This afternoon I am leaving to Belgium. I have been invited by the Université Catholique de Louvain to give a seminar on the status and the future of the Higgs boson searches at the Tevatron collider. This was a good pretext to sit down and learn the latest details of the analyses carried out by CDF and DZERO, and to do some real work of my own, mainly to understand what are the discovery or exclusion prospects for the Higgs in the US in the next few years. I have somehow described my conclusions in a
recent article.
Earlier today I reported about the publication of a paper by a non-professional physicist, Carl Brannen. Now I have to do the same for a paper -the first one in a long and groundbreaking series, you can bet- from the CMS collaboration, one of the two main experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
This just in:
Carl Brannen (
here his blog) got a paper on gravitation published in a scientific magazine. Carl, who is the typical amateur who many "established scientists" in the blogosphere have labeled a crackpot in the last few years, does not actually fit the bill very well: he is a deep thinker who knows the literature of what he studies, and the fact that he is not salaried by a research institute means as little as this: he does it for Science, and not for a pay.
"Quidquid oritur, qualecumque est, causam habet a natura. Cum autem res nova et admirabilis fieri videtur, causam invetigato, si poteris, ratione confisus. Si nullam causam reperis, illud tamen certum habeto, nihil fieri potuisse sine causa naturali. Repelle igitur terrorem quem
res nova tibi attulit et semper verbis sapientium confidere aude:
sapiens enim facta, quae prodigiosa videntur , numquam fortuito
evenisse dicet, quod nihil fieri sine causa potest, nec quicquam fit
quod fieri non potest: nulla igitur portenta sunt. Nam si portentum
putare debemus id quod raro fit, sapientem esse portentum est: facilius
esse enim mulam parere arbitror quam sapientem esse."
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Quick and dirty translation:
To see the future, you must know the past: these nine words nicely summarize a syllogism which knows few exceptions. Turning to known data to check the power of one's extrapolations is a quite well-founded scientific approach. So if we are to try and guesstimate how much will the CDF and DZERO experiments manage to deliver in the next few years, we must check how well they delivered this far, by comparing results with early expectations.
But why bother ? Well, of course because there is a real challenge on: bookmakers need to tune the odds they offer!
Fermilab versus CERN
Move Over - The Talk I Will Not Give
Shaping The Future Of AI For Fundamental Physics
On Rating Universities
Goodbye Peter Higgs, And Thanks For The Boson
