Physics

A very popular urban myth is that window glass is a liquid.  This apparently originated by the recognition that old European cathedrals had windows with the glass being thicker at the bottom than the top.  The actual cause of this is not attributable to gravity pulling the glass downward in a slump but rather the early window manufacturing techniques followed by a common practice of mounting window glass with the thicker side down.  Prior to modern manufacturing techniques, glass windows could be made by spinning molten glass to stretch it out into a thin layer from which the…

Temperature allows us to make a simple statistical statement about the energy of particles without having to know the specific details of the system. How do quantum particles reach a state where statistical statements are possible? The result is surprising: a cloud of atoms can actually have several temperatures at once.  Scientists from the Vienna University of Technology together with colleagues from Heidelberg University note that the air around us consists of countless molecules, moving around randomly. It would be impossible to track them all and to describe all their…

Particle physics is so cool - you get to build huge detectors with a specific goal clearly stated in your letter of intents and technical proposals, but are then allowed to use them to study many other things. Take the MINOS collaboration for example: their web site claims that "The MINOS Experiment is a long-baseline neutrino experiment designed to observe the phenomena of neutrino oscillations, an effect which is related to neutrino mass.", but of course once you have a hammer everything starts looking like a nail. So with two giant underground detectors (a near and a far unit,…

John Baez writes in "The Crackpot Index - A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics": 15.   10 points for each statement along the lines of "I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations".  … 18.   10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein …”   M. J. Duff, writes in String and M-theory: Answering the critics (an interesting paper that I almost fully agree with): “Of all the intellectual disciplines, theoretical…

The most probable date for Good Friday is April 3, 33 AD. This date is due to Isaac Newton.Easter is that holiday that wanders around in the calendar and which you never quite know when will take place. Some get annoyed by that, but frankly I find it charming. But when did the crucifixion of Jesus really take place? Questions like these were of much concern to Isaac Newton (1642-1726), surprisingly, since he is best known for gravitation and planetary orbits. Newton was able to compute dates in year 33 and 34 AD when the crucifixion could have taken place. Others have also found that year 30…

Taking inspiration from Resonaances, who this year offers much more than an April's Fool in his blog (I am also flattered to see that I am featured there, and with a character of my liking), I am going to offer some predictions for the next run that the LHC is going to start, at the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV, in the next few weeks. The unconventional thing is that I will force the natural scepticism out of my brain, and try to be over-optimistic.The prediction for 2015-2016The LHC will collect about 10 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collisions data this year. ATLAS and CMS will work…

Plagiarism is the most sincere form of flattery, they say (or rather, this is said of imitation). In arts - literature, music, painting - it can at times be tolerated, as an artist might want to take inspiration from others, elaborate on an idea, or give it a different twist. In art it is the realization of the idea which matters. As opposed to that, in scientific publications plagiarism is almost univocally bad, as what it refers to is not the copying of an idea: we always fruitfully and guiltlessly copy ideas in our scientific work. Plagiarism in scientific publications concerns the direct…

The brakes on your car, the lift in the mechanics shop and standard construction machinery such as front end loaders,  back hoes, and bull dozers all require hydraulics instrumentation to perform their function.  In addition to this, all sorts of industrial cutters, presses, folders and a substantial amount of manufacturing machinery depend on hydraulics.  Hydraulic technology is pretty important to our standard of living seeing as how we depend on it in so many ways to perform many tasks for which we either directly or indirectly rely upon. Hydraulic technology largely is…

Sometimes I think I am really lucky to have grown convinced that the Standard Model will not be broken by LHC results. It gives me peace of mind, detachment, and the opportunity to look at every new result found in disagreement with predictions with the right spirit - the "what's wrong with it ?" attitude that every physicist should have in his or her genes.The other day CMS put the word "end on an issue started one year ago, when ATLAS and CMS measured cross sections for WW production that seemed suspiciously high with respect to electroweak predictions. Was there an extra source of W boson…

When most people think of quantum mechanics they think of Schroedinger's cat, a thought experiment describing a cat inside a closed box, that may be either dead or alive. Only when the classical physics world enters the box do we know. But what is the tipping-point between that cat's life and death, when does quantum behavior give way to classical physics? Where, on the small scale, is Schroedinger's cat small enough size to be perceived as being both alive and dead at the same time? A new study in Physical Review Letters has an answer, thanks to a fiber-based nonlinear process that…