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Shaping The Future Of AI For Fundamental Physics

From April 30 to May 3 more than 300 researchers in fundamental physics will gather in Amsterdam...

On Rating Universities

In a world where we live hostages of advertisement, where our email addresses and phone numbers...

Goodbye Peter Higgs, And Thanks For The Boson

Peter Higgs passed away yesterday, at the age of 94. The scottish physicist, a winner of the 2013...

Significance Of Counting Experiments With Background Uncertainty

In the course of Statistics for Data Analysis I give every spring to PhD students in Physics I...

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 »

Are The New Hubble Images Better ?

Sep 11 2009 | comment(s)

New beautiful images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have been released recently, and they are, as always, a pleasure to behold. The HST was serviced in a mission by the Space Shuttle Atlantis crew last May, to replace some broken gyroscopes and drained batteries, and perform a number of additional important tasks that will allow operation to continue for many years to come.

Among the new installed instruments the new HST sports an improved wide field camera, WFC3, which promises a significant improvement of the quality of telescope's imaging capabilities.

Part-Time Lover, Part-Time Premier

Sep 10 2009 | comment(s)

Data concerning the parties with 30 young beauties (paid 1450$ each for their time, plus various benefits and gifts) held by the Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi in his residences in Rome and Sardinia, between September 2008 and January 2009, have been disclosed the other day by the provider of the girls, Giancarlo Tarantini. Tarantini is under investigation for several charges (including, it seems, drug abuse and distribution at his own parties), and he is spilling his guts. We thus learn from him that many of the involved girls allegedly spent the nights at the Premier's house providing sexual favors to their host; the fact appears to be confirmed in at least one case with video and audio recordings taken by escort Patrizia D'Addario.

The Higgs Potential: Source Of All Our Troubles

Sep 10 2009 | comment(s)

The slide below was shown yesterday at an invited talk that Antonio Masiero gave in the University of Bologna, during an open session of the CMS Physics week (see, I am careful to note I am not breaking any rules by showing material relevant to internal CMS business: the session was open!).

Watch Out For Anomalous Couplings In WW Production

Sep 09 2009 | comment(s)

The CDF collaboration has recently released a study of the production of pairs of W bosons in a large bounty of proton-antiproton collisions produced by the Tevatron collider -3.6 inverse femtobarns of them, or roughly 300 trillions, give or take 6%.

The measurement of the production cross section of this clean and rare electroweak process (its absolute rate, that is) is the most precise ever obtained so far, and reaches down to a level of uncertainty which cannot be improved further significantly at the Tevatron, because it is now limited by the uncertainty in the overall integrated luminosity mentioned above.

Rubbia and the Brutalized Gorilla

Sep 08 2009 | comment(s)

Sometimes I come to think this blog is overextended: it happens when I realize it contains more things than I can remember, even ones I would really like to have at my fingertips. I was reminded yesterday of a very funny story which a reader left in the comments thread of a rather meaningless post, and decided I should make a separate post of it, since it made my day reading it and it might make yours too...

The story was told by Leon Lederman in an introduction to Carlo Rubbia in the proceedings of a conference held in 1984 in Santa Fe:

"... Now I have some interesting news, a story that is at the least apocryphal. It concerns the heroic contestant in one of those ancient trials by strength which are so natural for our "Carlo". This trial was

Improving Science Education

Sep 06 2009 | comment(s)

I received an interesting question today from an Alex Ziller in the comments thread of a recent post. Here it is:

Do you think blogging actually improves Science? (I know, one should first define what "improving Science" actually means).

I think this matter has been debated elsewhere not too long ago -where by "elsewhere" I mean "some site I sometimes visit, can't recall where". Nevertheless, I consider it a crucial question to ask, and one with several facets. Here is my short answer to Alex -of the kind of depth a comments thread is worth: