Physics

The Journey to Presenting Relativization at the 2015 April APS Meeting. A Story of Quantum Gravity, and Airplanes.

O n April 11th 2015 I delivered a presentation on the subject of Quantum Gravity in which I questioned the basic assumption that quantum is more fundamental than relativity.  Relativization is the name for the approach I propose.  In a nutshell let us try ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Apr 14 2015 - 5:14pm

Guess the Plot

I used to post on this blog very abstruse graphs from time to time, asking readers to guess what they represented. I don't know why I stopped it- it is fun. So here is a very colourful graph for you today. You are asked to guess what it represents.  I ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 17 2015 - 8:33am

The Era Of The Atom

"The era of the atom" is a new book by Piero Martin and Alessandra Viola- for now the book is only printed in Italian (by Il Mulino), but I hope it will soon be translated in English. ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 19 2015 - 2:06pm

Project 8 And The Ghost In The Particle Machine

Neutrinos are among the more mysterious elementary particles in the universe: Billions of them pass through every cell of our bodies every second, yet these ghostly particles are incredibly difficult to detect, because they don’t appear to interact with or ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 22 2015 - 8:00am

Searching For The A Boson

Besides being a giant triumph of theoretical physics and the definitive seal on the correctness of the Standard Model-at least at the energies at which we are capable of investigating particle physics nowadays-, the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson by the ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 24 2015 - 1:39am

A Paper on Leptonic CP violation

I received from Ravi Kuchimanchi, the author of a paper to be published in Phys. Rev. D, the following summary, and am happy to share it here. The paper is available in the arxiv. Are laws of nature left-right symmetric?   ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 24 2015 - 2:00am

The Lead Zeppelin And Buoyancy

When a feather or a plastic bag or almost anything light is placed in water, these items will generally float.   This is easy to understand if you think of water being more dense than the other item.   If you put something heavier in water, it tends to si ...

Article - Robert Hayes - May 2 2015 - 8:22am

LHC: Nothing New Expected But One Deviation Can Change Everything

First collisions of protons at CERN's Large Hadron Collider are expected to start the first or second week of June. The LHC was restarted in early April after a two-year pause to upgrade the machine to operate at higher energies for a second three-yea ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 28 2015 - 1:28pm

The Quote of the Week: Who Called the Higgs Boson The Higgs Boson

"B.W. Lee also carries much of the responsibility for calling the Higgs boson the Higgs boson, mentioning repeatedly 'Higgs scalar fields' in a review talk at the International Conference on High-Energy Physics in 1972." J. Ellis, M.K. ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 29 2015 - 12:29pm

The difference between detectable, legal and dangerous exposures to radiation

Detecting ionizing radiation does not mean that a disaster has or will occur.  Detecting radiation is generally a good thing if the radiation is expected, intended or natural.  We and all living things on earth are naturally radioactive.  This is due prim ...

Blog Post - Robert Hayes - May 1 2015 - 10:15pm