Physics
This poem is too good to just quote the final stanza.
The Road Not TakenBy Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,And having perhaps the better claim,Because it was grassy and wanted wear;Though as for that the passing thereHad worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally layIn leaves no step had trodden black.Oh, I kept the first for another day!Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted…
In 1915 Albert Einstein formulated the theory of general relativity which fundamentally changed our understanding of gravity. He explained gravity as the manifestation of the curvature of space and time. Einstein's theory predicts that the flow of time is altered by mass.
This effect, known as "gravitational time dilation", causes time to be slowed down near a massive object. It affects everything and everybody; in fact, people working on the ground floor will age slower than their colleagues a floor above, by about 10 nanoseconds in one year.
This tiny effect has actually been confirmed in…
The picture of a central positively charged nucleus of an
atom surrounded by negatively charged swarming electrons explains so much
detail in the nature of our world. This
is known as the atomic model. The
behavior of gas, liquids and solids are almost completely explained with just
that model (after including quantum effects).
Basic things like weather, water behavior, rock mechanics and fire to
name but a small few.
The behavior of gas follows another simple rule using the
atomic model when kept in a constant volume chamber. The gas pressure is approximately…
In 1992 I started working at my undergraduate thesis, the search for all-hadronic top quark pairs in CDF data. The CDF experiment was just starting to collect proton-antiproton collision data with the brand-new silicon vertex detector in what was called Run 1a, which ended in 1993 and produced the data on which the first evidence claim of top quarks was based. But I was still working on the Run 0 data: 4 inverse picobarns of collisions -the very first collisions at the unprecedented energy of 1.8 TeV. And I was not alone: many analyses of those data were still in full swing.Among them, one…
In 1992 I started working at my undergraduate thesis, the search for all-hadronic top quark pairs in CDF data. The CDF experiment was just starting to collect proton-antiproton collision data with the brand-new silicon vertex detector in what was called Run 1a, which ended in 1993 and produced the data on which the first evidence claim of top quarks was based. But I was still working on the Run 0 data: 4 inverse picobarns of collisions -the very first collisions at the unprecedented energy of 1.8 TeV. And I was not alone: many analyses of those data were still in full swing.Among them, one…
I apologize to you, dear reader, for not having written yet about the 2.5 standard deviation excess that the ATLAS collaboration has recently found in diboson final states at 2 TeV in the 2012 8-TeV data. I thought it was interesting, but for some reason the distributions published by the experiment did not stimulate my fantasy enough to trigger an article here. Or maybe, it was because they got published at a time when I had too much on my plate to deal with it...
Now I regret that, and I am trying to fill that void in some way. The occasion is a new article which appeared in the ArXiv the…
Many people associate the image of an old man in glasses and crazy white hair with a scientist. This is largely due to the visage of Albert Einstein in his later years. Einstein is largely recognized today for his theories on relativity describing motion at the speed of light and that of gravity. Einstein did not win the Nobel prize for either of these however, he won the award for a lesser known discovery called the photoelectric effect. This discovery was one of the foundational cornerstones giving rise to quantum mechanics. The…
The discovery by an undergraduate student of tubes of plasma drifting above Earth has made headlines in the past few days.
Many people have asked how the discovery was made and, in particular, how an undergraduate student was able to do it.
The answer is a combination of an amazing new telescope, a very smart student and an unexpected fusion of two areas of science.
Here is how it all happened, from my perspective as the academic who supervised the project at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy.
My research involves studying the variability of stars and galaxies using a new radio telescope,…
Physicists around the world (myself included) are hoping that this week will mark the beginning of a new era of discovery. And not, as some fear, the end of particle physics as we know it.
After 27 months of shutdown and re-commissioning, the Large Hadron Collider has begun its much-anticipated “Season 2”. Deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the first physics data is now being collected in CERN’s freshly upgraded detector-temples at the record-breaking collision energy of 13 teraelectonvolts (TeV).
Much has been written about the upgrade to the accelerator, the experiments, and the…
Among the many things that CMS and ATLAS physicists are looking forward to checking up, using the data that the LHC is starting to deliver from 13 TeV proton-proton collisions, one is the WH resonance signal that CMS found in a recent analysis. Mind you, "signal" here is a misnomer: what was seen was most probably a insignificant fluctuation of the background; yet we must keep our mind open to interpretation changes.
The search I am talking about is one CMS did for boosted Higgs bosons recoiling against boosted W bosons, in a "back-to-back" topology (paper is here).
If a very heavy resonance…