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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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I was invited to give a talk and participate in a round table, at a conference on Physics communication in Frascati, a small town near Rome where the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics has its headquarters. The conference also has a poster session, so I produced a simple poster to advertise this site.

Here is the poster (in italian -sorry). The full-sized version is 10 Mbytes so I will avoid posting it here.



Below is a quick-and-dirty translation of what I write in a few of the frames:
Lesson of the day: if the moderator falls asleep, the loquacious speaker will take advantage of it and will not stop talking. Net result: the coffee break remains a chimeric dream.
Today I am attending a conference on the communication of Physics, at Frascati. They invited me there to present this blog, and discuss my experience with it. I spent last night trying to put together something meaningful, and I am now approximately satisfied with the result.

While I was preparing my slides (which include a online navigation in the site), it occurred to me that it has been a long time since I last played the "top searches" game. If you own a web site, you can play it too: it consists in finding combinations of words that, input in the google search window, will get one of your pages as the first hit.
"I am too shy to express my sexual needs, except over the phone to people I don't know"

Garry Shandling
In two years the Higgs boson will be close to discovery, and its mass already known, or the particle will be already in the trash bin. That is the single line which best summarizes the scenarios I depicted yesterday, in the concluding slides of a seminar I gave at IFIC, in beautiful Valencia (below, placa de la Virgen on a pleasant evening, taken with my iphone).
While answering a comment in another recent post, I was struck by a thought I have had other times, but which I tend to remove. This is about the fact that it is surprisingly hard to produce a paper in a large experimental collaboration in high-energy physics. The amount of work required to put together a sound analysis of collider data is quite sizable, and the pains of going through the internal review process may last months, when not a year or even longer.

Of course it is nice to have the