Quantum entanglement is a central principle of quantum physics - the science of sub-atomic particles. Multiple particles, such as photons, are connected with each other even when they are very far apart and what happens to one particle can have an effect on the other one at the same moment, even though these effects cannot be used to send information faster than light.

In 1935, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, referred to in the shorthand form EPR today, published a thought experiment designed to show that quantum mechanics, by itself, is not sufficient to describe reality. 

So, is it or is it not possible? Can black holes be split?

In my last blog I demonstrated that the laws of thermodynamics forbid the splitting of a single black hole. However, I also demonstrated the same laws don't forbid the splitting of a pair of black holes into many.

This leaves the door wide open for splitting black holes by smashing them together.

Or does it?

I hereby announce (create) a truly "next level" and I am sure inspiring challenge to all serious scientific philosophical thinkers who from their heart desire to participate in an honest, advanced attack on the fundamental questions that is not just another cycle of inflated sophistication or self-marketing.  Do you have some sort of understanding of our postmodern condition at the fundamental cutting edge of science and philosophy and the difficulties that emerged through it yet refuse to give up on participating in a somehow trustworthy social construction of higher level insight?  Are you disappointed with the usual contests (e.g.

UPDATE: for more on this, I only now realize that my friend at Resonaances had written about it yesterday... It is nice to see that he agrees with my conclusions, anyway. Also Peter has news on it, and as usual additional links...

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My ATLAS colleagues will have to pardon me for the slightly sensationalistic title of this article, but indeed the question is one which many inside and outside CERN are asking themselves upon looking into the new public material of ATLAS Higgs boson searches using the 2011 dataset in conjunction with the first part of 2012 data.

The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is using X-rays to measure, in atomic detail, a key process at work in extreme plasmas like those found in stars, the rims of black holes and other massive cosmic phenomena.

This is a post about basics. That's because I think a point needs to be made which is surprisingly not as well-known as its elementary nature would have you guess.

Correlation -in its most used version, due to Pearson- is a measure of how two quantities can be observed to be in linear dependence on one another. It is a very common quantity to report the results of scientific studies, particularly but not exclusively in the social sciences. Researchers try to evidence the presence of a correlation between two phenomena as a preliminary step to investigating whether one can be the cause of the other.

In High-Energy Physics the small p-value of an observation may be the first hint of a discovery about to be made. Here by p-value I just mean the probability, just to be fancy (or brief). Because we rely on the assessment of the rarity of observations to decide whether we have discovered something or not, we physicists are (or should be) really careful with p-values. Today's article aims at demonstrating how easy it is to be carried away into giving more relevance to an observation than we should.