Physics

This is the first of a series of posts that will publish the results of artistic work by high-school students of three schools in Venice, who participate in a contest and exposition connected to the initiative "Art and Science across Italy", an initiative of the network CREATIONS, funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the EU. The AMVA4NewPhysics network is sponsoring and directing the artistic production in Venice, which has taken place at Liceo Stefanini, Liceo Foscarini, and Liceo Benedetti, involving over seventy 3rd and 4th year students. The production has ended this…

The European Commission has launched a couple of weeks ago the campaign "Europe in my region 2017", an initiative aimed at getting the general public informed on the projects funded by the European Community in their area of residence or activity. There are open day events scheduled a bit everywhere, a blog contest, a photo contest, and other initiatives of interest.I think it is very useful that EU-funded projects get exposure, and particularly so those that are aimed at research and training, such as AMVA4NewPhysics. As some of you know, I am the scientific coordinator of a "Innovative…

Dr. Alex Durig (see picture) is a professional freelance writer, with a PhD in social psychology from Indiana University (1992). He has authored seven books in his specialization of perception and logic. He claims to have experienced great frustration resolving his experience of perception and logic when it comes to physics, but he says he no longer feels crazy, ever since Anomaly! was published. So I am offering this space to him to hear what he has to say about that...------On Dorigo's Anomaly! and the Social Psychology of Professional Discourse in Physics, by Alex Durig To the best of my…

Scientific consensus is not gospel dogma to be enforced, instead it should, and MUST change in the face of contrary data.  There are theories like evolution, general relativity, and climate change which are truly settled science.  Inflation (and string theory) are not there yet.  Letters signed by 33 or 33,333 prestigious physicist won't make that so.  Only data can.   On controversy over the article in Scientific American of ljjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb  which has been objected to by 30 or so top experts including Steven Hawking we all need to remember the basic…

Yesterday I visited the Liceo “Benedetti” of Venice, where 40 students are preparing their artwork for a project of communicating science with art that will culminate in an exhibit at the Palazzo del Casinò of the Lido of Venice, during the week of the EPS conference in July. The project (titled “Arte e Scienza: i Colori del Bosone di Higgs” – art and science: the colours of the Higgs boson) has been discussed in more detail in previous posts here, so I will not go in details here. I visited the school during one of the meetings  of the students with their art teacher, and had a…

The field of Big History attempts to tie events from cosmology, life evolution, and history into narratives and common themes. One approach to communicating this is the development of Little Big Histories that follow aspects throughout history that impact the development of a specific item or idea. For example, a recent episode of “How the Universe Works” explained how each of the elements found in cars were originally created.  This included the hydrogen (in the plastics, water, and fuel) from the big bang; the carbon, oxygen, silicon, and iron from stellar nucleosynthesis which are…

800x600 Flavor-Geometric Duality and Pseudo-Euclidean Symmetry of Neutrino Mixing in Semi-Empirical Phenomenology   I. Suggested early by the author, main equation of neutrino mixing semi-empirical phenomenology is given by                          cos^2 (2θ12) + cos^2 (2θ23) + cos^2 (2θ13) = 1+ sin^2 (2θ13),       (1)   where θik are the three neutrino mixing angles. The left side of this equation obeys the Euclidean 3-space geometric…

A little while ago I encountered an interesting problem, which I had fun solving by myself. I think my solution is not original (it must have occurred to others a gazillion times in the past) but I do believe the implementation is nice, so I want to share it with you here.The general problem Imagine you are given a set of counts distributed in bins of a histogram. This could be, for instance, the age distribution of a set of people. You are asked to assign uncertainty bars to the counts: in other words, estimate a "one-sigma" interval for the relative rate of counts in each bin. [I will make…

Innovative training networks are a European Community concept funded by the Research Executive Agency, under the project called "Marie Curie Actions". The idea is that the EU helps build structures that provide interdisciplinary training to skilled graduate students, providing them with knowledge and skills that make them attractive for the work market and useful to society, while boosting the research projects that the EU is interested in.The scheme involves the creation of consortiums of several research institutes, universities, industrial partners. They get funded to hire PhD students on…

GSI, the Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, is a laboratory located near the town of Darmstadt, in central Germany, just a few miles away from the Frankfurt airport. The centre was founded in 1969, and has since then been a very active facility where heavy elements are studied (six rare heavy ones were in fact discovered there, including the one they named Darmstadtium!), and where a wide research plan of nuclear physics is carried out. I visited the lab on April 25th and 26th to give a seminar there, invited there by my recent acquaintance, prof. Peter Braun-Munzinger. You know, this…