FAQ | Register Now | Sign In

Subscribe to the newsletter

[x]

Stay in touch with the scientific world!

Letter To A Demanding PhD Supervisor

A fundamental component of my research work is the close collaboration with a large number of scientists...

Letter To A Future AGI

I am writing this letter in the belief that the development of an artificial general intelligence...

A Great Year For Experiment Design

While 2025 will arguably not be remembered as a very positive year for humankind, for many reasons...

Living At The Polar Circle

Since 2022, when I got invited for a keynote talk at a Deep Learning school, I have been visiting...

Tommaso Dorigo

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

Script Of The TEDx Talk

Sep 26 2011 | comment(s)

The organizers of TEDx Flanders did produce in a very timely manner very professional videos of the event, so you can follow offline the talks, including mine. However, what I said is not exactly what I had planned to say. Further, you might not want to spend your time looking at a recording. So for the record, I am pasting here my unamended script. Later on I will also post here the slides I showed while talking, which cannot be seen in the video.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Thousands of physicists, engineers, computer scientists, modern-age seers have worked at it for the last twenty years.

Video of my talk at TEDx Flanders

Sep 25 2011 | comment(s)

The TEDx crew has been quite fast to make available on youtube the video of the presentation I gave together with Peter Woit in Antwerp yesterday. You can give a look at it here.

Unfortunately the slides are not simultaneously available, but I will fix that by pasting them here.

For now, just the video. Enjoy!

(By the way, my name has been misspelled in the title in a less than conventional way this time - but they're working to fix it).

TEDx, the Higgs, and Whiskey

Sep 25 2011 | comment(s)

Yesterday's event at TEDx in Antwerp, in the gorgeous Flemish Opera, was followed by an enthusiastic audience of 1000. I spoke in the afternoon and tried to explain what it is that we do at CERN with these protons and the complicated machines we use. I must say I had never spoken in front of such a large audience (although I had played the fourth Brandemburg concerto by Bach a few times in front of similar numbers, but that was 30 years ago), and my heart rate went to about 160 for the whole duration of my speech. I went blank a couple of times (forgot the succession of things I wanted to say from my script, that is), but nobody noticed, and it was a great performance according to the listeners and the organizers.

New Results From Opera Due Tomorrow

Sep 22 2011 | comment(s)

So, as I had announced a bit prematurely three days ago, the Opera experiment is about to release the results of a measurement that is bound to stir endless discussions.

The Say Of The Week - Excluding The Higgs

Sep 22 2011 | comment(s)

"Excluding wrong Higgs boson mass hypotheses is starting to feel like explaining how to make the chocolate mousse by compiling a list of all the wrong ingredients."

T. D., TEDx Flanders, Sept. 24th 2011

The Plot Of The Week - Single Top Loud And Clear

Sep 20 2011 | comment(s)

A well-known HEP rule says that yesterday's searched new processes will be tomorrow's annoying irreducible backgrounds; but since I am an optimist, I always see the glass half-full and feel compelled to add that today they are pleasing high-statistics signals. Take single top quark production: the Tevatron experimentalists (you can include me in the lot) banged their head for a decade trying to measure it; they finally succeeded, but the signal always remained a small excess of events in the tail of a highly-refined multi-variable discriminator.