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A Great Year For Experiment Design

While 2025 will arguably not be remembered as a very positive year for humankind, for many reasons...

Living At The Polar Circle

Since 2022, when I got invited for a keynote talk at a Deep Learning school, I have been visiting...

Conferences Good And Bad, In A Profit-Driven Society

Nowadays researchers and scholars of all ages and specialization find themselves struggling with...

USERN: 10 Years Of Non-Profit Action Supporting Science Education And Research

The 10th congress of the USERN organization was held on November 8-10 in Campinas, Brazil. Some...

Tommaso Dorigo

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

Scepticism On The Opera Result: Protecting The Establishment ?

Oct 11 2011 | comment(s)

I read with interest and some amusement (on the mouse joke) the piece written here by Sascha Vongehr. I find his arguments wrong and decided to answer him in the comments thread of his post, but my answer got a bit too long and I did not want to hijack a nice discussion that was developing there; plus I found out that what I was writing could be suitable for this blog in its own right. So below I explain what I criticize about his arguments.

The Say Of The Week - What Is The Higgs And Why Do We Need It

Oct 11 2011 | comment(s)

"We consider the scattering of charged W bosons [...] the sum of all diagrams still diverges as s/Mw^2. Heavy leptons cannot help us, so the only solution is to introduce a scalar particle which cancels these residual divergences [...] Here, h is just the Higgs particle. If we had not previously introduced it to generate the heavy boson masses, we would have been forced to invent it now to guarantee renormalizability [...] Higgs particles have so far eluded experimental searches [...] one might speculate that they do not exist as elementary fields, adn the higgs "particle" we have introduced actually corresponds to a more complex object [...]"

F. Halzen and A.D. Martin, "Quarks and Leptons", J.Wiley&sons 1984, p.344.

Tamburini: Neutrinos Are Majorana Particles, Relativity Is OK

Oct 10 2011 | comment(s)

Fabrizio Tamburini (left) is an old friend - I have known him since 1976, when we both used to attend the gatherings of the newborn Associazione Astrofili Veneziani, at the Lido of Venice. The love for astronomy had brought us together, but we took different paths in our scientific activities. Fabrizio remained maybe more faithful to his old love for the universe, and is now a well-known and respected astrophysicist, who studies original ideas in the physics of photon propagation and more. I repeatedly invited him to write about his research here, but so far he has not accepted, mainly for lack of time... But I am sure he will soon.

A Meteor Storm Tonight: Watch The Draconids!

Oct 08 2011 | comment(s)

The Draconids (also called Giacobinids) are a meteor shower associated to comet Giacobini-Zinner (see below for a 100-year-old picture of the comet). While most years this shower passes unnoticed to all but few professionals and experts amateurs, yielding only very few meteors in the nights between October 6th and 10th, every once in a while the Draconids do put up a real show, producing hundreds, or even thousands of meteor streaks per hour in clear skies.

On Wearing Two Hats - Your Input Appreciated

Oct 06 2011 | comment(s)

One of the issues that emerged in the discussion of whether researchers should be bloggers is the fact that it is always dangerous to wear multiple "hats", i.e. carrying multiple responsibilities which may sometimes come in conflict with one another.

Wearing two hats

Of course this is a very common and old problem. I am indebted to Jim S.M., who sent me a few excerpts from Churchill's autobiography, which are very relevant to the issue besides being quite amusing:

Should Researchers Blog? Should Their Employers Encourage Them?

Oct 04 2011 | comment(s)

Tomorrow I will fly to Frascati, where are the headquarters of INFN, the italian institute for nuclear physics. I will attend to an event there, called "Incontri di Fisica" (Physics meetings), where high-school teachers meet researchers and receive training, as well as discuss ways to improve science education and popularization in schools and outside.

I will be discussing the subject of "Science popularization with blogs" on Wednesday afternoon and then, two days later, I will be the last speaker with another short talk, where I will try to summarize some ideas on the matter. And you might help for this latter presentation.