Burton Richter, 1975 Nobel prize in Physics for the discovery of the J/ψ meson, speaks about the need of a new linear collider for the measurement of Higgs boson branching fractions in a video on Facebook (as soon as I understand how to paste here I will!)
Richter has been a fervent advocate of electron-positron machines over hadronic accelerators throughout his life. So you really could not expect anything different from him - but he still does it with all his might. At one point he says, talking of the hadron collider scientists who discovered the Higgs boson:
I am very happy today because I have been notified by the European Community that a project I submitted for funding as coordinator last January has been evaluated very positively by the EU reviewers. The project is a training network of universities and research centres in Europe, with participation of two additional academic partners and four industrial partners from the US, Russia, Italy and Belgium. The network name is "AMVA4NewPhysics", and it aims at developing and applying cutting-edge statistical learning tools to new physics and Englert-Higgs boson studies to the LHC data collected by ATLAS and CMS.
“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”
Richard Feynman, who would turn 97 years old today. Happy birthday, mr. Feynman!
Sometimes I write stuff here not because I know things, but rather, because I would like to know more, and I think the audience of this blog may help me find the material I need to become more knowledgeable on some topic. Having a blog is a privilege, in the sense that the one-to-many communication it establishes between the writer and the readers allows the owner to sometimes have access to the (all together vast) knowledge of his or her readers. Thanks to you, dear reader, to your comments, reactions, and suggestions expressed in the comments thread, I learn more on topics I do not have an expertise on. I cherish this one-to-many communcation means and I am grateful to you for it.
As yesterday in Italy was the equivalent of Labor Day, and today is a Saturday, with people around me exploiting the three-day rest for a recreational trip, I do not feel in a very productive mood, so rather than writing something original here I will exploit other people's work, pointing at what I found interesting or anyway worth my attention among the papers appeared on the Cornell Arxiv in the last few days, and other assorted material.
Enrico Stomeo - A Lifelong Passion For Meteor Studies
Surviving Queues: 1 - At The Airport
Choosing Your Bets: The Selection Bias
