Physics

This just in: Carl Brannen (here his blog) got a paper on gravitation published in a scientific magazine. Carl, who is the typical amateur who many "established scientists" in the blogosphere have labeled a crackpot in the last few years, does not actually fit the bill very well: he is a deep thinker who knows the literature of what he studies, and the fact that he is not salaried by a research institute means as little as this: he does it for Science, and not for a pay. Some of the articles that Carl has written in the last few years have struggled to get even past the mesh of the Cornell…

"Quidquid oritur, qualecumque est, causam habet a natura. Cum autem res nova et admirabilis fieri videtur, causam invetigato, si poteris, ratione confisus. Si nullam causam reperis, illud tamen certum habeto, nihil fieri potuisse sine causa naturali. Repelle igitur terrorem quem res nova tibi attulit et semper verbis sapientium confidere aude: sapiens enim facta, quae prodigiosa videntur , numquam fortuito evenisse dicet, quod nihil fieri sine causa potest, nec quicquam fit quod fieri non potest: nulla igitur portenta sunt. Nam si portentum putare debemus id quod raro fit, sapientem esse…

To see the future, you must know the past: these nine words nicely summarize a syllogism which knows few exceptions. Turning to known data to check the power of one's extrapolations is a quite well-founded scientific approach. So if we are to try and guesstimate how much will the CDF and DZERO experiments manage to deliver in the next few years, we must check how well they delivered this far, by comparing results with early expectations. But why bother ? Well, of course because there is a real challenge on: bookmakers need to tune the odds they offer! Fermilab versus CERN The hunt for the…

What is spacetime geometry?     Think of a very large ball. Even though you look at the ball in three space dimensions, the outer surface of the ball has thegeometry of a sphere in two dimensions, because there are only two independent directions of motion along the surface. If you were very small and lived on the surface of the ball you might think you weren’t on a ball at all, but on a big flat two-dimensional plane. But if you were to carefully measure distances on the sphere, you would discover that you were not living on a flat surface but on the curved surface…

"Why three families ? Why the particular symmetry structure ? [...] If the Higgs particle turns out to exist as conventionally described, with a reasonably low mass (say less than 200 GeV) then that closes the Standard Model from a mathematical point of view. It is then quite conceivable that new physics, not contained in the Standard Model, will be way beyond the reach of any accelerator imaginable today. In this case, humanity might never get an answer to the questions posed above." M.Veltman, Reflections on the Higgs System (1997).

    This time the idea of teleporting matter existed only in science fiction and the dense equations of quantum theory. As a result of experiments conducted in Europe since then, the notion that matter can be moved from here to there without being anywhere in between has achieved new respectability.Understand that a teleportation system won’t work anything at all like the transporter that Captain Kirk used to beam down to class M planets. That fictional machine “beamed” the body mass of crew members into space as energy. The type of teleportation system being discussed by…

Kalen Craig was a physical science technician, employed for 30 years at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C. He worked mostly on wave propagation, and radio and radar astronomy projects.  * * * These are some of the concepts that astrophysicists often make that we say are not necessarily so. Do not be surprised if most of the concepts on this list are ideas you believed to be correct. 1.    The ether, as a medium for light and gravity waves, does not exist. 2.    The universe is expanding; and it started expanding as a Big Bang, from…

Last Friday I was in Pisa, at the Scuola Normale Superiore (see picture), where italian members of the CMS Collaboration gathered for two days to discuss the status of their studies, exchange ideas, and try to coalesce common analysis efforts. Besides the many talks discussing physics studies with CMS, which I am prevented to discuss here, there was one which I really enjoyed listening. It was an invited seminar by Antonello Polosa, a theorist who has been working on the fascinating topic of exotic hadrons. I have taken some notes while listening to his talk, and I am now sharing them with…

W bosons are amazingly interesting objects. Almost thirty years after their discovery -by Carlo Rubbia and his collaborators of the UA1 experiment at CERN- they continue to provide critical information on the theory of electroweak interactions. The front of particle physics has moved quite a bit further from 1983, and yet the weapons we use todat to try and conquer unexplored land have not changed much. Today I wish to summarize one particular search that has been done by the CDF experiment at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider, one which tries to catch W bosons as they decay in a very…

I have been lagging behind lately with my usual browsing of other physics blogs. So let me catch up here and suggest a few posts which should be interesting to read. Peter Woit is always an extremely well-informed source of information. In a post titled "The Entropy Decade" he recently discussed how the 2010s appear to show a trend: entropy appears to be a concept that will yield more information about the universe and fundamental physics. In another he has a wealth of information on recent articles and sources. Michael Schmitt discusses alignment and length scale issues in a recent…