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Enrico Stomeo - A Lifelong Passion For Meteor Studies

I was reached this evening by the news of the passing of a dear friend, Enrico Stomeo. Enrico was...

Surviving Queues: 1 - At The Airport

Nobody likes to wait in line. Whether you are sitting in your car waiting to reach the toll booths...

Choosing Your Bets: The Selection Bias

As some of the long-time readers of this blog know, in this column I have occasionally discussed...

Have A Master In Science, Want A Post-Doc Position Directly?

Do you have a master in Science, and want to start a Post-Doc position directly? You can have it...

Tommaso Dorigo

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 »

The Quote Of The Week - Probability Does Not Exist !

Jun 03 2013 | comment(s)

"The abandonment of superstitious beliefs about the existence of Phlogiston, the Cosmic Ether, Absolute Space and Time, ... , or Fairies and Witches, was an essential step along the road to scientific thinking. Probability, too, if regarded as something endowed with some kind of objective existence, is no less a misleading misconception, an illusory attempt to exteriorize or materialize our true probabilistic beliefs."

Bruno De Finetti

10. Manipulate The Data

May 31 2013 | comment(s)

[The title of this article comes from a T-shirt with ten advices on what to do when everything else fails]

It has always surprised me to realize how confident we physicists are of the good faith of our colleagues. We may argue endlessly over one graph or result, getting to the point of publically casting doubts on the dexterity or intelligence of our peers (yes, I've seen that), but we never seem to doubt -privately or otherwise- their scientific integrity.

The Quote Of The Week - A Dark Matter Cusp At The Galactic Center ?

May 28 2013 | comment(s)

"The cusp in the dark matter distribution required to explain the recently found excess in the gamma-ray spectrum at energies of 130 GeV in terms of the dark matter annihilations cannot survive the tidal forces if it is offset by 1.5° from the Galactic center as suggested by observations."

Dmitry Gorbunov, Peter Tinjakov, "On the offset of a DM Cusp and the interpretation of the 130 GeV line as a DM signal", Arxiv:1212.0488

ATLAS Vs CMS Higgs Results: Which Experiment Has More Sensitivity ?

May 24 2013 | comment(s)

"Oh Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind ?"

Good old Shelley inspired me to start today's article with the above verse, taken from his magnificent "Ode to the West Wind". With the weather we are experiencing these days in Geneva and northern Italy, I found it a relieving thought...

So, winter conferences are over, and summer ones are still far away. This is therefore a nice moment to try an assessment on the quality of the results that the two competing CERN experiments have produced on the study of the Higgs boson. Why ? Because we are not going to have to change our conclusions in a short time scale caused by a result about to be published.

How to compare the results

Is Cold Fusion For Real?!

May 20 2013 | comment(s)

The results of a third-party investigation of Rossi's E-CAT reactor have appeared on the Cornell arxiv, and the conclusions of the tests are at the very least startling:

The Quote Of The Week - "No New Physics" Now Conceivable

May 17 2013 | comment(s)

"New Physics can appear at any moment but it is now conceivable that no new physics will show up at the LHC"

Guido Altarelli, LHC Nobel Symposium, May 15th 2013

It is funny reading the above quote if you are one who "conceived" that the LHC could find no new physics 7 years ago, as demonstrated by where I put my money...