Physics

Sorry, cosmic acceleration, this was not your year.   The Nobel Prize in Physics 2010 was awarded jointly to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene". Without question ultrathin carbon is here to stay and a lot of terrific work is done with it every month.  Bendable computer screens and ultralight materials could all result from graphene research. The University of Manchester researchers were born in Russia and started their individual physics work there but first worked together in Holland before…

I am spending a few pleasant days in Split for the conference "LHC Days". I will be representing the D0 and CDF collaborations here in a talk on top physics at the Tevatron; in the meantime, I am pleased to witness that talks are of high quality. This morning the most interesting to listen to (at least to me) was the one by Guido Altarelli, a distinguished theorist from the University of Roma III. Altarelli has given crucial contributions to the advancement of our understanding of Quantum Chromo-Dynamics in the seventies, and it is always a pleasure to listen to him (a previous report of a…

No, the following does not belong into the humor section, because I know of people who made a career with the method described below. This is serious! This is another article in my series on the usual cheating in science. POP-science culture (POP = publish or perish = popular) ensures that only publications count in academia. Successful grant applications also count, but the grant you get only if you have many publications. And “friends” count, which you get with coauthoring and publications. And all that impacts science – no conspiracy theory necessary here. This is science today: (Oh - BTW…

Over at Cosmic Variance Sean Carroll is fighting an interesting battle. In a series of recent blogs that started under the title "The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood" he is making the claim that physicists have fully figured out whatever we may encounter in our day-to-day lives. Everything. No exception. Sean wonders why this several decades old achievement never got the attention it deserves. The reactions to these blogs are interesting. There are hundreds of them. Not entirely surprisingly, a considerable number of commenters implicitly or explicitly…

I will be attending next week to a conference in Split (Croatia). The conference is titled "LHC Days", and has the purpose of bringing together experimental physicists working at the main CERN experiments with theorists and experimentalists from all over the world, to discuss the current status and the future perspectives of research in particle physics, focusing of course on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. I have been assigned a talk titled "Top Physics at the Tevatron", and I will therefore represent the CDF and DZERO collaborations and describe their results. It will be very interesting…

Georges Charpak, a French physicist and 1992 Nobel Prize winner, died yesterday. Of Polish origin, Charpak gave crucial contributions to experimental physics, in particular for his invention of the multiwire proportional chamber in 1968. Back then, the signal of passage of charged particles was recorded by bubble chamber images and images triggered by spark chambers - where the charge deposition would create a discharge in a very high electric field. There were problems with such technologies, because the processing of photographic images limited the data acquisition severely. Spark chambers…

Duality is one of the most important insights in physics and philosophy of physics. What does duality mean? It means that there are dual descriptions of one and the same observed physics. Duality implies that you cannot possibly decide whether the one description T or the other, to T dual description T’ is right or wrong, because both descriptions lead to the exact same observations for the observers who live in a universe that can be described by the theories T and T’. Both are equally right or wrong, as they are dual descriptions. This is not about interpretation or the often abused Ocham’…

With the fresh news of the election of Pierluigi Campana as spokesperson of the LHCb experiment, the Italian participation to the LHC experiments at the CERN laboratories is close to a grand slam: three of the four experiments along the ring are led by Italian physicists. Campana joins Guido Tonelli (CMS), Fabiola Gianotti (ATLAS), and Jurgen Schukraft (ALICE). Italians have consistently led CERN experiments, so the election of Campana is no surprise to most of us: still, it speaks volumes about the professionality of Italians in high-energy physics and the recognition that they are given by…

A week from now, Tuesday October 5th, the winner(s) of the 2010 Nobel Prize for physics will be announced. Predicting the Nobel laureates in physics is notoriously difficult. As part of their overall Nobel prize predictions, each year Thomson Reuters attempts to predict the winners in physics, but despite their habit of listing multiple candidates, so far they never managed to hit any of the annual winner(s). This year Thomson Reuters might, for the first time, be lucky. My prediction is that the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics will go to the discoverers of the cosmic acceleration: Saul…

Pickering is quite a name in the philosophy of science, or science studies, sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), or science and technology studies (STS). He is especially interested in physics and writes about so called “old” versus “new” science.  He means and to this day insists on the difference being soft versus hard scattering in particle collider experiments, the latter being something that happened around the time he started to look into physics more than 30 years ago (oh coincidence). I told him personally why his “mangle of practice” views on science are wrong in the light…