Physics
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Today’s emergence of nano-micro hybrid structures with almost biological complexity is of fundamental interest. Our ability to adapt intelligently to the challenges has ramifications all the way from fundamentally changing research itself, over applications critical to future survival, to posing small and medium as well as truly globally existential dangers.
In this article I publish suppressed information that has been actually officially published, but is effectively kept unavailable (after being rejected from all higher impact factor journals in the relevant fields because the text is too…
I am told by a TOTEM manager that this is public news and so it can be blogged about - so here I would like to explain a rather cunning plan that the TOTEM and the CMS collaborations have put together to enhance the possibilities of a discovery, and a better characterization, of the particle that everybody hopes is real, the 750 GeV resonance seen in photon pairs data by ATLAS and CMS in their 2015 data.What is TOTEM, first of all ? Well, TOTEM is a collaboration that operates some high-rapidity detectors located around the CMS collision point at the LHC. And before you ask, rapidity is a…
(Inside Science) – Physicists are on the hunt for elusive dark matter, the hypothesized but as yet unidentified stuff that makes up a large majority of the matter in the universe.
They had long favored "weakly interacting massive particles," known as WIMPs, as the most likely dark matter candidate, but after an exhaustive search, some scientists are moving on to more exotic particles.
Most estimates suggest that there's 5-6 times as much dark matter as there are things that we can see, such as galaxies, stars, and planets. Yet physicists know very little about what the mysterious dark…
With the Large Hadron Collider now finally up and running after the unfortunate weasel incident, physicists at CERN and around the world are eager to put their hands on the new 2016 collisions data. The #MoarCollisions hashtag keeps entertaining the tweeting researchers and their followers, and everybody is anxious to finally ascertain whether the tentative signal of a new 750 GeV particle seen in diphoton decays in last year's data will reappear and confirm an epic discovery, or what.
Data is collected by collider experiments by a process of selection and storage which at first sight appears…
The twelfth edition of “Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum“, a particle physics conference specialized in QCD and Heavy Ion physics, will be held in Thessaloniki this year, from August 29th to September 3rd. And the AMVA4NewPhysics network, the EU ITN I designed and coordinate, is among the sponsors of the event.
The reason of the sponsorship is simple to explain: the conference will host a session devoted to “Statistical methods for physics analysis in the XXIth century“. The Scientific Coordinator of the network, yours truly, will chair that session. Several talks of…
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Common Sense and Cosmology
The ultimate
physical meaning of the Big Bang should be Anthropic Selection: The unavoidable inference from the established
in modern physics initial Big Bang event is that "Big Bangs happen" though it
were in the pre-universe, pre-space or from nothingness, spacelessness, what-so-ever… And it is by the common sense that our observable Universe must…
While tediously compiling a list of scientific publications that chance to have my name in the authors list (I have to apply for a career advancement and apparently the committee will scrutinize the hundred-page-long lists of that kind that all candidates submit), I discovered today that I just passed the mark of 1000 published articles. This happened on February 18th 2016 with the appearance in print of a paper on dijet resonance searches by CMS. Yay! And 7 more have been added to the list since then.This unexciting datum caused me to ponder once more on the abstract value of such indicators…
I think this might be interesting to the few of you left out there who still read paper books (I do too). World Scientific offers, until April 29th, a 35% reduction in the cover price of its books, if you purchase two of them.This might be a good time to pre-order my book, "Anomaly!", if you have not done so yet. Plus maybe get one of the other many excellent titles in the collection of WS.
You can see the offer at the site of my book (that's where I got the info from!).
How well established are current cosmological dogmas? What do we really know about the fundamental origin and dynamics of our Universe, in spite of the remarkable work accomplished by COBE, WMAP, Planck and other collaborations? Actually, we know little or nothing about many basic questions. In particular, the structure and dynamics of the physical vacuum remain by now totally unknown. As a consequence, we are unable to describe the process by which the cosmological vacuum expands following the expansion of space. If this highly nontrivial process releases energy, its cosmological…
I gave a 15 minute talk at a local Americal Physical Society Meeting. Here is the title and abstract.
Title: A Unified Mathematical Field Theory
Abtract: The century old problem of getting gravity to play gracefully with the rest of physics may not have to do with a physics field theory. Instead it may have to do with the math tools used for any physics field theory. By third grade, we had all learned how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide any number. By the end of physics graduate school, the tools of differential geometry no longer allow one such freedom to play with…