Sadly, this morning Milla Baldo Ceolin passed away.
Milla was a volcanic physicist, and a fantastic professor. I had the pleasure of following her course of "Fisica Superiore" in the late eighties, and I remember her brilliant lessons, insightful and mind-broadening.
Milla was born in 1924, and graduated in Physics in 1951. In 1963 she was the first woman to become a professor in the University of Padova. Her research encompasses fifty years of subnuclear physics, and is especially centered on weak interactions. But in Padova, especially in the last two or three decades, her name was especially associated with neutrinos, the phenomenal particles at whose study her research was mostly aimed.
Do you remember the
multi-muon anomaly in CDF ? The matter was discussed with quite some detail in a
series of posts in this blog (back then at wordpress). In a nutshell, CDF could not explain their sample of events containing two muons, when these particles had a very large impact parameter (the impact parameter is the minimum distance of a trajectory from the interaction point: a large value indicates that the particle was produced elsewhere).
For you today here is a test of whether you shoud trust your intuition when confronted with an apparently simple problem. Incidentally, this article is the answer to
the "Guess The Plot" riddle I posted a few days ago here.
Suppose you are given two measurements of the same physical quantity. Make it something easy to visualize, such as the length of a stick. They tell you that when measured with method 1 the result was x1=10 cm, with a estimated uncertainty s1=0.1 cm, and when measured with method 2 the result was x2=11 cm, with estimated uncertainty s2=0.5cm. Here is a question for you today: What is your best guess of the length of the stick ?
Totally overshadowed by the news of the new Opera measurement of neutrino speeds, yesterday CERN officially released the combined result of ATLAS and CMS searches for the Higgs boson. The news has been given already in two prominent particle physics blogs (
Resonaances and
Not Even Wrong), so I think I am not obliged to do anything more than point you to those, who cover the matter quite accurately.
After a more careful reading of the paper, the listening to a seminar on the result, and some discussions, I can share with you a few more details on the Opera measurement.
The Arxiv apparently messed up and the new OPERA article on the neutrino speed measurement cannot be accessed there yet. However, you can get your copy
at this link. You will be prompted for the username and password, and you are invited to use "neuvel" for both. Enjoy!
Living At The Polar Circle
Conferences Good And Bad, In A Profit-Driven Society
USERN: 10 Years Of Non-Profit Action Supporting Science Education And Research
Baby Steps In The Reinforcement Learning World
