Physics

"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and moreprecise measurement" Lord Kelvin, 1900

[I changed the title of this blog to prepend Proto to vector space since a vector space is defined over a mathematical field.  While I explored the possibility that the positive real numbers might make up a mathematical field, that effort did not pan out.  In a subsequent blog, I will show how many properties of a vector space are shared by the positive real numbers over the group Z2.]My research quest is to understand the nature of quaternions and how much of their structure is reflected in physics.  This blog will tell the tale of how I fooled myself three different ways on…

As we near the first week of July, with the start of the International Conference of High-Energy Physics in Melbourne (July 2nd-8th) and the July 4th press release at CERN on the new results of Higgs boson searches by ATLAS and CMS, the attention to new particle searches is understandably increasing. And the question is what the new 8-TeV data produced by the LHC this year will give. Will the final word on the existence (or absence) of the Higgs boson be said ? Will there be new particle discoveries ? Will the LHC surpass the Tevatron precision on the measurement of the top quark mass ? Is…

"It is pure craziness what Politics is doing in our country (Italy, T.'s n.): that is, investing little and bad in research, letting the brightest minds escape, not rewarding excellence, and failing to attract foreign researchers. Not doing, that is, what is being done in Soccer, where Italy is in the first places, exactly because Soccer clubs deploy the best players, their selection is based on their merits, the best ones are very highly paid to avoid them to leave, and the best players are sought abroad to make the team a winning one. And even the coach, if (s)he does not bring home results…

CERN announced today (slightly preceded by Physics World) that the LHC experiments will present updates of their searches for the Higgs boson on July 4th. I will be there, blogging from the main auditorium at CERN in real time. By the way, since I just linked Physics World  for this, note that the site also has a piece relevant to the recent discussions on the allegedly detrimental value of rumors... If you will be reading this blog at the right time (9AM CEST - in the night for the US, unfortunately) you will be able to follow the news almost as if you were hearing the streams - with…

The tirade below (a bit over the top, admittedly, but I'm in the middle of a stressful week) is inspired by a post written today by Chad Orzel in his blog, Uncertain Principles. It is a breath of fresh air to hear that scientists outside high-energy physics (Orzel works in condensed matter) actually see things for what they are: I mean, it’s not an accident that there’s a lot of excitement about the maybe-sorta-kinda discovery of the Higgs. This is the product of years of relentless hype from the particle physics community. They’ve been talking about this goddamn particle for longer than I’ve…

The CaRiPaRo foundation offers 15 grants for students willing to follow a Ph.D. program at the University of Padova (Italy). The winners of these grants will get a (modest, but normal for Italian standards) yearly check of about 13.500 euros, plus full board and lodging. If you are interested, check the rules of the game here. The applications have to be sent electronically by September 5th. Note that if you won the grant, you could come and work with me at some hot topic in particle physics research with the CMS experiment !

Recent data from BaBar, a high energy physics experiment at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) may suggest possible flaws in the Standard Model of particle physics, the reigning description of how the universe works on sub-atomic scales. BaBar, a detector built to measure the decay of B mesons and their anti-particles, B-bar mesons and named after those particles, weighed 1,200 tons, and was 6 meters long and 6 meters in diameter. The new data show that a particular type of particle decay happens more often than the Standard Model says it…

April 24, 24 Steps To The Precession Of The Perihelion Of Mercury Snarky puzzle The only metric that is spherically symmetric and solves the Einstein field equations is the Schwarzschild metric, or so sayith Jørg Tofte Jebsen aka Birkhoff's theorem. [Correction: The theorem applies for a spherically symmetric, non-rotating, and uncharged source for the vacuum field equations.]Study an alternative, that will have both the right answer infinitely far away (the flat Minkowski metric), could pass weak field tests like the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, but is not a solution to the…

While Higgs rumors are appearing in blogs of the usual suspects, I cannot comment on those -and I decided it is better if I do not even link them here (I have grown wary of oversensitive reactions in my colleagues). The only thing I think I can discuss with you here now is the predictions on the Higgs boson significance level produced by CMS in October 2010 - a couple of geological eras ago, that is. Those predictions can be trusted because 2011 data showed to be perfectly in line with them, both for the 95% CL limits and for the significance -of course the former are valid in the full mass…