Physics

The Infinite Multiverse And Monkeys Typing Pi

Two years ago, I expressed my doubts about the existence of a multiverse (or at least it's portrayal by some cosmologists) in a blog post in this forum. In the meantime, last March, the announcement about the discovery of gravitational waves got us pe ...

Article - Amir D. Aczel - Jun 10 2014 - 9:32am

Lubos Motl, Prospective Winner Of Higgs Challenge?

Today among the three top players-those in the money- at the Higgs challenge we see the appearance of Lubos Motl, whom I had signalled as a participant in an earlier posting. We all know that Lubos is a smart guy, but I doubted whether he would take this v ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 8 2014 - 8:26am

Where Did All The Antimatter Go?

Matter-antimatter asymmetry is one of the greatest challenges in physics- we know antimatter is out there, because it can be created at places like CERN, but the universe seems to be composed entirely of matter. Theories predict that exactly equal amounts ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 11 2014 - 9:02am

Why I Am Rooting For Lubos

With still three months to go and 663 teams participating, the Higgs challenge has not even entered a hot phase yet, and still there is a lot to watch in the leaderboard at the kaggle site. In the last few days, there has been a total revolution in the lea ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 23 2014 - 1:23am

The New Higgs Mass From ATLAS: Still Twin Peaks

One and a half years ago ATLAS produced measurements for the Higgs boson mass using their selected sample of H->gamma gamma and H->ZZ*-> 4-lepton decay candidates, based on data collected in 2011 and 2012. That preliminary measurement was rather s ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 17 2014 - 6:20am

The Plot Of The Week- Michel Parameter

The muon is a remarkable particle, and its characteristics continue to be of interest eighty years after its discovery despite the fact that we have measured them better than almost anything else around. So, for instance, the muon lifetime is known to bett ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 18 2014 - 4:26am

The Quote Of The Week- Disagreeing With Dick Feynman

"Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize. " R. Feynman, People magazine, 1985 I sure cannot disagree more with Dick than on the above sentence! ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 19 2014 - 3:05am

BICEP2 and gravitational waves, an answer of foregrounds.

After great pains to simulate the foreground dust the Cosmic Microwave Background, gravitational wave result of BICEP2's B-Mode observations is still in question.  The simple fact is we do not really know what the foreground dust contamination really ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Jun 19 2014 - 2:04pm

Improbable Article Titles

The Cornell arxiv is known to not accept preprints without a minimal screening of their contents. Still, I am sometimes led to wonder if a similar attention is paid to the liberty that authors at times take with the titles of their papers. I am officially ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 22 2014 - 9:56am

Standard Model: Evidence For Direct Decay Of The Higgs Boson Into Fermions

The Higgs boson was detected using its decay into bosons but scientists from the CMS experiment at  the Large Hadron Collider have found evidence for the direct decay of the Higgs boson into fermions. If the Higgs particle can decay into both bosons and f ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 22 2014 - 3:09pm