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Living At The Polar Circle

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Conferences Good And Bad, In A Profit-Driven Society

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Baby Steps In The Reinforcement Learning World

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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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Devotion To The Tevatron

Devotion To The Tevatron

Sep 30 2011 | comment(s)

I'm nostalgic tonight. The reason ? The Tevatron has finally stopped running, for good.

It's strange to find out one can mourn the shutdown of a synchrotron just as the passing away of an old friend, but that's more or less how I feel like tonight. And I am not even among the ones who can claim to have been around for the full duration of the machine's lifetime, like Giorgio Chiarelli - as Giorgio recounted here, he was there in the CDF control room when the first proton-antiproton beams collided the first time, in 1985.
Nando Ferroni Is New INFN President

Nando Ferroni Is New INFN President

Sep 30 2011 | comment(s)

Not yet official, but safe enough to be announced here: prof. Fernando Ferroni is the new INFN president. The charge will need to be confirmed by the Minister of Instruction and Research, Mariastella Gelmini (yes, the lady who said neutrinos travel in a 732 km long tunnel underground from CERN to Gran Sasso), but this is just a formal step.

Nando Ferroni is full professor at the University "La Sapienza" of Roma. He is an experimental particle physicist with a background in neutrino experiments (at CERN in the eighties) and collider physics (with the L3 experiment at LEP, and then with Babar at PEP2).
The Tevatron Shuts Down, Long Live The Tevatron!

The Tevatron Shuts Down, Long Live The Tevatron!

Sep 29 2011 | comment(s)

Tomorrow is the last day on duty. For twenty-six years the Tevatron collider, the four-mile-long accelerator of the Fermi laboratory in Batavia (IL), has provided the CDF and DZERO experiments with proton-antiproton collisions at 1.8 and then 1.96 Tera-electron-Volts, allowing the investigation of fundamental physics at the highest available energy.

I received today a very nice video which commemorates the Tevatron collider. The video was produced by a colleague, Rob Snihur, together with an artist friend of his, Maria Scileppi. I hope you like it! A text is also available on Maria's site.
Script Of The TEDx Talk

Script Of The TEDx Talk

Sep 26 2011 | comment(s)

The organizers of TEDx Flanders did produce in a very timely manner very professional videos of the event, so you can follow offline the talks, including mine. However, what I said is not exactly what I had planned to say. Further, you might not want to spend your time looking at a recording. So for the record, I am pasting here my unamended script. Later on I will also post here the slides I showed while talking, which cannot be seen in the video.

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Thousands of physicists, engineers, computer scientists, modern-age seers have worked at it for the last twenty years.
Video of my talk at TEDx Flanders

Video of my talk at TEDx Flanders

Sep 25 2011 | comment(s)

The TEDx crew has been quite fast to make available on youtube the video of the presentation I gave together with Peter Woit in Antwerp yesterday. You can give a look at it here.

Unfortunately the slides are not simultaneously available, but I will fix that by pasting them here.

For now, just the video. Enjoy!

(By the way, my name has been misspelled in the title in a less than conventional way this time - but they're working to fix it).

TEDx, the Higgs, and Whiskey

TEDx, the Higgs, and Whiskey

Sep 25 2011 | comment(s)

Yesterday's event at TEDx in Antwerp, in the gorgeous Flemish Opera, was followed by an enthusiastic audience of 1000. I spoke in the afternoon and tried to explain what it is that we do at CERN with these protons and the complicated machines we use. I must say I had never spoken in front of such a large audience (although I had played the fourth Brandemburg concerto by Bach a few times in front of similar numbers, but that was 30 years ago), and my heart rate went to about 160 for the whole duration of my speech. I went blank a couple of times (forgot the succession of things I wanted to say from my script, that is), but nobody noticed, and it was a great performance according to the listeners and the organizers.