Physics

A 9.0 magnitude earthquake is equal to about 450 megatons of TNT being set off underground.  Due to the situation at the Daiichi nuclear plant near in Sendai Japan there is much talk of how nuclear plants should not be built in earthquake zones.   The purpose of this report is to point out the utter futility of trying to avoid such a incident though site selection alone because an event such as this could happen anywhere on Earth.  Anywhere that could experience a near hit from an asteroid of sufficient size.  The impact of a asteroid may sound far fetched however may be…

What is a BLEVE? A BLEVE is a Boiling-Liquid Expanding-Vapor Explosion. It is fairly common knowledge that removing the radiator cap of a vehicle with a hot engine will cause the ejection of boiling water. The cooling system of a liquid-cooled engine is pressurized for two reasons.  The first reason is to let the engine run at an optimum temperature.  The second is that heat transfer by direct contact increases with pressure.  That last reason is why CPU coolers use strong clamping systems.  Mostly.  (Keeping the water from evaporating doesn't figure as a third…

The NEUTEL 2011 conference started today in Venice. Many experiments in neutrino physics will be reporting new results there, and the interest is of course high in the community. Along with a few vailant physicists from my university, I will be blogging form the site, trying to cover all the important new information as well as some other information in general. So please visit the NEUTEL11 blog to learn the latest news on neutrino physics... Already there is a report on a general overview of neutrino oscillations by Art McDonald, among with additional posts on HEP results.

Researchers say they have ruled  the cosmic bubble theory, an alternate theory on the nature of dark energy, after recalculating the expansion rate of the universe to unprecedented accuracy. The universe appears to be expanding at an increasing rate and some believe that is because the universe is filled with a dark energy that works in the opposite way of gravity. One alternative to that hypothesis is that an enormous bubble of relatively empty space eight billion light-years across surrounds our galactic neighborhood. If we lived near the center of this void, observations of galaxies…

Third graders enjoy clay and pipe cleaners. It might sound cruel to teach them graduate level graph theory most math Ph.D.’s have not seen, but I might get away with it if I uses the right craft supplies. Tell kids spinach is good for them. Children are right to skeptical, as I expect of my reader. [The video is a reading of the content contained herein, so click or skip] Real numbers are the most important numbers out there, bar none. Even for people working with category theory can have Elmo count their functors as long as they are written down on a piece of paper. While I have watched…

... Not really. What startled me most was that a colleague of mine at the University of Padova even sent a message to my departments' mailing list, saying that the new result is very important. But it clearly isn't! In fact, the exclusion at 95% CL in the range of Higgs boson masses that CDF and DZERO could put together from the analysis of additional data is almost exactly the same as the one that they published last Summer. But maybe I should make a step back and explain the matter from the start, to let you judge by yourself the relevance of the new Tevatron bounds on the rate of Higgs…

Neutrino phyisics may be boring, as Jester claims in a post today at the NEUTEL11 blog, or exciting, as many others are ready to testify. And since Jester talks about exciting new results ready to be submitted by the XENON100 collaboration, I would bet you will concur with the latter. In any case, a group of ten physicists is blogging there to tell the story of the Neutrino Telescopes conference this year, and they have things to say, so if you are at all interested in High-Energy Physics, or Cosmology, or Astro-particle Physics, or the Universe, or palaces on the Canal Grande in Venice, you…

I define the fringe as anyone trying to make a contribution to a field where they are not employed or do not have a degree in the subject.  I happen to be a fringe physicist because my degrees from MIT were in Biology and Chemical Engineering.  My current job is in software with no connection what-so-ever with physics. Most fringe savants babble physics.  There are the words of physics combined in ways that do no make sense to people trained in the arts.  Babbling is how babies learn language, even deaf babies babble in sign language.  I had my babbling phase back…

Readers of this blog know that I often discuss here the latest results of searches of Supersymmetric (SUSY) particles -nowadays furthered by the CDF and DZERO experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron collider, and by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the CERN LHC. The game of limit-setting on SUSY parameters has been very recently taken over by the LHC experiments, which both published their first results on 35 inverse picobarns of 7-TeV proton-proton collisions. While 35/pb are less than a hundredth of the data already collected at the Tevatron, the LHC's x3.5 larger nominal center-of-mass energy…

Upon expressing the Higgs potential in terms of the field H0, we find The first term in V is a constant energy density which can be interpreted as a contribution to the vacuum energy, Although the parameter  is unknown, we can get a feeling for the scale of the Higgs vacuum energy by supposing . The Higgs vacuum energy contributes to the cosmological constant of general relativity an amount . Such a term would have a remarkable effect on the geometry of spacetime, manifesting itself over a distance scale of ! The present limit on the cosmological constant is (RPP 1990). There must…