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A Chess Study Requiring Backpropagation

The following position is a win for white. But how?It seems like white is able to grab a knight...

Co-Design Of Scientific Experiments

Next Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, you will find a new bulky paper in the arXiv. Titled "On...

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...

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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 Say Of The Week - What Is The Higgs And Why Do We Need It

The Say Of The Week - What Is The Higgs And Why Do We Need It

Oct 11 2011 | comment(s)

"We consider the scattering of charged W bosons [...] the sum of all diagrams still diverges as s/Mw^2. Heavy leptons cannot help us, so the only solution is to introduce a scalar particle which cancels these residual divergences [...] Here, h is just the Higgs particle. If we had not previously introduced it to generate the heavy boson masses, we would have been forced to invent it now to guarantee renormalizability [...] Higgs particles have so far eluded experimental searches [...] one might speculate that they do not exist as elementary fields, adn the higgs "particle" we have introduced actually corresponds to a more complex object [...]"

F. Halzen and A.D. Martin, "Quarks and Leptons", J.Wiley&sons 1984, p.344.
Tamburini: Neutrinos Are Majorana Particles, Relativity Is OK

Tamburini: Neutrinos Are Majorana Particles, Relativity Is OK

Oct 10 2011 | comment(s)

Fabrizio Tamburini (left) is an old friend - I have known him since 1976, when we both used to attend the gatherings of the newborn Associazione Astrofili Veneziani, at the Lido of Venice. The love for astronomy had brought us together, but we took different paths in our scientific activities. Fabrizio remained maybe more faithful to his old love for the universe, and is now a well-known and respected astrophysicist, who studies original ideas in the physics of photon propagation and more. I repeatedly invited him to write about his research here, but so far he has not accepted, mainly for lack of time... But I am sure he will soon.
A Meteor Storm Tonight: Watch The Draconids!

A Meteor Storm Tonight: Watch The Draconids!

Oct 08 2011 | comment(s)

The Draconids (also called Giacobinids) are a meteor shower associated to comet Giacobini-Zinner (see below for a 100-year-old picture of the comet). While most years this shower passes unnoticed to all but few professionals and experts amateurs, yielding only very few meteors in the nights between October 6th and 10th, every once in a while the Draconids do put up a real show, producing hundreds, or even thousands of meteor streaks per hour in clear skies.
On Wearing Two Hats - Your Input Appreciated

On Wearing Two Hats - Your Input Appreciated

Oct 06 2011 | comment(s)

One of the issues that emerged in the discussion of whether researchers should be bloggers is the fact that it is always dangerous to wear multiple "hats", i.e. carrying multiple responsibilities which may sometimes come in conflict with one another.

Wearing two hats

Of course this is a very common and old problem. I am indebted to Jim S.M., who sent me a few excerpts from Churchill's autobiography, which are very relevant to the issue besides being quite amusing:
Should Researchers Blog? Should Their Employers Encourage Them?

Should Researchers Blog? Should Their Employers Encourage Them?

Oct 04 2011 | comment(s)

Tomorrow I will fly to Frascati, where are the headquarters of INFN, the italian institute for nuclear physics. I will attend to an event there, called "Incontri di Fisica" (Physics meetings), where high-school teachers meet researchers and receive training, as well as discuss ways to improve science education and popularization in schools and outside.

I will be discussing the subject of "Science popularization with blogs" on Wednesday afternoon and then, two days later, I will be the last speaker with another short talk, where I will try to summarize some ideas on the matter. And you might help for this latter presentation.
A Mandatory Link

A Mandatory Link

Sep 30 2011 | comment(s)

Just a link you cannot miss:

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/tevatron/milestones/interactive-timeline.html