Physics

Quantum physics and Einstein’s relativity theory, in theory as well as experiment, are extremely concerned with light and its photons. Why should fundamental science be obsessed with something so feeble? Well, it could not be any other way! Science is about what we can (experimentally) observe. As physics advances, it must be expected to be more and more concerned about the most reliable way to measure. It must investigate observation as such. If you measure a length with a wooden ruler, also called straightedge, you know the ruler may bend in moist and warm weather. It shrinks in a dry spell…

Ben Allanach is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge. Before that he was a post-doc at LAPP (Annecy, France), CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), Cambridge (UK) and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK). I noticed a recent article of his in the arxiv, and asked him to report on it here, given the interest that the recent LHC results have stirred in the community. He graciously agreed.... So let us hear it from him!  Blimey, I'm tired. I'm also elated and excited and grateful to my lovely girlfriend, who's not only putting up with my long hours, distracted head and…

Both the CMS and ATLAS collaborations have already started to exclude meaningful regions of the parameter space of Supersymmetric models with the data they collected in 2010. And Physics World is on the news today with a online article by Kathy Mc Alpine, the famous rapper physicist who wrote the lirics and interpreted one of the biggest Youtube hits in the category of science popularization. If you have not watched it yet, please rush to do so now. Six million people (and counting) have done so before you already. Once you've watched the video, you can spend the rest of your coffee break…

A nice piece of news in my mailbox today: it appears that the CMS collaboration, the experiment I work for at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, has got four different scientific papers approved for publication in the course of the same week. What is more, the four articles will be published on three different international magazines of clear authority. A true success ! That CMS is publishing scientific papers at a very high rate was no mystery to me - I spend a good fraction of my research time reviewing those papers (mainly to check for the correctess of the statistical claims they contain,…

Some subjects I try to avoid in this blog. But this one seems to become increasingly difficult to escape. Since my interview at Philosophy-To-Go, I regularly get questions about the physics of free will. These questions range from "Does free will exist given that the laws of physics are deterministic?" to the more suggestive "Is our free will based on quantum indeterminism?" and the more confrontational "Should physicists not worry given that their theories are incapable of accommodating free will?" These are all valid questions, but also tricky questions. Simple reason is that topics like '…

Today I spoke at a conference on "QCD advances" which is being held in Les Houches, an amiable small town near Chamonix, on the french slopes of Mont Blanc. The content of my talk is accessible from the conference web site, but I guess that I should provide here a summary of what I discussed. The talk was titled "Quarkonium and heavy quark production in pp collisions" and focused on the results produced by the CMS experiment on 2010 proton-proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider, CERN's "end of the world" machine. I discussed six experimental results that have been…

Time flows. Newton seemed to think so. So did Aristotle and countless others before. Even the Buddhists, with their cyclic time, kept believing that time was something which went from one instant to the other, moving forward though in circles. That, of course, changed after Einstein. However, I think a vast number of people still have problems coming to grips with the nature of time and how they fit in it. Which is no wonder: humans evolved to live within time, trapped in their 3D slice of reality, ripe with memories and longings. This paragraph hasn't been here forever. I just wrote it. Or…

After arguing against ‘higher consciousness’ or freedom evolving, let us go on to discuss consciousness inside computers. This is, maybe surprisingly so for some readers, closely connected with the non-existence of gods and in fact quantum theory. Ironically (given what I wrote the last time), cyberspace and its breakneck speed evolution is still the big hope for some ill-defined freedom. Since cyberspace is all about information technology, should there not be higher consciousness after all? Maybe a ‘god2.0’ develops and grants us salvation in virtual reality, in a simulated matrix? The…

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The physics with LHC is becoming rapidly awesome, and being part of the CMS experiment and deeply involved in some technical aspects of the analyses (the statistical treatment of the data, and the control of the statistical claims of the scientific papers we publish) I find myself with more things to do in my agenda than I can possibly manage. With less and less time in my hands to write, it is clear that the time I can spend on reading other people's blogs has sunk to zero. But this is not good at all - being a blog writer requires you to keep in touch with what other bloggers write on…