Physics

Dark matter density near Earth? An informal defense of Moni Bidin et al.

The issue of how dense the dark matter is near Earth is far from settled. Recent work by Moni Bidin, Carraro, Mendez and Smith holds that the density of dark matter near Earth is 0.04 gigaelectron volts per cubic centimeter, the work of Bovy and Tremaine ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Jun 3 2012 - 5:45pm

Scalars, Vectors, and Quaternion [Scalars and Quaternion Vectors]: Definitions (1 of 2)

[Clarification: I tweaked the title because the focus of this blog was intended to be quite small.  While scalars and vectors are used in a dizzying array of areas in many dimensions, quaternions are constrained to work in one plus three dimensions.  One c ...

Blog Post - Doug Sweetser - Jun 13 2012 - 10:39pm

Enough Luminosity For A Higgs Discovery!

The LHC collider has been producing proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV for two months now, and the integrated luminosity collected by the CMS experiment has surpassed the mark of 4 inverse femtobarns (see figure below). That' ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 5 2012 - 9:45am

Direct Realism falling in Wittgenstein’s Silence

Direct Realism falling in Wittgenstein’s Silence: Accelerating the Paradigm Change that Renders Relativistic Quantum Mechanics Natural ...

Blog Post - Sascha Vongehr - Nov 14 2013 - 1:00pm

Of Quantum Non-Locality And Green Cheese Moons In Many Worlds

The fourth FQXi essay contest “ Which of Our Basic Physical Assumptions Are Wrong? ” is underway.   ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Jun 8 2012 - 9:49am

New CERN Results On Rare B Decays: A Tombstone To SUSY?

The CERN average of searches for rare B decays to muon pairs has been shown yesterday in a talk given by Mitesh Patel at the "Physics at the LHC" conference, which is being held in Vancouver (BC) this week. And the results are not very encouragin ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 8 2012 - 9:47am

Cosmological Constant

Cosmological Constant- it's the blog's title, but something more, As you may know, Einstein himself called it his greatest blunder. Why did he say these words? Let us see... When Albert Einstein developed his General Theory of Relativity he found ...

Blog Post - Pepe Gallardo - Jun 9 2012 - 4:12pm

Astronomical Unit

Last Transit of Venus was more fruitful than could be expected. Thousands of amazing images were taken and this is just enough to appreciate the high point of the event. Things more physical or astronomical were also concluded from it, of course. ...

Blog Post - Pepe Gallardo - Jun 11 2012 - 8:54am

ICFP 2012 Day One

The island of Crete, in the middle of the Mediterranean sea, is home to ICFP 2012, a conference in high-energy physics. I arrived yesterday night and this morning I woke up with a gorgeous view of the sun rising over a blue sea. (The picture shows a beach ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 11 2012 - 12:24am

Summary Of Day 1 At ICFP 2012

The International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics (ICFP) 2012 started today with a rich program of experimental and theory talks. I should be swimming in the Cretan sea in front of the nice conference venue (which is 40 meters away from the water), ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 11 2012 - 10:56am