Physics

  After recent claims by Henry Stapp, I'd like to write about his violations of the Born Rule. For those who don't know quantum mechanics the laws come in two parts. First Unitary Evoluation. We start a set of amplitudes for a how likely each of a set possible occurances are, and write it as a column vector, describe a physical processes as unitary matrix that multiplies this vector, resulting in a output vector again describing how likely each set of outcome. ; The Born rule is that the probability of observing a particular outcome  happening is Where A is the value from the…

I received the text  below from Jim Markovitch, and decided it was fun enough to make a guest post entry with it. Markovitch worked for the world's largest supplier of corporate credit information, where he designed and implemented algorithms to estimate the probability of the equivalence, for credit purposes, of two name/address records. More recently he has adapted these algorithms to help identify unusually efficient approximations of fundamental constants. Let us see what this is about - TD --- Quantum Diaries Survivor readers who happen to play chess will be familiar with the…

Every once in a while Lubos pleases with one of his straight-leg tackles, as he deals with stuff he shouldn't be a-messing with (I am still giggling at an incident of a few years ago, when he publically apologized after a week of nonsense). Today it's one of those blessed moments. In a post where he means to attract the wrath of the whole of CMS on me, using the fact that I teased my most gullible readers with a (wrong) covert give-away of the Higgs mass, he also mentions that, by using a formula I warned should be used with caution (the simple formula of the weighted average of two…

It is so annoyingly sweet to be right, when being right means that one's job is not going to become more exciting in the near future... Today CDF published their analysis of CP violation in the Bs sector, where a very exciting three-sigma deviation from the Standard Model predictions had been a bit prematurely and uncautiously claimed by a group of phenomenologists in 2008. The group had analyzed the results of CDF and the results of DZERO on the phase of B_s mixing, fitting them together with other information using some assumptions on experimental details they did not have access to (if I…

As everybody knows, next Tuesday we will be treated with a CERN webcast of the analysis results on the Higgs boson searches by ATLAS and CMS. I imagine many of you will want to tune in, but fear you will not grasp much given the typically technical jargon that physicists use to communicate the details of their analyses. So I thought I would provide here a very short glossary of terms you are likely to hear, and which you might have a hard time understanding correctly. Let me see if I can do a decent job. - gamma: a gamma-ray is a photon, i.e. a quantum of light. A very energetic one, to be…

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started work in September 2008. Here are some of the results of the LHC Run I: ________________ Search for a light Higgs boson in the radiative decays of J/psi http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01641 "We find no evidence for $A^0$ production" _________ LHC results for dark matter from ATLAS and CMS http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01516 "No deviation from SM background expectation was found " _________ Searches for a heavy scalar boson H decaying to a pair of 125 GeV Higgs bosons hh or for a heavy pseudoscalar boson A decaying to Zh, in the final states with h to tautau http://…

The anticipation among physics enthusiasts is almost palpable: In three, four days from now, December the 13th, the discovery of a rather light Higgs particle is going to be officially announced - well, at least the "observation" or whatever the official term will be. Fitting to the ‘lucky’ number 13 date, this could well spell the end of the world, literally! According to rumors (Woit, vixra), the Higgs has been found in two different experiments, CMS and ATLAS, and both agree that it has a rather low mass. It is not fundamentally important whether the Higgs is found or not - except maybe…

Here at Science 2.0, but also elsewhere, a tsunami of articles on the speeding neutrino issue continues to scream for your attention. Their titles often promise a lot of spectacle, yet the truth of the matter is that nothing more than an anomaly has been reported that still is awaiting independent confirmation. A confirmation by another team at a different location, and with distance and timing measurements different from these used at the Gran Sasso experiment. In the meantime, we all have our hopes and expectations on what will be the final outcome. A good method to test the firmness of…

New research  by Dr Ashok  K.  Singal suggests that the solar system is hurtling through space at a speed much higher than previously thought. The newly calculated speed might prove that the universe is not uniform on a large scale, as is portrayed by the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR), thermal radiation emitted shortly after the Big Bang. The CMBR is not precisely uniform in all directions because the universe itself is not uniform. As our galaxy sweeps through the CMBR, this relative movement makes the sky look slightly hotter in the direction we are travelling…

It is by now public that Rolf Heuer, the Director General of CERN, in announcing for December 13th two back-to-back talks of the CMS and ATLAS experiments on their Higgs search results with 2011 data, warned that the results might not be conclusive yet. Besides, nobody really could expect them to be, since the sensitivity expected by both ATLAS and CMS in the still not excluded region of the Higgs mass, with 5/fb of data per experiment and 7 TeV running conditions, ranges from 2 to 4 standard deviations in the rosiest circumstances. Despite that, blogs around have raised expectations on the…