Physics

The Quote Of The Week- Richter On The Landscape

"If you have seen the movie Particle Fever about the discovery of the Higgs boson, you have heard the theorists saying that the only choices today are between Super-symmetry and the Landscape. Don’t believe them. Super-symmetry says that every fermion ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Sep 8 2014 - 7:55am

Buckyballs And Diamondoids: An Unlikely Teamup To Make Chip Components Molecule-Sized

By pairing two unconventional forms of carbon – one shaped like a soccer ball, the other a tiny diamond – scientists have created a molecule that acts as a rectifier- it conducts electricity in only one direction, which means it could be possible to cheap ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 9 2014 - 8:54am

George Zweig's Brilliant Intuition And Van Hove's Horrible Censorship

One year ago I had the pleasure to spend some time with George Zweig during a conference in Crete (ICNFP 2013). He is a wonderful storyteller and a great chap to hung around with, and I had great fun in the after-dinners on the terrace of the Orthodox Acad ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Sep 17 2014 - 4:53am

The Crackpot Conundrum

The field of physics attracts crackpots. It is impossible to completely avoid them, and after a nasty incident in 1952 with an actually mentally ill individual who was upset no one would listen to his theories concluding electrons don't exist, the Ame ...

Blog Post - Edward "Henry" Brown - Sep 9 2014 - 6:06pm

Life After The 125 GeV Higgs: What Is Left Of Two-Higgs Doublet Models

I just read with interest the new paper on the arxiv by my INFN-Padova colleague Massimo Passera and collaborators, titled " Limiting Two-Higgs Doublet Models ", and I thought I would explain to you here why I consider it very interesting and wha ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Sep 13 2014 - 11:32am

ATLAS Higgs Challenge Results

After four months of frenzy by over 1500 teams, the very successful Higgs Challenge launched by the ATLAS collaboration ended yesterday, and the "private leaderboard" with the final standings has been revealed. You can see the top 20 scorers belo ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Sep 16 2014 - 5:08am

John Ellis On The Ascent Of The Standard Model

Being at CERN for a couple of weeks, I could not refrain from following yesterday's talks in the Main Auditorium, which celebrated the 90th birthday of Herwig Schopper, who directed CERN in the crucial years of the LEP construction. A talk I found mos ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Sep 17 2014 - 4:27am

Dark Matter Is A Bose-Einstein Condensate?

What is dark matter? No one can say because it can't be detected or measured, but in science inference can help and we know that something is making gravity not work properly at the large scale. What we know as matter- stars, planets, us and other or ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 17 2014 - 4:24pm

Witness The Singularity AI Nanotech Co-Evolutionary Merger

How is this for some exciting news, straight from the same source as “ I Let My Computer Use My Brain ” three years ago, but much advanced in the ways artificial intelligence (AI) has integrated itself further so that most anybody can now work with it, or ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Sep 26 2014 - 2:56am

Quantum Teleportation 25 Kilometers Away

Physicists at the University of Geneva have succeeded in teleporting the quantum state of a photon to a crystal over 25 kilometers of optical fiber. The experiment shatters the previous record of 6 kilometers achieved 10 years ago by the same  team. Passi ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 21 2014 - 8:53pm