Physics

It is with great sadness that I heard (reading it here first) about the passing away of Guido Altarelli, a very distinguished Italian theoretical physicist. Altarelli is best known for the formulas that bear his name, the Altarelli-Parisi equations (also k ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 3 2015 - 2:48am

Nobel Prize To Neutrino Oscillations

The winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics are: Takaaki Kajita Kajita (Super Kamiokande) Arthur McDonald (Sudbury Neutrino Observatory- SNO) “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass" ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 6 2015 - 11:16am

In Plain English: Why Neutrino Mass and Oscillation Won A Nobel Prize.

H ow does knowing that neutrinos have mass, and change from one kind of particle to the other kind benefit all mankind? Why should Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald get a Nobel Prize for finding this? What the heck is a neutrino anyway? How does th ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Oct 6 2015 - 11:13pm

An Easy Problem

Yesterday I chaired the selection committee to choose the student who will be hired in the AMVA4NewPhysics network by the Padova section of INFN, and during the interviews I asked all candidates a couple of "easy" physics questions, meant to test ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 8 2015 - 12:27pm

The Plot Of The Week: Light New Bosons Below The J/Psi

The graph below, I hope you'll agree, is significantly cooler and better-looking than the typical data display plots you get from high-energy physics analyses. Colours are bright, graphical symbols are clean, and one grasps the essence of the informat ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 13 2015 - 9:40pm

Beta Decay For Teenagers

Yesterday my 16 year old son surprised me by explaining that he had been taught at school what alpha, beta, and gamma decays are. He had learned a lot, but I was able to add a little more background information to the picture as he asked me what was the ne ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 22 2015 - 3:19pm

Another Higgs At 145 GeV?

A longtime follower of this blog, Tony Smith, pointed out to me today this arxiv paper published three days ago. In it, CMS data from Run 1 of the LHC are used to speculate that there might be a second Higgs boson hiding in the data at a mass of about 145 ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Nov 7 2015 - 4:40pm

Nonlocality is an inherent feature of quantum reality

Nonlocality is an inherent natural feature of quantum reality described by its wave function (WF). It shows itself up not only in the widely discussed cases with two or more particles, but also with one spinless particle. The point is that the WF-Collaps ...

Blog Post - Emmanuel Lipmanov - Oct 23 2015 - 2:37pm

May The Fifth Force Be With You

Discovering possible new forces in nature is no easy task. To discover the secret of gravity, the public thinks it took an apple falling from a tree, but really it took him inventing Calculus. linked to Newton's arguably apocryphal apple experiment h ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 27 2015 - 3:04pm

Shopping Around For A Post-Doc

As I am spending my time these days selecting candidates for early-stage researcher positions in the EU network I am coordinating, I am reminded of my own experience as a participant to job interviews from the other side of the table. The text below tells ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 28 2015 - 2:58pm