Physics

CDF Kisses Another New Physics Effect Bye-Bye

Do you remember the " e-e-gamma-gamma-met"  event? I am sure you do not. It is an incredibly striking event that appeared toward the end of the Tevatron Run I in the CDF data. One event that was so incredibly striking, so impossible to produce th ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 6 2009 - 11:49pm

Guest Post: Carl Brannen, "Position, Spin, And The Particle Generations"

Carl Brannen is well known to the regulars of this blog. He is an independent researcher and my favourite non-professional theorist, because he gives me the hope that brilliant minds, who were diverted from the natural path of doing basic research, may re ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 10 2009 - 10:14am

The Say of the Week- on Decision Making

"It turns out that any optimal classical decision rule is also some Bayesian rule. In other words, even if the decision maker is not a Bayesian, he will behave as if he were!" Frederick James, Statistical Methods in Experimental Physics ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 10 2009 - 8:27am

The 'Superest' Microscope- US Neutron Facility Achieves Record Megawatt Power

There are many super microscopes around the globe but they are not like the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). This new source has become the brightest of them all since August 2007. Some say it is more like a laser l ...

Blog Post - Hatice Cullingford - Oct 11 2009 - 12:42pm

Sticky Collisions And Atomic Bombs

It is easy to marvel at Einstein's relativity theory. It is less easy to really understand relativity. At least so it seems. Understanding relativity requires abilities in predicting with confidence the outcomes of relativistic experiments. For that y ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Oct 12 2009 - 11:02am

Sunday Science Book Club

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, by Graham Farmelo Basic Books, 2009 When Niels Bohr calls you strange, you know you're in rare company. Niels Bohr, as director of one of the great institutes of theoretical physic ...

Article - Michael White - Oct 11 2009 - 4:03pm

How To Weight With A Balance

Ah, the pleasure of study! I had forgotten the immense intellectual pleasure one may derive by reading a stimulating, informative book. And if half a lifetime has passed from the last time you studied something, and what is left in your brain of it is just ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 11 2009 - 7:36pm

New! My Paper On Solving The Omega B Controversy

The web site of the Cornell preprint archive, arxiv.org, says it best: successful submissions to the preprint archive are a source of considerable pride (darn it, the page with the exact statement is only available just after you submit a paper, so I canno ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 12 2009 - 9:06pm

Overbye on Backward Causality

Many thanks to Dennis for linking, from the NYT site, an article I wrote one year ago to comment a crackpotty paper by an otherwise esteemed scientist. The essay just appeared on the New York Times site is excellent, as always with Overbye, but it is also ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 13 2009 - 2:00am

The Say of the Week: Strumia on Backward Causation and Communism

" Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernencko: these three premiers of Soviet Union unexpectedly died around 1984, such that Gorbachev could lead the process that ended with the fall of Soviet Union, such that the US congress stopped funding the SSC, such that the ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 13 2009 - 2:06am