Fake Banner
The Strange Case Of The Monotonous Running Average

These days I am putting the finishing touches on a hybrid algorithm that optimizes a system (a...

Turning 60

Strange how time goes by. And strange I would say that, since I know time does not flow, it is...

On The Illusion Of Time And The Strange Economy Of Existence

I recently listened again to Richard Feynman explaining why the flowing of time is probably an...

RIP - Hans Jensen

Today I was saddened to hear of the passing of Hans Jensen, a physicist and former colleague in...

User picture.
picture for Hank Campbellpicture for Patrick Lockerbypicture for Heidi Hendersonpicture for Bente Lilja Byepicture for Sascha Vongehrpicture for Johannes Koelman
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 »

 Blogroll
Why I Have The Right To Be Pissed Off By The Paris Terrorist Attack, And Maybe You Do Not

Why I Have The Right To Be Pissed Off By The Paris Terrorist Attack, And Maybe You Do Not

Jan 09 2015 | comment(s)

The terrorist attack of two days ago in Paris to the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo left most of us hit hard by the blow to freedom of the press and freedom of thought, which are among that core set of rights on which we have built our society and which we feel we really cannot give up.

I confess I have never unfolded a copy of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper, but I am quite familiar with the work of Wolinski, the 80-year-old cartoonist, who perished in the attack along with his colleagues. I liked his sense of humor and his cartoons a lot, and I am quite pissed off by those two morons taking that away from me.
David Orban Guest Post: On Becoming A Cyborg

David Orban Guest Post: On Becoming A Cyborg

Jan 04 2015 | comment(s)

The following is a guest post by David Orban, CEO at Dotsub, faculty and advisor at Singularity University, and trustee of Network Society Research.

When I implanted an NFC chip in my left hand about two months ago at the Singularity University Summit Europe in Amsterdam, I followed the tradition of our species that a hundred thousand years or more ago decided to become a cyborg.

The Graph Of The Week - 10th Order Vertex Diagrams

The Graph Of The Week - 10th Order Vertex Diagrams

Dec 30 2014 | comment(s)

Apologizing for the silence of last week, due not so much to Christmas holidays but to my working around the clock to write a grant proposal, I wish to show you today a graph which describes very well the complexities of modern day frontier theoretical calculations. That graph is the collection of some of the Feynman diagrams that have to be calculated in order to evaluate a property of the electron called its "anomalous magnetic moment".
Guest Post: Ben Allanach, On Open Access

Guest Post: Ben Allanach, On Open Access

Dec 19 2014 | comment(s)

Ben Allanach, guest blogger, is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. He is grumpy about the way that public funds are being unnecessarily directed to scientific publishing houses. So I am offering this space to him to hear what he has to say about that...

New Limits On VY Production From CDF: Good, But Also Disappointing

New Limits On VY Production From CDF: Good, But Also Disappointing

Dec 17 2014 | comment(s)

Alas, for once I must say I am not completely happy of one new result by the CDF collaboration - the experiment to which I devoted 18 years of my research time, and where I learned almost everything I know about experimental particle physics.
The Plot Of The Week: Higgs Decays To WW In ATLAS

The Plot Of The Week: Higgs Decays To WW In ATLAS

Dec 13 2014 | comment(s)

The latest paper by the ATLAS Collaboration is a very detailed report of the search for Higgs boson decays to W boson pairs in Run 1 data. The H->WW* process contributes significantly to the total bounty of Higgs boson candidates that the two CERN experiments have been able to collect in the 2011 7-TeV and 2012 8-TeV proton-proton collisions, but the presence of neutrinos in the final state prevents the clean reconstruction of an invariant mass peak, hence the WW* final state has remained a bit "in the shadows" with respect to the cherished ZZ* and gamma-gamma final states.