Physics
The world of elementary particles has something in common with our own: there are large inequalities in the properties of particles, as in the properties of human beings. The heaviest particle, the top quark, with its estimated mass of 172 GeV is five orders of magnitude heavier than the most common matter constituents, the up and down quarks and the electron. Along with the top quark there are three other heavyweight particles that we currently call elementary -perhaps only a label we have to use because we haven't been able to split them further into smaller bits: the Higgs boson (125 GeV…
The recent developments in artificial intelligence, most notably the demonstration of the weird power of GPT4 and other large language models, have brought the scientific community to ponder on some very foundational questions - What is conscience? What is intelligence? Can machines really think? Can machines really become conscient? (Below, the answer of ChatGPT to my silly question on self-awareness.)
Of course, large language models (LLM) are not it - they are not conscient, they are not intelligent (at least according to most of the meanings of the term we would be comfortable with…
Impressive research conducted at ETH Zurich did show that quantum entanglement applies to even macroscopic quantum systems. In that case, superconducting Qbits. They did not show that Einstein was wrong or causality does not exist at the quantum level. Despite media reports over the years, on various great experiments, to better test quantum entanglement, Einstein’s Relativity still stands and applies even at the quantum level. In fact, the standard model of particle physics, tied with General Relativity for best tested theory in all of science, requires this to be the case. While the…
The call for applications to Ph.D. positions at the University of Padova opened yesterday, and it will remain active for less than one month (deadline is June 7th at 1PM CEST).
University of Padova is an important centre for academic studies in Italy. It is the third oldest university in the world, and just turned 800 years old! The department of Physics and Astronomy itself has been selected for 2023-27 as a centre of excellence. And Padova is a very pleasant small town in north-eastern Italy, where over 70,000 students receive education in all fields of sciences and…
Few authors dare to say aloud things about physics or the history of physics that may go against the status quo. Alexander Unzicker is one of them. In his last work, Make Physics Great Again. America has Failed (2023; translated into English from the original in German: 2022, Einsteins Albtraum – Der Aufstieg Amerikas und der Niedergang der Physik, Westend Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt), like in his previous works, he dares to touch a raw nerve that is usually avoided in politically correct environments. This book is certainly polemical. Basically, the claim is that North American pragmatic values…
Today I am traveling to Banff, a pleasant mountain resort in western Canada, to attend a workshop on systematic uncertainties. Yes, you heard that right - a bunch of physicists and statisticians will be gathering in a secluded location for a whole week, with the sole purpose of debating on that exotic topic. How weird is that? I bet most of you don't think much of systematic uncertainties. What are they, anyway?
Known unknowns
I am sure I am going to be criticised for the down-to-earth definition that follows - some of my colleagues, and especially the friends I'll meet in Banff, are rather…
A long time ago, this column used to report a lot of detail of my personal life and of daily news about my work-related travel and activities. The site does offer two modalities for posts: article-type and blog-type; this determines where they appear in the main science20 site (this text is classified as blog-type, so it will be listed in the column on the center-right in the main page of Science20). This built-in feature invited the kind of blogging style I already had before, so when I moved here in April 2009 (gosh, it's been a while!), it was a seamless manouver.
However, over time I…
In the last couple of days I have been busy writing a project to explore the potential of artificial intelligence to extract more information from particle detectors. In fact, while the development of these instruments in the course of the past 80 years has closely followed, and sometimes been a driver, of technological developments, I can see the issue of a progressive mis-alignment of detector design with the ultimate potential and final goals of large experiments. That mis-alignment is due to the rapid evolution of deep learning tools. They have now become the real elephant in the room in…
Dark matter is thought to be 85% of all the matter in the universe but we have no idea what it is. All we know is that there appears to be something that exerts gravitational forces that behave like ordinary matter. One theory is that there are very old and very small black holes that were created soon after the Big Bang, primordial Black Holes. These black holes might be the mysterious dark matter that makes up most of the matter in the universe. Stefano Bondani, Matteo Bonetti, and Luca Broggi et al, want to study these black holes by looking at how they affect a very big black hole at the…
I am exploiting my column today to advertise a workshop that the collaboration I lead, MODE, is organizing at Princeton University this coming July. The workshop, the third of its series, aims to bring together physicists and computer scientists to join forces in the solution of complex optimization problems in experiment design.
The MODE collaboration (https://mode-collaboration.github.io) was founded in 2020 when with a few colleagues we realized two things. On one side, in recent years there has been a development of the technical tools that in principle allow one to attack the problem of…