Physics

Wow, those folks in Stockholm do pay attention to this blog. With a delay of a year (ok, you are forgiven, graphene is cute stuff after all), one half of the ten million kronor goes to SAUL PERLMUTTER and the other half jointly to BRIAN SCHMIDT and ADAM RIESS.
Exactly as I instructed them.
Bravo Nobel committee. And congratulations Saul, Brian and Adam, well deserved!
Saul Perlmutter receiving a call from Stockholm.Credit: Paul Sakuma
Credit: the universe adventure.
Let there be no mistake: this Nobel is not for dark energy. It is for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the…

Tomorrow I will fly to Frascati, where are the headquarters of INFN, the italian institute for nuclear physics. I will attend to an event there, called "Incontri di Fisica" (Physics meetings), where high-school teachers meet researchers and receive training, as well as discuss ways to improve science education and popularization in schools and outside.
I will be discussing the subject of "Science popularization with blogs" on Wednesday afternoon and then, two days later, I will be the last speaker with another short talk, where I will try to summarize some ideas on the matter. And you might…

This year’s Nobel Prize in physics goes to Saul Perlmutter, who shares it with Adam Riess and Brian P. Schmidt, all having been vital in the discovery of that the universe’s expansion is speeding up; research that was done during the 1990s.
Several science bloggers opined that maybe work on quantum entanglement was more deserving, and they have a point, but if the wider impact of scientific issues is at play in the considerations that lead to awarding the Nobel Prize, the decision today was a good one in that regard.
Saul Perlmutter receiving the Shaw Prize for astronomy in 2006 with…

RETRACTION: I have decided to retract three blogs (Deriving … 4/5, 5/5, 6/5+1). I was unable to figure out a reasonable statement concerning gauge symmetry. When the blogs were initially written, I focused on the field equations, mainly the Gauss-like law, and ignored the force equations entirely. Finding a solution that works with the the field and force equations were not looked for. A consistent proposal should do all three things (fields, forces, and solutions) with grace. I have concluded it is not possible to achieve these goals with the Lagrangian as written, hence the retraction.…

Relativity is by itself a very cross-disciplinary subject. Not only from the point view of Physics, Mathematics, Astrophysics, Philosophy... but also from that of Ethics, History and other Social Sciences.
For instance, why there has been no Nobel Prize awarded for the theory of relativity ? If Albert Einstein got the Nobel Prize in 1921, no mention of relativity was made :
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921 was awarded to Albert Einstein "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the…

X-ray is a form of electromagnetic wave with wavelength in range of 0.01~10 nm and energies in range of 0.12~120 keV, almost the same range for the core-level electron binding energy (0.1~100 keV).[1,2]
Therefore, X-rays can be used to determine the electronic structure of the material by monitor the absorptions of the X-ray with tunable photon energies, X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS). In XAS the final states of the elements, including the photoelectron emission, fluorescent and/or in-elastically scattered photoelectrons, can be measured and thus the electronic structure of the matter…

The reportedly faster than light neutrinos at OPERA may be a systematic error, but if these and those data of other neutrino experiments are correct, they hint at a phenomenon that propagates with very many times, perhaps millions of times the speed of light.
Some, like Cohen and Glashow (http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.6562), only look at the average velocity and then explain to us why the neutrinos could not possibly travel that fast. That is a little silly, because we already know for many years, namely from supernova data, that neutrinos do not travel that fast over long distances. Sure…

Just a link you cannot miss:
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/tevatron/milestones/interactive-timeline.html

I'm nostalgic tonight. The reason ? The Tevatron has finally stopped running, for good.
It's strange to find out one can mourn the shutdown of a synchrotron just as the passing away of an old friend, but that's more or less how I feel like tonight. And I am not even among the ones who can claim to have been around for the full duration of the machine's lifetime, like Giorgio Chiarelli - as Giorgio recounted here, he was there in the CDF control room when the first proton-antiproton beams collided the first time, in 1985.
I started working in CDF in June 1992. In the course of these 19 years I…

Not yet official, but safe enough to be announced here: prof. Fernando Ferroni is the new INFN president. The charge will need to be confirmed by the Minister of Instruction and Research, Mariastella Gelmini (yes, the lady who said neutrinos travel in a 732 km long tunnel underground from CERN to Gran Sasso), but this is just a formal step.
Nando Ferroni is full professor at the University "La Sapienza" of Roma. He is an experimental particle physicist with a background in neutrino experiments (at CERN in the eighties) and collider physics (with the L3 experiment at LEP, and then with Babar…