Physics

The challenge of providing Ph.D. students in Physics with an overview of statistical methods and concepts useful for data analysis in just three hours of lectures is definitely a serious one, so I decided to take it as I got invited to the "Indian Summer School" in the pleasant lakeside town of Traunkirchen, Austria. This is the first school organized here for Austrian Ph.D. students. It features lectures in topics ranging from searches for new physics at colliders, to cosmology and dark matter searches, to QCD and quark-gluon plasma, to statistics for physicists. I was happy to see that…

In this blog, I will again define the space-times-time invariance proposal using simple graphics, an explanation intended for a wider audience, videos, and information for nerds. It is taken directly from my own web site that has nearly exactly the same information. In Part B, the equations of motion will be derived, something technical people would reasonably ask for. An Overview The deepest problem physicist have struggled with since the 1930s is how to unify general relativity with quantum mechanics. Perhaps this was the wrong goal. Special relativity imposes algebraic constraints on…

The European network I am coordinating will have its kick-off meeting at CERN on September 16th. This will be a short event where we give a sort of "orientation" to the participants, in terms of who we are, what we have to deliver, how we plan to do it. It is not a redundant proposition, as the AMVA4NewPhysics programme is quite varied: it includes two big experiments (ATLAS and CMS), plus two Statistics institutes, and several industrial partners; it will organize workshops in statistics, outreach, soft skills, and software tools such as MatLab, RooStats, Madgraph; and it will send our 10…

Category theory is a branch of mathematics which attempts a formalization in terms of simple elements and associations between them. A rather abstract construction, indeed, and certainly one above my head (I am an experimentalist, for god's sake!).So why am I talking to you about this ? That is because category theory may be one way to attack very deep and unsolved problems in theoretical physics, too. And although I do not know all the details, I think that given the depressing landscape of attempts at a theory of everything and at a unification of gravity and quantum field theory, and the…

Nuclear Glue The nucleus of an atom is made up of protons and neutrons.  Both have about the same weight although protons have a positive charge and neutrons have no charge (they are neutral).  Like charges such as protons produce a repulsive force against each other.  This then begs the question, what holds the nucleus together then if these positively charged protons are all pushing each other away while being crammed into the nucleus together? In truth, the atom is a truly lovely concept, full of answers to so many physical properties of everything we see around us. …

Just a short post to remind anybody who has successfully completed a master in scientific disciplines that there is a chance to do research with the CMS experiment at CERN, earning a PhD in Physics or Statistics and becoming expert with Statistical Learning techniques, while being paid a salary much higher than mine.Two calls for applications are now open, respectively at the University of Padova (dept. of Statistical Sciences) and at INFN-Padova (for a PhD in Physics again at the University of Padova). They expire at the end of September. The salary is in the 50,000 euro/year ballpark, and…

        The SM neutrino hierarchies are special   There is a noticeable difference between neutrino mixing angle hierarchy and the mass hierarchies of all three types of SM Dirac particles – charged leptons and up- and down-quarks. The hierarchies of the three Dirac experimental mass values (m1, m2, m3) at leading approximation (biminimal pattern 0, 0, 1>; hierarchy-angles being bimaximal 90, 90, 0> deg) indicate that they obey the euclidean symmetry invariant Pythagorean equation not only in the 3-dimensional space, but also in the 2-dimensional spaces for…

This morning I received a copy of the book "WHAT NEXT ? White Paper of CSN1", a publication of the Italian INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics) addressing the question of what awaits us after the Higgs discovery, and what projects should be supported in the long-term future of HEP.The book is the result of one year of work by many colleagues who have actively participated in four working groups and one task force, producing some preliminary studies of the discovery potential of this or that machine, and of the most important questions that need to be answered -and the projects that…

I was at the ICNFP 2015 Conference, spending two nights to prepare updated versions of two posters following an idea that I had on August 22 just before taking the plane for Crete (the possible space-time contradiction between the preonic vacuum and the macroscopic world, leading to Quantum Mechanics for standard matter), when an important result was posted to arXiv.org . In an article entitled Experimental loophole-free violation of a Bell inequality using entangled electron spins separated by 1.3 km, http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.05949 , a Delft + Barcelona + Oxford collaboration announced on…

The scientists behind the BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescope, last year made an extraordinary claim that they had detected gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time. Initially hailed as the most groundbreaking discovery of the century, it later proved a false alarm: the signal was merely galactic dust. So are we likely to ever find gravitational waves? And would they really provide irrefutable evidence for the Big Bang? Here are five common myths and misconceptions about gravitational waves. 1. Setbacks are just due to teething problems It…