Physics

And after all I said about Supersymmetry being an invention, I fear I now have to eat it all with my hat to boot ! The ATLAS Collaboration has just released results of a very striking search for gluinos, which increases the sensitivity over past analyses by employing a much improved and cleaned-up version of missing transverse energy along with a higher-resolution version of the effective mass variable used in the past, and has found a first strong evidence for Supersymmetric decays !! I am disrespectfully happy despite this might mean I have lost a $1000 bet -an "insurance bet", if you like…

This article looks at the mathematics of Self-Field Theory (SFT) and how it impacts on electromagnetics and thus on physics.  As we saw in the article 'A new mathematics for the hydrogen atom', a number of fascinating links were found to historically important discoveries that were unearthed early in the 20th century. These included a reformulation of electromagnetics, Bohr theory, an analytic expression for Planck's 'constant', Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (HUP), and relativity. So SFT is quite a fundamental revision of the fundamentals of physics. since as we know…

People can already count since several millennia. Arithmetic is improved over time. Usually we count by using integers. If we want to get more accurate results, then we better use rational numbers. Sometimes we also use numbers that are not expressible in a fraction, such as the number π (pi) and the square root of two . These are real numbers. The square root of a negative number delivers more problems. For this task it is necessary that we move to a two-dimensional number system. The better calculators under us can also handle this problem fluently. The so-called complex numbers are…

In the parallel world where bonobos* developed into those that took over the earth with the help of technology, they never insisted on an absolute nature of time in the first place. Einstein came along and discovered that since we use light as the most basic measurement tool, there should be a certain relativity. They experimented and confirmed that proposal. It was useful, too, and interesting, and nobody called relativity evil, so nobody made defensively a dogma out of it either. Bonobos accepted that relativity can be the emergent symmetry of an Einstein ether in case it is not fundamental…

Antonio Ereditato (left), spokesperson of the Opera collaboration, announced today he stepped down. He is no longer leading the Opera experiment. The Opera experiment last September made headlines around the world with their announcement that neutrinos sent from the CERN laboratories to the Gran Sasso cavern appeared to be moving at superluminal speed. The claim was fortified two months later, when results of a custom-made narrow-bunched beam of neutrinos sent for a week to Opera in October proved that the result of the timing measurement was not an artifact of the ill-understood bunch…

How do you know a scientist was right a lot? When an entire cottage industry exists to try and prove him wrong. Einstein's view of the Universe has gotten some new respect; the most accurate measurement ever made of the distance to the time when the expansion of Universe began to accelerate. It means that the phenomenon can be explained using just Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the cosmological constant - the simplest theoretical explanation for the acceleration of the Universe. The results will be used to understand what is causing the acceleration and why, and could shed new…

While most High-Energy Physicists nowadays are kept busy with the idle search for non-existent new physics beyond the standard model in the form of improbable Supersymmetric particles, phantom leptoquarks, fairy Z' resonances, putative colorons, invented gravitinos, and what not, the subset of lucky experimentalists who decided to go against the flow and kept their feet on the ground are provided with endless entertainment in the study of resonances that are as real as your breakfast today.  It is the case of B physics analysts in the DZERO experiment, for instance, who published…

The title of this blog is the title of a talk I will be giving real soon, this Thursday, March 29, as part of "Ignite Boston 9" at MIT's Media Lab.  No, you cannot go unless you are one of the 400 people who signed up, but video should be available soon enough.  Ignite talks short, all of 20 slides, 15 seconds a slide, so 5 minutes total.  Since the slides auto-advance, the time limit is strictly enforced.  The topics of discussion are all over the nerd map.  I am pretty sure I will be the only one to discuss number theory in any way. [Update: as a commenter…

That relativity theory or quantum mechanics are only important at huge velocities or incredibly small distances and so on is a common misconception. In fact, the yellow color of gold and the stickiness of fridge magnets are relativistic effects. One thing that only works because of quantum mechanics is that a gecko can walk along the ceiling, which is quite astonishing to watch for the first time. I remember washing myself in Thailand, finding beautiful white geckos above me. Not knowing how secure they are up there on the moist ceiling nor whether they were potentially dangerous, this was a…

After fixing the Higgs boson mass to the best fit value mh = 125 GeV, the SM does not have any free parameter left to vary. Therefore all the anomalies in the present data must be statistical fluctuations and disappear with more statistics. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the average of all data agrees with the SM prediction [...] and the global χ2 is good: 16 for 15 dof (we recall that with n>>1 degrees of freedom one expects χ2 = n+-sqrt(n) ).On the other hand, our best fit [...] has a signicantly lower χ2 = 5.5 for 13 dof: a bigger reduction than what is typically…