Physics
A quick cross link to a great article on the Higgs boson search at the super liberal web site dailykos.com. A very clear description of the issues. I particularly liked the stats. One other thing to note: the threaded discussion had 433 comments. Those folks know how to chat.[Note: Just saw my mug featured in a comment. I suggested if they were interested in the work, to follow my blogs on Science20.com. Cross pollination is good, hence all the dramatic readings on YouTube.]
Update: Version 2.0 is out where he discusses the Higgs signals at 130-150 GeV and 260 GeV. There is also a…
Today I casually ran into a very nice figure which is perfect for an entry as "guess the plot", both because of its mysterious appearance, and because of the interesting physics it hides. It is a two-dimensional "surface" and its shape should tell you something. For the moment, I will just say it is something which has to do with both particle physics and astrophysics, and that it is quite cool, being a new way of looking at something we know well.
So please let me know what you guess that plot might represent, using the comments thread below! I would like to know: 1) what does the figure…
vongehr |
In Science Could Have It all Wrong, Ethan comes to the conclusion that we should all trust the experts. The most controversial bit is surely where he takes the impressive successes of modern cosmology to be a good reason to trust experts on topics like global warming. Some bad guy put the following outrageous commentary:
Experts do not fall from the sky, they are selected by a self-reinforcing, thereby emergent establishment which one cannot join without subscribing to certain highly questionably core beliefs in the first place.
I did not have to be a GR expert yet to mistrust the consensus…
The title is not a tease but is an exercise in abstraction. I spend most of my free mind time thinking about one or the other of these two subjects. Can I find any overlap in the research going on in these two? That was the challenge. I hope you don’t mind if I spend most of my time on sex. I will reach out to physics near the end.
How can we come up with an abstract definition of sex? The Internet has a significant amount of abstract sex, meaning that most of the traffic in text, images, and audio does not lead to real sex. Wikipedia has statistics on the amount of sexual information on the…
Blogging from the whereabouts of one of the most beautiful places of the Mediterranean, Balos Beach (see picture), I wish to draw your attention today to one fun search that CMS produced on data collected in 2010: the one for gluinos in events with six jets.
Gluinos are particles predicted by supersymmetric models. They are the super-partner of the gluon, the carrier of strong interactions. If they exist, gluinos must be copiously produced in proton-proton collisions, because they carry the colour charge which "couples" them to standard quarks and gluons contained in the proton. In a few…
G.D.W. |
Twitter and Facebook have been studied extensively and have provided some insights into the formation and maintenance of human social networks. But could this approach be adapted to gain understanding of swarming behavior in animals, say, locusts?
Apparently, it can. Researchers from the German Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, in collaboration with a US based colleague, have used insights from human networking theory to study swarm formation in locusts, which can be crucial for their survival. Swarm formation and maintenance has been studied for several decades,…
In the beautiful hideout of Falassarna, Crete (see below), I am blogging today from the terrace of my hotel room, overlooking a wonderful beach. Although still "connected" and in touch with the happenings at CERN and Fermilab, I am for once in a detached, pensive mood, as I ponder over the status of HEP in this hot summer of 2011. So let me just assemble some thoughts below. Summer conferences are at our doors, but I will miss them.... I prefer to think at what we'll see at the next winter conferences!
The LHC is running at full steam and it is bound to exceed in an embarassing way the "goals…
ujm |
Consider the following scenario. An initial measurement indicates that two indistinguishable particles – particles of the same type, carrying no kind of identity tag – are headed northward and southward, respectively. The next (relevant) thing that is indicated by a measurement is that two particles of exactly the same type are headed eastward and westward, respectively. We also assume that the scattering is elastic – no particles are created or annihilated in the meantime – and that the pair of outgoing particles is in some sense the same as the pair of incoming particles: no other particle…
I was waiting for the announcement in the Fermilab seminar of next Friday, but apparently despite I am still a member I am not well enough informed of what happens inside CDF, the experiment at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider of Fermilab. So the paper is now public, and you can read the news in the Cornell arxiv: CDF sees an excess of muon pairs which is compatible with originating from the decay of B_s mesons.
The decay of B_s mesons to muon pairs occurs via a "box diagram" in the Standard Model, and is suppressed by the fact that weak interactions must make double work to produce…
Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist who has gained some attention of late. Minkowski is dead. From my soapbox here, I will channel Minkowski in this gentlemen’s disagreement. Links to Julian’s work will be provided, they are worthy of your time. Nothing I say against Barbour’s ideas are personal, they are all technical in nature, as is my way. I have a bullet with “The Nature of Time” written on it. At this moment, I am not sure if it will kill the paper. I will have to find out and report the result at the end of this blog.
Julian has a real theoretical physics Ph.D.…