Physics

Written by Francesco Sylos Labini and Martín López Corredoira. This year the committee of the Nobel Prize in Physics has gifted humanity with a poetic touch: “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos”. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 was awarded for one half to James Peebles “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology” and for the other half to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star”. We might discuss how much outstanding is the latter contribution to Physics, but at…

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Periodic Table of Elements, whose inventor is Dmitrii Mendeleev, a Russian physicist who is famous for that achievement but who actually gave enormous contributions to Physics in a number of different areas of experimental research. It is also well known, but actually a misconception, that Mendeleev "invented" the correct recipe for the Russian national drink, vodka. In fact, he studied the mixture of water and alcohol in detail, discovering several of its interesting properties, but vodka was appreciated before him, as it did after.A week ago I…

If you have a minute to spend watching something really cool, why not having a look at the completion of the installment of GEM detectors in the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, ***RIGHT NOW*** (6PM CEST Oct 24th) ?You can do so by connecting to the CMS web site. For those of you still unconvinced: CMS is one of the four main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, one of the two which discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, it is the most massive, and by far the most photogenic - just check it out today to get convinced of the fact. Or see below: As for GEM detectors, they are…

The most recent preprint in the ArXiv this evening is an APPEC report on the neutrinoless double beta decay. This is the thick result of a survey of the state of the art in the search for a very (very) rare subnuclear process, which can shed light on the nature of the mass hierarchy of neutrinos. Oh, and, APPEC stands for "AstroParticle Physics European Consortium", in case you wondered.I do not wish to, nor would I be able to, summarize in a blog post the hefty work of the committee members here. My ambition is to only give here a few hints of their recommendations, easily accessible in the…

This week's Plot relates to the search of rare decays of the Higgs boson, through the analysis of the large amounts of proton-proton collision data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN's marvelous 27km particle accelerator. The ATLAS collaboration, which is one of the four main scientific equipes looking at LHC collisions, produced an improved bound on the rate at which Higgs bosons may decay to electron-positron pairs (which they are expected to do, although very rarely, in the Standard Model, SM) and to electron-muon pairs (which are forbidden in the SM). The interest of…

Sometimes browsing the Cornell ArXiv results in very interesting reading. It is the case with the preprint I got to read today, "DAMA/LIBRA annual modulation and Axion Quark Nugget Dark Matter Model", by Ariel Zhitnitsky. This article puts forth a bold speculative claim, which I found exciting for a variety of reasons. As is the case with bold speculative claims, the odds that they turn out to describe reality is maybe small, but their entertainment value is large. So what is this about? I will assume you know nothing of the whole thing here, and walk you through the facts before I venture…

Z, a quantity known as the partition function in statistical thermodynamics and the generating functional in quantum field theory tell us that we are exactly right about black hole thermodynamics.  Dr Craig Callender, Professor of Philosophy at UC San Diego, is all wrong about black holes.    Any theory which unifies Quantum Field Theory (QFT) with General Relativity (GR), by any means, will allow us to write such a generating functional.  When the low energy limits are taken for a large number of particles, we recover statistical thermodynamics. A Textbook Proof. To…

Today I am back from the 8th edition of the ICNFP conference, which finished yesterday in Kolymbari (Crete). This event is very interesting because of its wide scope, bringing together physicists from quite different fields in a venue that, due to its very relaxing, secluded nature favours post-session discussions and exchanges among the over 250 participants.  This year I went there as the failed organizer of a session on Machine Learning - there were too few contributions to have a meaningful parallel session, so at the end we distributed the talks to other sessions. I was however not…

No, the Amazon does not produce 20% of the Earths oxygen.  The real value is more like 5% to 6%.  This is NOT to minimize how bad it is to have out of control wildfires.  This is to keep unscientific non-facts from being perpetuated.  I was made to write this due to a statement seen on CNN.  First let me explain from pure physics why it is impossible for an area like the amazon to be responsible for 20% of the Earths Oxygen production.   Oxygen is released for Carbon dioxide by photosynthesis in plants, all plants, from majestic trees to slimy algae living…

I am presently spending a few days in the pleasant island of Crete, in the middle of the Mediterranean, where I am attending the eight edition of the "International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics". Crete is a gorgeous island at the crossroads of three continents, and because of its location it is brimming with relics of ancient to less ancient history. Anyway, this post is rather about physics, so let me go back there.  I have participated in several of the previous editions of the ICNFP conference, organizing parallel sessions and attending as a chair of sessions, as well as…