# Schroedinger's Burlesque 2.0

May 09 2011 | 7 comment(s)

Recently scientifically 2.0 so topical Schrödinger's cat jumped into being in the 1935 three-part article (in German) in Die Naturwissenschaften, just at the end of part one:
Man kann auch ganz burleske Fälle konstruieren. Eine Katze wird in eine Stahlkammer gesperrt, zusammen mit folgender Höllenmaschine …

# Excess ? What Excess ? ATLAS Clarifies.

May 08 2011 | 25 comment(s)

In a display of nonchalance that should teach us a thing or two, the ATLAS collaboration has put an end to the Easter Higgs Rumour (EHR), which brought the blogosphere in an excited state for at least a week, and experimentalists and theorists for even more time. They did so by publishing a very narrow-focused document, totaling less than five pages, where they discuss the backgrounds to Higgs boson decays in the diphoton final state.

# Guess The Plot - Chapter 2

May 06 2011 | 12 comment(s)

My attempt at stimulating your curiosity with a scientific graph last time worked quite well, and I want to try it again. This time, however, you should not consider yourself eligible to participate if you are an experimental particle physicist (or in the process of becoming one). That's because I want to "lower the bar" a little, allowing non-experts in the game, and an experimentalist in HEP should recognize what this figure is quite easily. If you are a theorist, I am not sure -today's plot might be instantaneous for you to recognize, or not easy, depending on what you work on. I'll take Lubos as a testing ground. Lubos ?

# No Comment On The Latest Rumor

May 04 2011 | 55 comment(s)

As many of you know, I expressed here my strong doubts that the rumoured Higgs signal found by members of the ATLAS collaboration in the two-photon final state was due to a real particle, and went as far as to bet 2:1 against it (you can take the bet by just writing in the comments thread, but you must be a well-known individual who has a reputation in physics if you want to be taken seriously).

# Sexy Standard Model Symmetries 2: Experimental Corrections

May 02 2011 | 5 comment(s)

Thanks to all that read my previous post, “Sexy Standard Model Symmetries”. Most probably did not notice quite a few technical exchanges between David Halliday and myself. I was pretty darn sure I had a way to represent electroweak symmetry using quaternions. David was pretty darn sure I did not. Such exchanges can go on for some time, unless one party finally sees that they were in fact wrong on the facts. That doesn’t happen often. It did happen here, and I was the one who was wrong. This blog will go into my mistakes, and generate a few more animations which may open up new views.

# The Say Of The Week

May 02 2011 | 4 comment(s)

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."

R. Feynman

# If Schrödinger Cats All Die, Do The Alive Ones Go To Hell?

May 01 2011 | 28 comment(s)

Schrödinger’s cat is in a quantum superposition of two states, namely |Dead> and |Alive>. If we open the box and find the cat dead, where is the living one? You all know the answer: In the ‘parallel universe’ where I pull the cat out alive. Let me add a twist that only a true cat hater can come up with.

$ds^2=-dt^2+a^{2}(t)\left[\frac{dr^2}{1-kr^2}+r^2d\theta^2+r^2Sin^2(\theta)d\phi^2 \right]$

# The big bang was not an Explosion: However an explosion is a metaphor for what the big bang was.

May 01 2011 | 49 comment(s)

The big bang was given it's name by Fred Hoyle, in order to make the theory sound absurd.  He metaphorically called it an explosion.   In the mist of time most people even some scientist lost the metaphor part of that and thought of it as an explosion.  Others then stopped using the metaphor because it confused people.
This is more of an entry about the use of language than physics.  That said here is the shortest possible argument for why the big bang was not an explosion for anyone who needs convincing:

Explosions are the free expansion of material from higher, pressure, temperature and density to lower pressure, temperature and density in a short amount of time.

# Quantum Reflections

Apr 29 2011 | 7 comment(s)

In his article “The World Is Not Woven From Real Stuff” Sascha Vongehr raised the important matter of quantum physics and our perception of the natural world.

He argued that “the feeling that facts are just out there in a really existing world, is strictly wrong” and asked “However, how can a layperson best grasp that direct realism is wrong?”

The reader was then taken through the mental exercise of considering how familiar objects such as billiard balls behave, that is, they lose motion. This was used to demonstrate that “real things” cannot be made of smaller things inside smaller things because eventually “real stuff out of smaller real stuff slows down and collapses into a motionless heap over time.”

# A Simple Derivation Of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

Apr 27 2011 | 18 comment(s)

In his recent blog post "The World Is Not Woven From Real Stuff", Sascha Vongehr wrote:
Some merely claim that we need quantum mechanics so that the electron does not fall into the atom’s nucleus. Any classical electric charge would spiral into the atom's nucleus. The material that they make up would collapse.... Well, how convincing is this argument? Does it convince you? It would not convince me without a severe dose of already knowing at least a bunch of electromagnetism. Why could there not be some other, more intuitive explanation of why atoms do not collapse?