Physics

No New Z Bosons Below A TeV

New important information on high-energy particle physics has recently been released by the CDF experiment, one of the two detectors scrutinizing the 2-TeV proton-antiproton collisions copiously produced by the Fermilab Tevatron collider located near Batav ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 9 2011 - 6:01am

Tevatron Will Shut Down in FY2011

This just in. The Tevatron collider, proud and glory of Fermilab, the leading high-energy lab in the US, will stop collider operations for good at the end of FY2011. This means that CDF and DZERO will collect roughly 1800 additional inverse picobarns, reac ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 10 2011 - 2:47pm

25 Years Of Successes!

Thanks to the Tevatron Facebook account manager, R.M. (Ron, tell me if I can disclose your identity here), I can offer to you today an exceptional plot of historical significance. Before I paste below the plot in question, let me discuss what it is about. ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 11 2011 - 11:18am

The Inverse Look-Elsewhere Effect

When physicists working in a collaboration want to publish the observation of a new effect in the data, they need to first convince their peer that what they are observing is real, and not the product of a weird fluctuation. Statistical fluctuations are ev ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 16 2011 - 11:38am

Falling Faster Than Freefall: A Lesson In Didactics And Critical Thinking

Remember the neat little experiment whose result may be counter intuitive to some of those who embrace the “all bodies fall the same way inside earth’s gravity” ‘doctrine’ without quite understanding it? Here it is again- if the video should not come up f ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Nov 15 2011 - 10:51pm

An Attack To The Tevatron Higgs Bounds!

While listening to highly interesting talks on cutting-edge statistical issues at PHYSTAT 2011, I have casually been reading this morning a paper recently posted on the arxiv, which was pointed out to me by a Cypriot friend, Alex (thanks, Alex!). The autho ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 17 2011 - 9:15am

The Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly

Looks like particle physicists have finally digested the food of Christmas break by now. Just as I was reviewing a new paper on the arxiv on the Tevatron Higgs limits, I ran into another hot preprint, titled "The Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly". ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 17 2011 - 10:55am

Best Joke From Phystat 2011

At PhyStat 2011, currently being held at CERN, talks are informal and the atmosphere is friendly, but I have heard very few jokes from the participants so far. Just a minute ago I witnessed what might be a pretty strong bid at the best joke of the conferen ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 18 2011 - 11:48am

The Career of Women in Physics- the Italian Case

I just read with interest some slides portraying the situation of male/female differences in the employment at the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics, the institute I myself work for. I do not wish to make a summary here, but just paste a graph ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 21 2011 - 11:20am

Hawking Lady Gaga Challenge: Rim Versus Center Brake

I challenged you to come up with a short and ‘philosophical’ reason for why the tip of a plank can fall faster than free fall. The point was not to explain the experiment but to teach a lesson about critical thinking, waterproof argumentation, and so on. ‘ ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Jan 20 2018 - 8:33am