UPDATE: what a difference a small typo makes! In the report below I claimed that the CDF top mass measurement was yet to be stripped of the record of being the most precise in the world, given that the total uncertainty on the mass was 1.01 GeV, while the newest CMS result has a total error of 1.07 GeV... I however realized this morning that the total CDF uncertainty of the quoted measurement is 1.10, not 1.01 ! So the CMS result mentioned at the bottom of this article is indeed the most precise single measurement in the world of the top quark mass !
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In a few weeks I will speak in Torino, Italy at
Comunicare Fisica 2012, a conference devoted to the communication of Physics in the media, in schools, through web sites, etcetera. And
I need your help !Let me explain. I have submitted an abstract which reads as follows:
If you chance to take part in a conversation with people arguing that they do not want their tax money to go into building huge science gadgets whose utility for humanity is doubtful and null to them in particular, you have better be equipped with a sound way to shut their mouth.
Of course, one way is to explain with patience the importance of basic science, the investment in the future, etcetera. You might like to insert well-learned quotes, such as "Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza" ("You were not made to live like beasts, but to follow virtue and knowledge" - Ulysses in Dante Alighieri's "Inferno"). Well, good luck with that - I bet your argument will not go very far with the kind of opposition I have in mind.
In the last few days CMS released four new publications, which you can download from the Cornell arxiv site. These are exquisite new measurements in the fields of top physics, exotica searches, and higgs physics, and so I thought I would give you the coordinates here, and comment briefly on the first result in the list:
paper 1,
paper 2,
paper 3,
paper 4.
At this link you can find the video of an interview I gave for Festivaletteratura Mantova (the literature festival held last week). I discuss science outreach, the media, the discovery of the Higgs boson and its impact on laypersons, and a more technical issue about the origin of mass. Unfortunately the interview is longish and I do not know whether I'll find the stamina to produce a writeup in English for this site. We'll see...
It sometimes happens that my comments in the threads of my own blog get long and detailed (do not take this as me boasting about anything - it is just a fact). When that happens, I reason that they deserve to be promoted to a post by themselves, because threads are read by way fewer readers, and some of them might thus lose some interesting bit.
Because of the above I am (re)posting the text below, which explains some "a priori" reasons why quarks come with fractional electric charges in multiples of one third, why the sum of charges of fermions in one family nullify, and why our universe chose to have quarks of three colours. Beware, some non-trivial concepts of quantum field theory are needed, but I will try to make this as painless as possible (but not more).
Move Over - The Talk I Will Not Give
Shaping The Future Of AI For Fundamental Physics
On Rating Universities
Goodbye Peter Higgs, And Thanks For The Boson
