Physics

  What is Space?    A Brief Exposé of our Neglected Stepchild in Physics           By: David Cox     Space, that place where everything exists and moves within. Space is empty. Space is not entirely empty. Space, it seems to be expanding. Space, it’s a place that can be distorted and curved. Space, it has at least three dimensions but some theories endow it with 11, and even 25 dimensions have been speculated. Space seems to have almost as many definitions as Time, which is a travesty…

Shoot. Today I am on strike. This morning I decided to post here an article describing the details of a new result just approved by the CMS collaboration, the observation of a nice signal of phi meson decays. It is a result of which I am quite proud, and although not really a big deal, it is a nice way to start the new year, while we wait for more data from the LHC. I had just finished writing the 200-lines piece describing the likelihood fit to the mass distribution, when I decided to save the draft with the "publish" box unmarked, to give it a last reading before submitting it. And the…

Three weeks of speculations have come to an end. Since this morning Verlinde's paper is available on arXiv.I encourage you to give it a try. The article is well written and the math is limited to fairly basic stuff. This combination makes it a relatively easy read. Granted, the paper requires some more gray matter cells being active than the average “Hammock Physicist” blog entry, but for an average Hammock Physicist reader probably not by an insurmountable amount. The crux of the article can be summarized in one sentence: If it smells like entropy, and it behaves like entropy, it probably…

Today's visit to the Cornell Arxiv, the repository where scientific papers on physics, astrophysics, mathematics, and a few other disciplines are made publically accessible before getting published on paper, was a productive one. Some casual browsing allowed me to learn a few random things on topics I know little or nothing about; but what really made my day was reading study by a few distinguished theorists (Vernon Barger, Wai-Yee Keung, and Brian Yencho), who considered a collider signature I had been fantasizing about in the past. The reading of the paper titled "Triple-Top Signal of New…

Being capable of asking the right question is a crucial skill. Dick Feynman tells a story in his book, "Surely you're joking, mr. Feynman": at a meeting with a bunch of military big shots he is shown the blueprint of a building meant to store radioactive material, he sees a symbol that he guesses represents a ventilation opening in the wall, and risking his reputation points the finger at it, asking what happens if the opening is occluded. The question turns out to be right on the money, and as a result his reputation gets a boost, plus the building does not blow up. Usually, asking oneself…

"Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints." Alfred Hitchcock

After re-emerging from a rather debilitating new years' eve banquet, I feel I can provide my own answers to the second batch of physics questions I proposed a few days ago to the most active readers of this column. Be sure about one thing: the answers to the three questions have already been given in some form by a few of the readers in the comments thread; I will nonetheless provide my own explanations, and in so doing I might pick a graph or two to illustrate better the essence of the problems. But first, there was a bonus question included in the package, and nobody found the solution to…

Rather than writing down my new year's resolution, I find it more constructive to look back at the past year and draw some conclusions on it. I have already done some analysis concerning this blog in a recent post; this one is a more personal view of what happened to me in 2009, and you might well consider it not interesting at all for you -but it is my blog, and it belongs here. So, let me start with my family. In 2009 neither I, nor my wife or my children, had any major health problem. That is for sure an important thing of which I consider myself quite lucky. Heck, I did not even have to…

Note to those in the various fields of Physics: You must read the entire paper. The language and style may seem contradictive from a mathematical standpoint in the early paragraphs. The paper is designed for a general audience. Time is perhaps the most enviable component in existence. It enjoys tremendous freedom, credibility and best of all, a wide range of definition. Within this generous range it wears many faces and nothing to date has pinned it down and thus made it reveal its one true face and definition. Within the concise confines of this paper we will sort through the many faces of…

    THE END OF TIME©          By: David Cox     Note to those in the various fields of Physics: You must read the entire paper. The language and style may seem contradictive from a mathematical standpoint in the early paragraphs. The paper is designed for a general audience.       Time is perhaps the most enviable component in existence. It enjoys tremendous freedom, credibility and best of all, a wide range of definition. Within this generous range it wears many faces and nothing to date has pinned it down…