Physics

What is Dark Matter (DM) and why should you care? I feel I should start this article by explaining these two things first, as we live in an age when nobody has time for long historical or context-setting introductions. We do not know what dark matter is, but we know it exists. When Newton's nap under an apple tree was interrupted by the fall of a fruit over his slumbering head, the guy did not know what really was it at the source of the event, but he could clearly see that there was something pulling the apple toward the earth: the force of gravity. We are in a similar situation…

Before you brush off this post with the answer "of course", let me qualify the title. Of course anybody can become a particle physicist, although the learning curve can be steep and hard to climb up. But what I mean here is, can a student who has been trained as a statistician (through his or her bachelor and master degree) become a successful experimental particle physicist, without investing other years of his or her life in studying quantum mechanics and lots of other arcane physics topics ? The question, as I see it, is important because of the way we do science at those huge particle…

Particle physics has been historically the ground of long-standing scientific challenges between the US and Europe, especially since the birth of the CERN laboratories in 1954. And in parallel, another challenge has kept the field alive and thriving for over half a century: the one between theoretical and experimental physics. The fifties were glorious years for experimental research in "high-energy physics" (HEP) - where high energy meant to signify the use of very energetic reactions to study new states of matter. A plethora of new hadrons (subatomic particles made of the same…

Alessandro Strumia, needs to have had a five minute talk with the late great Ben Barres.  Dr Barres was fond of telling a story where he heard how much his work was “better than your sister’s”.   Ben was a female to male transguy.   For those unfamiliar with the lingo started out a woman … then transitioned to living as a man.    This is a clumsy and non-PC way to put it I know… but when preaching to people one must speak their language.   Transgender scientist can tell you all about how different gender-based stereotypes and assumptions…

The world of particle physics is in turmoil because of a presentation by Alessandro Strumia, an Italian phenomenologist, at CERN's "1st workshop on high energy theory and gender", and its aftermath. By now the story has been echoed by many major newscasters around the world, and discussed in public and private forums, blogs, twitter feeds. I wanted to stay away from it here, mainly because it is a sensitive issue and the situation is still evolving, but after all, why not offer to you my personal pitch on the matter? Strumia, by the way, has been an occasional commenter to this blog -…

Casual reader, be warned - the contents of this article, specifically the second part of it, are highly volatile, speculative stuff. But hey, that is the stuff that dreams are made of. And I have one or two good reasons to dream on.The environment Machine Learning is ubiquitous today. Self-driving cars; self-shaving robots (just kidding, but I'm sure they can be constructed if the need arises); programs that teach themselves chess and become world-champion-class players overnight; Siri; google search engines; google translate - okay, I am going too far. But you know it: machine learning has…

What is a photon jet? Despite their exotic name, photon jets are a well studied thing nowadays. The original studies were performed by experimentalists who aimed to test quantum chromodynamics: they used to spend their time discriminating prompt photon production in hadron collisions from backgrounds. I remember a lot of such studies were performed in the 80ies and 90ies by my CDF colleagues, especially within the "QCD working group".The importance of the detection of single, isolated photons of high energy has risen enormously since then, given their role in the discovery of the Higgs boson…

The famous paradox 'which came first, the chicken or the egg?' was created by philosophers to discuss cause and effect. Since chickens lay eggs, and eggs produce chickens...you get the idea. Biologists have an answer to that question. The egg came first, hundreds of millions of years before the chicken, but physics has a different. They both came first, and at the same time. That's because in quantum physics, cause-and-effect is not always as straightforward as one event causing another. Quantum mechanics weirdness is not something we can experience in real life.  In real life you walk…

Since yesterday, and for almost a week, the literature festival in Mantova hosts "ScienceGround", a quite innovative initiative at the boundary between a science fair, a workshop, a library, and a place to hang around together and exchange ideas and information. The location is the beautiful hall of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, where a modular and dynamically configurable space has been set up.The theme is the word "Data" in all its meanings and forms. There are laboratories of data mining, machine learning, how to lie with statistics; discussions and instant lectures on how to…

Two teams have announced the fifth and most prominent way that the Higgs boson - "the God particle" as it was once called - decays into other particles called bottom quarks. This pathway is the last to be detected of the five main signature pathways that can identify the Higgs particle. Quarks are tiny constituents of protons, which themselves are some of the building blocks of atoms. The bottom quark is one of the six types of quarks that make up the menagerie of particles in the "standard model" that explains matter and their interactions Long-sought because it confirms theories about…