Physics

Finally, Schrodinger's Cat Hits A Nobel!

Well, kind of. David Wineland and Serge Haroche have not endangered any living beings. That is to say: probably not in their physics experiments.  Yet, although they stayed at a safe distance from bringing life form into quantum superposition, both physici ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Oct 9 2012 - 4:32pm

CMS Vs ATLAS On Dijet Resonances: Who Wins?

Two papers describing results of searches for high-mass resonances decaying into jet pairs have appeared on the arxiv this week. They are authored by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations, and they both report lower limits on the mass of hypothetical particles ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 11 2012 - 5:02am

Acknowledged!

This is just to report that I feel greatly honoured to be cited on top of the acknowledgements section of the new paper by Dimitri Nanopoulos and colleagues. I hope I will be able to review the paper for you here soon. The title ("Primordial Synthesis ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 11 2012 - 10:36am

Did God Pick Quantum Physics To Protect Us From Evil Scientists?

Science based creationism has arrived and is fashionable: Established academics and NASA scientists claim that evolution is merely a deception, the fossil record planted; darlings of “new-atheists” get away with basically saying that the universe is made ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Nov 7 2012 - 11:55am

Power And Limits Of The Analogy In Particle Physics

Yesterday I spent a very interesting day at Comunicare Fisica 2012, a conference held in TORINO which brought together researchers, high-school teachers, journalists and other professionals working in the field of the popularization of science. The session ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 12 2012 - 12:41pm

Flat Quantum Physics

Quantum physics uses a parameter space that is curved. It is possible to cure this situation by converting the quantum state functions to distributions that have a flat parameter space. Let ψ(q) be a quaternionic probability amplitude distribution (QPAD). ...

Blog Post - Hans van Leunen - Oct 13 2012 - 8:47am

A Still Better Analogy To Explain Naturalness

See, this is what I really like of a blog: when readers contribute significantly! ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 15 2012 - 8:52am

Scandal! Scientist Makes Honest Mistake, Humbly Retracts Supersolidity Result

You may have heard of superfluids and superconductors, so why not supersolids?  In 2004 Moses Chan and Eunseong Kim thought they had discovered that super-cooled helium ice could essentially walk through walls – a defining characteristic of a supersolid. ...

Article - Robert Cooper - Oct 16 2012 - 1:32pm

Dreaming Of Torsional Building Oscillations During An Earthquake

I had a dream. So what, we all do. Well, this was particular, because I remember all of it well, and because it involved a very interesting situation. I was at Fermilab, in an office on a top-level floor of a tall building, when a powerful earthquake hit. ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 18 2012 - 11:11am

The Weird Grey Area Between Primordial Plasma And Ordinary Matter

Physicists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) recently observed first glimpses of a possible boundary separating ordinary nuclear matter, composed of protons and neutrons we know today, from the odd, seething soup of their constituent quarks and ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 18 2012 - 5:54pm