Physics

Kalen Craig was a physical science technician, employed for 30 years at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C. He worked mostly on wave propagation, and radio and radar astronomy projects. * * * These are some of the concepts that astrophysicis ...

Blog Post - Bruce Leeeowe - Jan 11 2024 - 2:10pm

Thermodynamic Parameters Can Influence The Outcome Of An Experiment

When you are making a model it is common to make assumptions about the physical systems often assume that measurable features of the system. Temperature or chemical potential can be specified. The real world is messier than that, and uncertainty is unavoid ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 15 2024 - 5:48pm

Comparing Student Reactions To Lectures In Artificial Intelligence And Physics

In the past two weeks I visited two schools in Veneto to engage students with the topic of Artificial Intelligence, which is something everybody seems to be happy to hear about these days: on the 10th of January I visited a school in Vicenza, and on the 17 ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jan 21 2024 - 11:19am

An Idea For Future Calorimetry

A calorimeter in physics is something that measures heat. However, there are mainly two categories of such objects: ones that measure macroscopic amounts of heat, and ones that measure the heat released by subatomic particles when they smash against matter ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 1 2024 - 10:57am

On Overfitting In Statistics And In Machine Learning

I recently held an accelerated course in "Statistical data analysis for fundamental science" for the Instats site. Within only 15 hours of online lectures (albeit these are full 1-hour blocks, unlike the leaky academic-style hours that last 75% o ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 13 2024 - 8:30am

A New Free Tool For The Optimization Of Muon Tomography

Muon tomography is one of the most important spinoffs of fundamental research with particle detectors-if not the most important. ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 21 2024 - 6:39am

Where's Tommaso?

March is here, and with it begins a season of intense travel for me- something which for some combination of reasons has become sort of a habit. First, workshops and conferences are rarely scheduled in the December-February period. Second, the Christmas va ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 2 2024 - 10:08am

On The Utility Function Of Future Experiments

At a recent meeting of the board of editors of a journal I am an editor of, it was decided to produce a special issue (to commemorate an important anniversary). As I liked the idea I got carried away a bit, and proposed to write an article for it. ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 13 2024 - 7:57am

The Analogy: A Powerful Instrument For Physics Outreach

About a month ago I was contacted by a colleague who invited me to write a piece on the topic of science outreach for an electronic journal (Ithaca). I was happy to accept, but when I later pondered on what I would have liked to write, I could not help thi ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Mar 24 2024 - 10:42pm

Significance Of Counting Experiments With Background Uncertainty

In the course of Statistics for Data Analysis I give every spring to PhD students in Physics I spend some time discussing the apparently trivial problem of evaluating the significance of an excess of observed events N over expected background B. This is a ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 6 2024 - 2:16am