Physics
The postulate of special relativity, which in common terms means that no particle can travel faster than the speed of light, has been tested and shown to be correct in literally billions of measurements. So the scientists at CERN who report measuring neutrino's moving faster than light are either WRONG or are being grossly misrepresented in many media outlets. Every other time a packet of particles collided with another packet of particles special relativity has been borne out. The experiment reported in many outlets, conducted at CERN, has been reported as "showing…
So, as I had announced a bit prematurely three days ago, the Opera experiment is about to release the results of a measurement that is bound to stir endless discussions. If you read the piece before I took it down (to comply with a request coming from high up above), or even Lubos Motl's blog, you know what this is about; but by now it is not a mystery in any case, since many newspapers are now discussing the news, although they often misrepresent things, as usual (heck, the newspaper "La Stampa" has a short piece in its online version tonight, where they manage to claim that Einstein was…
"Excluding wrong Higgs boson mass hypotheses is starting to feel like explaining how to make the chocolate mousse by compiling a list of all the wrong ingredients."
T. D., TEDx Flanders, Sept. 24th 2011
Researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne are hoping the Higgs boson is found at the LHC for a big reason - they think it can explain universal expansion and even reveal the possible existence of another closely related particle.
The Higgs boson would help explain why the majority of elementary particles possess mass. but a group of EPFL physicists say it would also help us understand the evolution of the Universe from the moment of its birth - and it could be verified with data from the Planck satellite.
The Universe was incredibly minuscule at its birth but it is…
A well-known HEP rule says that yesterday's searched new processes will be tomorrow's annoying irreducible backgrounds; but since I am an optimist, I always see the glass half-full and feel compelled to add that today they are pleasing high-statistics signals. Take single top quark production: the Tevatron experimentalists (you can include me in the lot) banged their head for a decade trying to measure it; they finally succeeded, but the signal always remained a small excess of events in the tail of a highly-refined multi-variable discriminator.
Nowadays, the 7-TeV collisions of the Large…
Last time I blogged, I discussed entropic gravity and ended with the prediction that we will witness some more opposing and supportive views on entropic gravity before the dust will settle on the subject. The moment I wrote these words, a critical article on Verlinde's entropic gravity idea appeared, soon followed by a an article that brushes aside all earlier entropic gravity criticism based on neutron experiments.
I haven't read these articles in detail, as a cursory look gave me the impression that these two articles add little to the various arguments presented already. I refer here…
The Maxwell source equations will be derived using quaternions - an approach James Clerk Maxwell himself tried and yet failed to do. As far as I am aware, this technique is not in the literature, up to an isomorphism (meaning actually it is there but under a different name, math in disguise). By using quaternions, the approach can be extended to generate field equations for particles with the weak and strong force symmetries, SU(2) and SU(3). The extension is a technical speculation, which I define as precise math whose applicability to Nature I have not a clue :-)
Warning: doing a classic…
[Introduction: I published the text below last Monday, when the news of this controversial new measurement had spread in the corridors of physics departments, as well as in the threads of popular HEP blogs. I felt I was not doing anything wrong, since all I was reporting were facts, with a cautious opinion on my part. I was however forced to take it down only a few hours afterwards, due to a kind of pressure I could not ignore, my own job being at stake. I understand that the experiment who did this measurement was not too happy to see the news in print before they wanted to, but then again…
The Collider Detector at Fermilab, CDF for insiders, is the longest lasting physics experiment ever (yes, I know about the pitch drop and no, I do not consider that a physics experiment). Designed in 1979, it was assembled in the early eighties, and operated since 1985 to 2011. Now, in two weeks it will stop data taking, and soon will be decommissioned.
Sad story, because CDF has made history in a number of ways -maybe the most recognizable one being the discovery of the top quark, in 1994 (yes, I am being politically incorrect -that was "only" an evidence, strictly speaking; however nobody…
Dark matter has proven harder to find than anyone anticipated in earth bound experiments, furthermore astronomical observations have revealed how it is spread through the universe. How can these null results be explained?
There are two kinds of searches for dark matter. Those done in earth bound experiments, and those done with telescopes. Astronomers have been very sure dark matter and dark energy exist for quite some time. What they have been working on is figuring out its precise nature. They consider dark matter composed of massive but non-radiating…