Physics

Weighted Averages "A' La PDG"

The new PDG- a full-size copy of the glorious "Review of Particle Properties"- is on my desk since its arrival a few weeks ago, but only today did I get some time to browse it. It is always awesome to observe how much information is contained in ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 18 2013 - 5:37pm

Ben Kilminster: How The Universe Works- In 10 Sentences

Ben Kilminster is a friend and a distinguished colleague working for the CMS and CDF experiments. Besides being a long-time higgs hunter, having sought that particle for over a decade in the two mentioned experiments, Ben is a veteran of science outreach ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 19 2013 - 11:09am

Guess the Plot 11

It has been a while since the last time I posted the last riddle of this series. It was fun though, so upon seeing the graph below I immediately decided I would use it here, to let you guess what it is about. Please use the comments thread to provide your ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 21 2013 - 11:12am

Turning Popper Around To Make Everett An Appendix To Einstein

A century ago, “ past ” and “ future ”, previously strictly apart, mixed up and merged.   Temporal terminology improved.   Today, not actualized quantum states, that is merely “ possible ” alternatives, objectively “ exist ” (are real) when they interfere ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Jan 23 2013 - 10:33am

Improved Upper Limits On Rare B_s Decays By DZERO

The DZERO collaboration has released last week the result of their search for the rare decay of B_s mesons into muon pairs, based on the full statistics of proton-antiproton collisions acquired during Run II- a total of 10.4 inverse femtobarns of integrate ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 25 2013 - 10:56am

Tevatron Higgs Sensitivity: Did We Lie In 1999?

Today the arxiv features the paper describing the final word by the CDF experiment on its searches for the standard model Higgs boson. This paper supersedes previous ones describing searches performed in partial datasets and including only a subset of the ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 29 2013 - 12:20pm

On The CMS Higgs Video, Bias And Variance

Nowadays whenever I set out to write about CMS I turn on a self-censorship co-processor in the back of my mind, one which is instructed to check that all the sentences I write are completely free from any possible misinterpretation or slant that may cause ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 31 2013 - 8:24am

Maybe The Multiverse Created Probability To Explain The Multiverse

Ever since Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger simultaneously killed and did not kill his unfortunate cat, fellow scientists have been using quantum theory to explain and understand the nature of waves and particles. ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 6 2013 - 7:20pm

What's The Omega_b Mass? LHCb Confirms CDF, DZERO Way Off

The Omega_b particle is a quite peculiar baryon, made up by three heavy quarks: a b-quark, and two s-quarks. Because of this composition, where only down-type quarks appear, the phenomenology of the decay of this particle is really spectacular: both the b- ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 7 2013 - 11:02am

A never ending story

The history of the cosmos. In quaternionic physics one equation plays a major role. It is a mixture of a differential equation, a continuity equation and a coupling equation. Φ = ∇ ψ = m φ Here Φ, ψ and φ are continuous quaternionic distributions or more ...

Blog Post - Hans van Leunen - Feb 14 2013 - 7:11am