Physics

Dreaming Of Torsional Building Oscillations During An Earthquake

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. ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 18 2012 - 11:11am

The Weird Grey Area Between Primordial Plasma And Ordinary Matter

Physicists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) recently observed first glimpses of a possible boundary separating ordinary nuclear matter, composed of protons and neutrons we know today, from the odd, seething soup of their constituent quarks and ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 18 2012 - 5:54pm

The Quote of the Week

"The problem of averaging data containing discrepant values is nicely discussed in Ref. x [...] It is difficult to develop a procedure that handles simultaneously in a reasonable way two basic types of situations: (a) data that lie apart from the mai ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 19 2012 - 11:20am

GEM Unification Rescinded, Officially

Claims on the Internet live on indefinitely.  I claimed to have found a testable candidate to unify gravity with the three other fundamental forces of Nature.  Thanks to sometimes trying efforts on this Science20 blog, I now have reasons why that claim was ...

Blog Post - Doug Sweetser - Oct 23 2012 - 3:56pm

Quantum Casino- Less Than Zero Chance

Human thought has led to a variety of remarkable and profound insights. Many of these insights are well established and have been embraced by a significant portion of the global population. The earth being round, the atomistic nature of matter, our unremar ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Oct 24 2012 - 1:33pm

Recent CMS Results

Let me write here a short note-just for the record- to mention a proceedings paper I wrote for the ICFP 2012 conference. I spoke in Crete last June about the latest results of the CMS experiment, but in the meantime a lot happened-the Higgs boson discovery ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 26 2012 - 9:35am

Hidden Influence Inequality- Bell's Inequality With Less Drama

Outside the very large and the very small, the universe is rather easy to understand in modern times.  At the very large, we have to try and make dark matter and dark energy work.  At the very small,  quantum predictions challenge our best understanding ab ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 5 2012 - 3:06am

Convicting Scientists For Miscommunicating Risk: What We Should Focus On

As I reported in a post a few days ago, the Italian sentencing of seven scientists to 6-years imprisonment for their misassessment of the risks of the population of L'Aquila, soon thereafter struck by a powerful earthquake which killed 309 and injured ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 29 2012 - 1:28pm

The Multiverse

Alan Guth, the discoverer of cosmic inflation, gave a talk at MIT on November 1, which convinced me, a natural skeptic about these issues, that the multiverse may very well exist. Two routes to the multiverse were never to my liking. One is "Many Worl ...

Article - Amir D. Aczel - Nov 5 2012 - 9:19pm

Black Hole In Our Backyard?

Scaling down the observable universe to make it fit within our moon's orbit, the Milky Way gets reduced to a village. We live close to the edge of this village, at a comfortable distance from the central marketplace, where a giant black hole is known ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Nov 6 2012 - 10:37pm