Physics

The way to get people to know you, attach your name to your face, and realize you are knowledgeable is, maybe suprisingly, to ask questions at meetings, as often as possible. You do not understand something about a plot your colleague is showing during his talk ? Ask about it. The x-axis labels are missing ? Ask what the heck are the units, even if Groucho's child of five could understand it. You arrive before the last slide and the speaker is saying she measured x with two inverse femtobarns ? Sit down, wait ten seconds for the dust to settle (you do not want them to see you have just…

The Large Hadron Collider is delivering as expected a large amount of integrated luminosity of proton-proton collisions to CMS and ATLAS, running at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. The total collected in 2012 by CMS has just now crossed the mark of 10 inverse femtobarns: this is twice as much data as that collected in 2011. And the CMS detector is working like a charm, with all subsystems collecting data flawlessly. Physicists need large integrated luminosity to explore rare phenomena, and high energy to probe processes which may only "turn on" above a certain threshold. So given the x2…

Dark matter, up to 25 percent of the universe, hasn't actually been found. It is a hypothesis, though not an unreasonable one, given that something must create a gravitational force. But science has mapped the motions of more than 400 stars, up to 13,000 light-years from the Sun, and calculated the mass of material in the vicinity of the Sun in a volume four times larger than ever considered in the past and found it isn't there, disputing prior studies claiming 3-6 times more 'dark matter' than expected using Jan Oort's discovery that the density of matter near the Sun was nearly twice what…

In 2008, “The missing memristor found” [1] was published in the respected science journal Nature, and this claimed discovery was announced on the front pages of most major newspapers. This “discovery” is simply a misinterpretation of devices that had been discovered many years before in India [2,3]. Those original inventors did not misinterpret their work in order to make it into the news. Given the serious doubts that have been presented in many places, one seriously wonders whether the fact that the cheated are ‘just a bunch of Indians in India’ has anything to do with the embarrassing…

When CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, announced the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson on July 4th this year--the result of years of running of the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest, most expensive, most powerful, and coldest (liquid helium cooled, colder than outer space) machine ever built--it marked a tremendous triumph of experimental physics. A boson (an integer-spin particle, usually associated with conveying a force of nature), and the last undiscovered one, needed to complete the extremely successful Standard Model of particle physics…

Collisions between heavy ions at machines like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and more recently the LHC, may help enlighten our understanding of the hot nuclear matter that permeated the early universe and make this hidden realm accessible by recreating the extreme conditions of the early universe on a microscopic scale. The temperatures achieved in these collisions, more than 4 trillion degrees Celsius, the hottest ever created in a laboratory, briefly liberate the subatomic quarks and gluons that make up protons and neutrons of ordinary atomic…

I am very happy to have been invited, by Matteo Polettini, to two events that will take place at Festivaletteratura (literature festival), an important cultural event that takes place in Mantova, a beautiful town in northern Italy, from the 5th to the 9th of September. The first event will take place at 8.30 PM on September 7th in the glorious Piazza Mantegna (see picture, right). There, armed with a blackboard and chalks, I will attempt to explain, in the matter of thirty minutes, what are these infamous "five sigma" that physicists require for a discovery claim to be put forth. The matter…

Don't be surprised when you spot four Ferraris at 1 Einstein Drive, Princeton. Four brand new racing machines nicely parked next to each other and next to the entrance of the Institute for Advanced Study.  Fresh director Robbert Dijkgraaf must be proud that four of his institute members each collected a $ 3 million Fundamental Physics Prize. All thanks to Russian internet investor and billionaire Yuri Milner. Milner, who in a previous life studied theoretical physics, donated a total of $ 27 million to nine theoretical physicists, to recognize…

Don't be surprized when you spot four Ferraris at 1 Einstein Drive in Princeton. Nicely parked next to each other next to the entrance of the Institute for Advanced Study.  Fresh director Robbert Dijkgraaf must be proud that four of his institute members each collected a $ 3 million Fundamental Physics Prize. All thanks to Russion internet investor and billionaire Yuri Milner. Milner, who in a previous life studied theoretical physics, donated a total of $ 27 million to nine theoretical physicists to recognize their contributions to…

ATLAS has just released a note which summarizes the searches for the standard model Higgs boson in 7-TeV and 8-TeV data. Since July 4th the main improvement is the addition of the WW channel, which had not been shown back then. With it, the combined local significance of the 126 GeV Higgs boson excess in the WW, ZZ, and γγ channels grows to 5.9 standard deviations. In the words of a Facebook friend who's in ATLAS: "if this is not a discovery, I don't know what is". So, due congratulations to my ATLAS colleagues for this new important document. The paper is indeed full of detail about the…