Physics

Self Quote Of The Week: Why You Can't Weigh Quarks Directly

In the process of revising a chapter of my book, I found a clip I would like to share here, as it contains an analogy I cooked up and which I find nice enough to be proud of. Well, two analogies, as you'll soon find out; here I am speaking of the cat ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 11 2014 - 8:39am

A Boron Cage Discovered?

In the 1980s, the discovery of soccer-ball-shaped carbon molecules called buckyballs helped to spur an explosion in nanotechnology research. Now, there appears to be a new ball on the pitch- a cluster of 40 boron atoms forms a hollow molecular cage simila ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 13 2014 - 6:00pm

Carbon, Oxygen, And Stars

Recently this headline on Real Clear Science caught my eye: Carbon-12 Nucleus Shaped Like Equilateral Triangle.  It led to an article in Physics World, entitled ...

Article - Robert H Olley - Jul 14 2014 - 9:24am

The Spam Of Physicists' Mailboxes

I guess every profession has its own kind of personalized spam. Here is a couple of recent samples from my own: From a Fermilab address: "According to the TRAIN database training for course FN000508 / CR- Workplace Violence and Active Shooter/Active T ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 19 2014 - 1:59pm

Watching Electrons Jump Between The Fragments Of Exploding Molecules

Ultra-short X-ray flashes have enabled scientists to watch electrons jumping between the fragments of exploding molecules. The study reveals up to what distance a charge transfer between the two molecular fragments can occur, marking the limit of the mole ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 20 2014 - 12:27pm

The SUSY-Inspiring LHC WW Excess May Be Due To Theoretical Errors

A timely article discussing the hot topic of the production rate of pairs of vector bosons in proton-proton collisions has appeared on the Cornell arxiv yesterday. As you might know, both the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, who study the 8-TeV (and soon 13-T ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 18 2014 - 8:39am

LUX-Zeplin Dark Matter Experiment, Two Others, Get Government Green Light

The U.S. Department of Energy has given the green light to the LUX-Zeplin (LZ) experiment, which wants to help figure out dark matter, an invisible substance that must make up a lot more of the universe than visible matter does. It is essentially a scient ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 18 2014 - 5:00pm

A Universal Solution For A Quantum Three-Body Problem

Have physicists conquered the scaling behavior of exotic giant molecules? When a two-body relation becomes a three-body relation, the behavior of the system changes. The basic physics of two interacting particles is well understood but the mathematical des ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 19 2014 - 6:00am

How to know when an alternative theory is legitimate science and not quackery.

As a consumer of science who is not a scientist how can you know if a theory is legitimate or simply crakcpottery.  Here are some easy to understand signs that an alternative theory is legitimate science.   A blog about spam by Tommaso Dorigo (The Spam Of ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Jul 21 2014 - 8:59pm

True And False Discoveries: How To Tell Them Apart

Many new particles and other new physics signals claimed in the last twenty years were later proven to be spurious effects, due to background fluctuations or unknown sources of systematic error. The list is long, unfortunately- and longer than the list of ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 24 2014 - 5:26am