Physics

Hello! Years and years have gone by without a blog. For reasons I do not understand, I appear to have lost my ability to include an image, even URLs do not work for me on this site. FIXED, images included now... Bell's Future Quantum Mechanics, a novel interpretation. Start with all of space-time. All branches of physics are confined to space-time. This includes all of the physics we know today, and even the stuff we do not (what's up with parity violation for beta decay?) I'm explicitly rejecting more than 3 dimensions of space. I'm explicitly rejecting a multiverse. Nature knows how…

For the past 11 years I have blogged for Science2.0 (formerly Scientific Blogging), and I have considered this site my true personal web page, too - the articles I have published here for over a decade are a much better representation of who I am, what I do, and of my personal expertise than anything else I can ever think of putting together in a web site. However, I think that from a professional point of view addressing all inquiries and searches for my name to a blog, as good as this may be, is a questionable tactical choice, as there's people out there who consider blogs a waste of time,…

The text below is the sixth and last part of what could have become "Chapter 13" of the book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab", which I published in 2016. For part 1 see here; for part 2 see here; for part 3 see here; for part 4 see here; for part 5 see here . Another anomaly bites the dust If the search for superjets in Run 2 performed by the Illinois group left a few questions on the table, it was at least produced relatively quickly. Instead, it took until 2007 to obtain an answer on the nature on the 7.2 GeV bump in the invariant mass spectrum of…

The text below is the fifth part of what could have become "Chapter 13" of the book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab", which I published in 2016. For part 1 see here; for part 2 see here; for part 3 see here; for part 4 see here. No superjets in Run 2 It needed to be done, and somebody eventually decided to do it. Were superjet events a lusus naturae, a funny fluctuation in an otherwise perfectly well-behaved sample of data, a sub-subset of events artfully carved to create an anomaly where none existed, or were they the first hint of something new,…

The text below is the fourth part of what could have become "Chapter 13" of the book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab", which I published in 2016. For part 1 see here; for part 2 see here; for part 3 see here. A written proposal to admit senior member Paolo Giromini to CDF II was sent by the head of the CDF-Frascati group Marco Cordelli to the spokespersons Ristori and Lockyer on January 27th, 2004. The recipients duly informed the Executive Board representatives of the institutions participating to the experiment, suggesting that the matter be discussed…

The offer of Ph.D. positions in Physics at the University of Padova has opened just a few days ago, and I wish to advertise it here, giving some background on the matter for those of you who are interested in the call or know somebody who could be. The Ph.D. in Italy In Italy, Ph. D.s last three years (the duration can be extended but this is not recommended). Courses start with the first academic semester, so the calls typically open in the spring, and admission tests are run in the summer. The system is not too different from that of other countries, but there are peculiarities of which…

The text below is the third part of what could have become "Chapter 13" of the book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab", which I published in 2016. For part 1 see here; for part 2 see here. Giromini joins Run 2 While all those preparations were reaching their final stages, Paolo Giromini was busy with the completion of his Run 1 analyses. He had originally refused to add his name to the list of Run 2 authors, thereby formally joining the new experiment. He stood faithful to his judgement that embarking on a massive upgrade of the detector and accelerator…

The text below is the second part of what could have become "Chapter 13" of the book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab", which I published in 2016. For part 1 see here. Collaboration membership from CDF to CDF II Although from the outside one might have perceived a substantial continuity between the Run 1 and Run 2 collaborations operating CDF, change was the rule rather than the exception also from the point of view of manpower. In truth, very few collaborators actually left the experiment right after the end of Run 1. The collected data would take many…

When I wrote the final version of the book "Anomaly! Collider physics and the quest for new phenomena at Fermilab", four years ago, I had to get rid of a lot of material which would not fit within the strict page limit requested by my prospective publisher. The discarded material was not yet at book quality level - I had intended to interview more colleagues and collect more material to finalize those extra chapters - so I never bothered to do anything with them, and they rested until now in a subdirectory of my book project folder. Last week, however, a colleague who also runs a physics…

You may be wondering, upon reading the above title of this post, what I am after today: the top quark has been around for 25 years now, and there is no long-standing controversy on who discovered it -almost. Well, I will come to that in due time, but to explain quickly what I mean for those of you in a hurry, I am referring to how the top discovery is cited in the very important Wikipedia pages about that subatomic particle, as well as those of the relevant experiments that claimed its observation in 1995. Quarks Now, before I get to that, let me also introduce the protagonist of this play to…