Dreaming Of Torsional Building Oscillations During An Earthquake

Oct 18 2012 | 3 comment(s)

I had a dream. So what, we all do. Well, this was particular, because I remember all of it well, and because it involved a very interesting situation. I was at Fermilab, in an office on a top-level floor of a tall building, when a powerful earthquake hit.

Scandal! Scientist Makes Honest Mistake, Humbly Retracts Supersolidity Result

Oct 16 2012 | 7 comment(s)

You may have heard of superfluids and superconductors, so why not supersolids? In 2004 Moses Chan and Eunseong Kim thought they had discovered that super-cooled helium ice could essentially walk through walls – a defining characteristic of a supersolid.

The experiment was to make a cylinder with tiny nanopores in its walls, fill the pores with solid helium ice, suspend the cylinder from a torsional spring, and then give it a little twist. Like a kid on a swing set, the cylinder started rotating back and forth, with a frequency depending on its mass. As they supercooled the cylinder even further, they saw that the oscillation frequency changed, as if it had less mass!

A Still Better Analogy To Explain Naturalness

Oct 15 2012 | 4 comment(s)

See, this is what I really like of a blog: when readers contribute significantly!

Richard Feynman's Functional Integral 3 - Electromagnetism

Oct 13 2012 | 0 comment(s)

This is the third part of a ten-part post on the foundation of our understanding of high energy physics, which is Richard Feynman's functional integral.

Flat Quantum Physics

Oct 12 2012 | 2 comment(s)

Quantum physics uses a parameter space that is curved. It is possible to cure this situation by converting the quantum state functions to distributions that have a flat parameter space.

Let ψ(q) be a quaternionic probability amplitude distribution (QPAD). ψ(q) can be used as a quantum state function of a particle. It can affect its own parameter space. It does that when it couples to a second QPAD. That is why its parameter space is curved.

Power And Limits Of The Analogy In Particle Physics

Oct 12 2012 | 9 comment(s)

Yesterday I spent a very interesting day at Comunicare Fisica 2012, a conference held in TORINO which brought together researchers, high-school teachers, journalists and other professionals working in the field of the popularization of science. The session in the afternoon dealt with the use of the web 2.0, and of course among the topics discussed in the talks was the use of blogs.

Did God Pick Quantum Physics To Protect Us From Evil Scientists?

Oct 12 2012 | 41 comment(s)

Science based creationism has arrived and is fashionable: Established academics and NASA scientists claim that evolution is merely a deception, the fossil record planted; darlings of “new-atheists” get away with basically saying that the universe is made for humans; arXiv is not above promoting considerations of we-are-in-a-simulation scenarios that are hidden variable realities blatantly inconsistent with quantum mechanics.

Acknowledged!

Oct 11 2012 | 3 comment(s)

This is just to report that I feel greatly honoured to be cited on top of the acknowledgements section of the new paper by Dimitri Nanopoulos and colleagues.

I hope I will be able to review the paper for you here soon. The title ("Primordial Synthesis: F-SU(5) SUSY Multijets, 140-150 GeV LSP, Proton and Rare Decays, 125 GeV Higgs Boson, and WMAP7") promises a lot...

Below is a clip of the "acknowledgement" of my contribution (just a very pleasant chat with Dimitri in Athens last August, and little more).

CMS Vs ATLAS On Dijet Resonances: Who Wins ?

Oct 11 2012 | 0 comment(s)

Two papers describing results of searches for high-mass resonances decaying into jet pairs have appeared on the arxiv this week. They are authored by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations, and they both report lower limits on the mass of hypothetical particles predicted by several new physics signatures. Both collaborations base their results on the analysis of their full 2011 datasets.

Finally, Schrodinger's Cat Hits A Nobel!

Oct 09 2012 | 4 comment(s)

Well, kind of. David Wineland and Serge Haroche have not endangered any living beings. That is to say: probably not in their physics experiments.

Yet, although they stayed at a safe distance from bringing life form into quantum superposition, both physicists have thoroughly explored the schizophrenic world of the quantum, and opened the door to the direct observation and manipulation of quantum superpositions. By cleverly exploiting the fundamental interaction between light and matter, the two quantum optics experts have managed to pull off a range of experiments in which Schrödinger's cat states lead to bizarre results.

Physics