Physics

Particle Physics had a short fling with Numerology in its young years, but the two have never met again since then. TD

It happens in the best families, so they say. Two experiments work 24/7 to produce an improved result on the Higgs search, and the result is disappointing, to say the least. I am talking about the Tevatron, of course. For a little while longer, CDF and D0 will have the exclusive on Higgs boson searches. Last March, we all rejoyced when we saw that the Tevatron was starting to become sensitive to a high-mass Higgs, and indeed it excluded its existence in a range of masses between 160 and 170 GeV. We were waiting for more exclusions for the winter conferences of 2010, when more data would be…

I recently discussed here the Tevatron results of searches for new Z bosons in electron-positron or dimuon samples collected by CDF and DZERO, pointing out that there seem to be a couple of intriguing upward fluctuations in the data. One of the dielectron fluctuations sits at a mass of 240 GeV, the other, also in the dielectron spectrum, is at about 720 GeV. Neither is compelling. If you know me, you are no doubt positive that I discussed those fluctuations just for the sake of it, to arise interest in the Tevatron searches, and that I do not give two cents to the idea that those fluctuations…

The decision to pursue physics in my tertiary years sprang from a rather naive mindset of my youth: the belief that this constantly evolving field had cracked open the chest of mysteries that we normally call ‘life’. As much as I struggle to recall the specific impetus that drove such an arrogant assumption, I am equally satisfied that my desire, founded on a false basis, has led to my current understanding of the truth – not the truth of life but the truth of reality. The proverbial notion that our knowledge of the universe is like a grain of sand on the beach became increasingly apparent as…

Today CNN features a short video with an interview to Professor Nielsen, the mastermind behind the whole "Higgs comes back from the future to prevent its own creation" crap.  I wrote about the matter a couple of times in the past, and will not reiterate here that I think his suggestions to pull out cards from a deck to decide whether to carry on basic research with the LHC is a unmitigated pile of you know what. What I am sorry to see, however, is that with so many exciting things to discuss, so many beautiful pieces of physics waiting to be broadcast to a large audience, with such…

Friday, October 16, 2009 Consciousness and the brain - my response to you tube's "Quantum Phyics" welcome to the martrix Bill A Peoples October 16 at 4:08pm AFTER SPELL CHECK LOL--- Max Planck was genious but his premise was a falsified form of logic. He said himeslf that all matter is held together by a force therefore one must "assume" there is a consiousness or intelligent mind behind everything. that is an assumption that is not supported by any provable, tangeable or even mathematical theroy or possabilty. I believe the jump to find a direct correlation from what we have learned…

The “Om” from you tube is profoundly pleasant. I agree with the traditions, thoughts and expressions presented here. Obviously based on Sanskrit’s from Buddhism and Hinduism I still agree with the content while technically labeling myself a practicing Christian. To some this may seem ironic if not hypocritical. Unlike many, I have never thoughtfully felt a conflict with the obvious clash of some radically interpreted fundamentals within these belief systems. While the majority of believers in these respective religions or philosophies towards life would argue against me, I see the…

What is the most important object physicists manipulate everyday? My answer with no hesitation is : the Lagrangian ! What is it? simply the object that contain everything one need to know about a given physical system. As many should know, the Lagrangian is simply the kinetic energy minus the potential energy of the system (it's all about moving and interacting objects). Before that, there was the newtonian formulation of mechanics, a vectorial equation, meaning three scalars equations to solve. It is natural to wonder whether it's possible or not to summarize these equations into a…

Last May the CDF collaboration published their observation of the  baryon, a particle made by a very exotic "bss" quark triplet. The CDF result came almost one year after a similar measurement was published by the competitor experiment, D0. D0 had claimed first observation of the  in 2008, with a signal whose statistical significance was quoted at 5.4 standard deviations -an effect which, if due to a background fluctuation, has a probability of occurrence of merely 67 times in a billion. The D0 peak is shown on the right, with a fit overlaid. The two observations led me to…

Today I got access to a collection of very cool pictures of the CMS detector, one of the two experiments designed and built to study proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Many of those pictures, which were taken by Michael Hoch (CERN/CMS) in the last couple of years, have circulated in the web for a long time, and individual ones have been used in several places. However, they are very nice to browse one after the other. And I think they are even more interesting to watch if one has not had the privilege of visiting the giant detector in its underground…