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Travel With Two Infants

The other day I traveled with Kalliopi and our two newborns to Padova from Lulea. After six full...

A Nice Little Combination

Although I have long retired from serious chess tournaments (they take too much time, a luxury...

The Strange Case Of The Monotonous Running Average

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Turning 60

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Tommaso DorigoRSS Feed of this column.

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

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The third "Machine Learning for Jets" workshop is ongoing these days at the Kimmel centre of New York University, a nice venue overlooking Washington Square park in downtown Manhattan. I came to attend it and remain up-to-date with the most advanced new algorithms that are been used for research in collider physics, as I have done last year. The workshop is really well organized and all talks are quite interesting, so this is definitely a good time investment for me.

What hurts you is not what you don't know, but those mistaken assumptions which "everyone knows to be true".
[The following text is courtesy Andras Kovacs - T.D.]
Although you probably did not notice, this blog has been inactive during the past three weeks. The reason is simple: I took a break, treating myself to a 24-day trip to Thailand and the Philippines. Anticipating that many of the places I would visit would offer non-existent or very bad internet connection, I decided that it was going to be frustrating to pretend I could blog during the trip, and just left my laptop at home (or rather, in the Bangkok hotel which I first visited for a conference, before leaving for the tour).
I am currently in Bangkok, where the final 2019 meeting of the CMS collaboration started today. The meeting was inaugurated this morning with an official visit of Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, giving me the rare opportunity to miss an appointment with a princess, something that was still missing from my repertoire. Checked now. 
Last month the Museum of Natural History of Venice hosted, in the last room of the exhibit called "room of the cetaceans" (where a large skeleton of a whale hangs from the ceiling), an exhibit of artwork produced by high-school students from the Venice area. The event, which belongs to the "Art and Science across Italy" project, was the culminating point of a series of lectures on particle physics, on science in art, and related topics which involved the students and INFN personnel from the Padova section.
Is there a fifth force of Nature, beyond the four we know about ? This question has been around ever since it was understood that 
1 - electric charges attract and repel, and influence one another, due to the action of the electromagnetic force;


2 - hadronic matter is held together by the strong force;


3 - quarks transmute into other quarks due to the action of the weak force (and leptons do that too);


4 - bodies carrying mass feel attracted to one another, although very weakly, by the gravitational force.