Physics

Think Like a Scientist

From Prof. Chad Orzel's Graduation Speech: Science isn't a body of facts, science is a process for figuring out how the world works: you see something interesting, come up with an idea of why that might happen, and test you're idea to see if ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 28 2009 - 4:27pm

42 Questions For Particle Physicists

In a few days, scores of Italian post-doctoral researchers in experimental particle physics will get tested on their knowledge of the matter, without any promise of a position, but just to get one further "stamp" on their curriculum, testifying t ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 30 2009 - 2:47pm

Answers To Selected Questions

As I promised a week ago, I am posting answers to a few of the 42 questions which constituted the first part of an the exam selecting experimental particle physicists for the INFN (the italian institute of nuclear physics) four years ago. Next week, a simi ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 4 2009 - 10:56am

Blogs, Big Physics, And Breaking News

The 2009 World Conference on Science Journalism took place last week in heat-wave-struck London, at the convenient location of Westminster Central Hall (see below). More than 900 delegates got together from 90 countries to discuss the future of science jou ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Feb 25 2010 - 4:05pm

The Say of the Week

"The INFN directorate may have invented the Identity operator in the space of qualifying exams" Guido Volpi (commenting on FB on the very offensive R5 exam held today by INFN post-docs). ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 6 2009 - 3:57pm

INFN Exam Does Not Go Deserted

Unfortunately I was right: at least in predicting that the INFN exam dubbed "R5" would not go deserted. The R5 exam, which in exchange for a stressful pair of written tests (which I am trying to get a hold of, to report on it here) guaranteed not ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 7 2009 - 12:40am

What Time Travel Looks Like

Just what would time travel look like?  This question was posed to me by a movie director in L.A..  It turns out there are three parts to this question-- what physics suggests, what movies have done in the past, and what looks good. The last is up to her a ...

Article - Alex "Sandy" Antunes - Jul 7 2009 - 10:18pm

'Effective' Magnetic Fields Allow Scientists To Manipulate A Single Bit In A Quantum Processor

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a viable way to manipulate a single 'bit' in a quantum processor without disturbing the information stored in its neighbors, using polarized light to create &quo ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 7 2009 - 10:21am

Guest Post: Patrick Draper, "Is The Supersymmetric Higgs Behind The Corner?"

Patrick Draper is a graduate student in physics at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab. He is a native of Illinois and lives in Hyde Park, Chicago with his wife Karen and parrot Felix, to whom he is grateful for their love, patience, and co ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 7 2009 - 5:34pm

Does The Arxiv Blacklist Authors? Help Finding Out!

The Arxiv is an online repository of scientific papers in physics, astronomy, maths, cosmology, computer science, and a few other topics, where papers due to be published on scientific journals are submitted by the authors, and become quickly accessible f ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 8 2009 - 7:33am