A very personal blog posting today. Well, at times it so happens that I feel like writing something about myself... That is the whole purpose of a blog for many, while I, like most of the writers here, usually have additional reasons; today the chance to write about myself comes handy though.
Twenty-five years ago this evening I was at a birthday party, with a bunch of friends. It was the birthday of two nice girls, and the party was held at the home of one of them. We were barely 20 years old back then (the two girls in fact were turning 20), and in similar occasions we used to smoke a lot, listen to music of the seventies, drink quite a bit, and party until late night.
A brand new result in Higgs boson physics has been presented by my old-time CDF colleague Wei-Ming Yao at the Moriond QCD conference two days ago. It is the combination of CDF and DZERO limits on the Higgs boson, and it constitutes a significant advancement in our knowledge of the standard model.
The result is simple to state in a single sentence, although it will take me several pages to explain it acceptably. The Higgs boson is excluded at 95% confidence level in the 130-210 GeV mass range, if there are four generations of matter fields.
"A male astrophysicist talks physics to the astronomers and astronomy to the physicists, but then he meets another astrophysicist, and they discuss women."
Unknown
Have you ever seen a galaxy ?
I mean, not a picture of one. The real thing. A picture is a representation of reality, and as such it conveys to our senses only a pale suggestion of the stimulation that experiencing the real thing provides. In a world where images, still and in motion, have a dominant role in our lives, we tend to forget how different are some things when we experience them directly.
I was delighted to receive news this afternoon of three new interesting results produced by the DZERO collaboration in the analysis of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) processes.
QCD, the theory of strong interactions between quarks and gluons, is the "boring" part of the physics of high-energy hadron-hadron collisions. It used to be more more exciting twenty years ago, when the theoretical calculations were not as refined as they are now, and there was still a lot to understand in the physics of strong interactions between quarks and gluons. But nowadays, things are much more clear.
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