Physics
2.2 standard deviations. That is what the combination of CDF and DZERO searches for the Higgs boson yield, according to a release of the interactions news wire.
The talks on Higgs searches are scheduled for this morning at the Moriond Electroweak conference in La Thuile, a nice ski resort in the Italian alps.
The money plot is the one below, which shows the upper limit on the Higgs boson production rate, in units of the Standard Model expectation (y=1 on the vertical axis corresponds to the SM Higgs production rate, for the particular mass identified by the abscissa in the graph).
The…
The Moriond EWK conference is in full swing and results are being shown of the recent new searches for rare decays of the Bs meson. The Bs is a hadron made up by a bottom quark and a (anti)strange one. The peculiar composition of this particle and its zero electric charge make it a very interesting probe of new physics in its decays: new physics processes might give a sizable contribution to the rate of decays yielding pairs of muons, which are both very rare in the standard model, and very easy to identify in the detector.
So far, all searches have been unable to measure a significant rate…
Jan. 23, Slit Experiments and Coherence PatternsSnarky Puzzle
The coherent source is often modeled as a plane wave. Write the quaternion valued plane wave like so:whereA0 is the amplitudeomega is an angular frequencyk is a wave vectorpsi is a phase shiftSay you know the angular frequency and wave vector exactly. Fix the angular frequency and wave vector, and make the phase zero. [Arg, poorly formed question:]What values of time t and position R will have no signals? [Better: What values of time t and position R will the wave be completely real? What values to be completely imaginary?]…
vongehr |
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” studies have become a field provided with copious Templeton funding. Yale recently had the 2011 WITA (Why is there Anything?) conference (see their blog), which was funded by the Templeton and Yale Divinity School. Rutgers sports the Rutgers Templeton Project in Philosophy of Cosmology, and they now have a blog where they ask a list of questions ending in a grand finale with lucky number 13 being the ‘WITA question ’ in its better known version:
13) Why is there something rather than nothing?
I imagine that all of these will be discussed…
Introduction
It is a mathematical fact that both the real numbers and the rational numbers contain an infinite amount of elements. It is possible to devise a procedure that assigns a label containing a different natural number to every rational number. This is not possible for the real numbers. Technically this means that the set of real numbers has a higher cardinality than the set of rational numbers. In simple words it means that there are far more real numbers than there are rational numbers. Still both sets can densely cover a selected continuum, such as a line. However, the rational…
vongehr |
Quantum physics is close to the ultimate foundation of everything, but not because it is about little things. Quantum physics is not about little things; a radio-wave photon can be hundreds of meters long (in terms of wave length as well as coherence length). Physics is fundamentally the question of what is possible at all. With quantum mechanics, physics arrived at a point where we either face up to uncomfortable facts or refuse to follow science any further. Quantum physics is not important to consciousness because of some quantum magic in the brain that switches the light on, but because…
Just a few days ago the CDF collaboration announced their new measurement of the W boson mass, with a considerable improvement over the precision of the current world average for that quantity. Now DZERO, the competitor experiment, has also published their own new measurement, which is based on a statistics of 4.3 inverse femtobarns - twice as many data as the ones used by CDF.
The new DZERO measurement is quite compatible with the CDF result: DZERO finds M(W)=80367+-26 MeV. The uncertainty is larger, mainly because of their systematic uncertainty on the electron energy calibration. Note that…
There's now a new mathematics, Self-Field Theory (SFT) to test against the physical world in addition to the various quantum theories. So this is 'the new kid on the block'. One of the new features of this form of mathematical physics is that it does not use Lagrangians but rather uses what are called Maxwellians. In other words, this is a maths that is one degree of differentiation below the Lagrangian; essentially it is about fields and forces rather than potentials. I've italicized 'field' because it has been traditional to use the term field when we are actually talking about potentials…
As today I have just published a piece on CP violation which lacks detail on the theoretical aspects of the issue, I think it is a good time to offer you here a post on the matter written by Carl Brannen, a independent researcher and now Ph.D. student who is a great example of how what is typically dubbed "crackpottery" can at times convert into accepted science. Carl has managed to get a few of his papers accepted for publication, but he remains "on the edge", dealing with issues that many frown upon. Maybe he is right, or maybe he is not, but I sympathize with his approach, so I…