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On Rating Universities

In a world where we live hostages of advertisement, where our email addresses and phone numbers...

Goodbye Peter Higgs, And Thanks For The Boson

Peter Higgs passed away yesterday, at the age of 94. The scottish physicist, a winner of the 2013...

Significance Of Counting Experiments With Background Uncertainty

In the course of Statistics for Data Analysis I give every spring to PhD students in Physics I...

The Analogy: A Powerful Instrument For Physics Outreach

About a month ago I was contacted by a colleague who invited me to write a piece on the topic of...

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 »

The Say of the Week

Aug 10 2009 | comment(s)

"Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness in the desert air."

Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", vv. 53-56. I have always loved these lines, and besides, as I wrote a few years ago, "The relevance of these verses to the general melancholy of the Higgs hunter at the Tevatron is obvious… Suffices to say that the Tevatron is currently producing of the order of 20 Higgs bosons per day in CDF and D0, and yet they blush unseen, born by dark unfathomed caves of

The Continuing Search Of A Dark Site

Aug 09 2009 | comment(s)

Amateur astronomers fond of visual observation of faint galaxies and other fuzzy treasures of the night sky are always in search of the best observative site, where to drag their large Dobsonian telescopes.

Unfortunately, their road is always uphill - also in a metaphorical sense: light pollution is growing everywhere at a disturbing rate, and it has already erased all but the brightest stars from our urban and suburban skies.

Many of our kids grow without having seen the Milky Way, and the few who are drawn to astronomy are surprised to realize, from the tales of older dogs like me, that it did not use to be that way.

Et Tu, Brute ?

Aug 05 2009 | comment(s)

Stabbed by his once most faithful man after many other blows received by the conjurors, Julius Caesar pronounced those words, according to reports, before falling to death.

Now, is history repeating itself ? Paolo Guzzanti, once one of Silvio Berlusconi's best men, is an aggressive journalist who became a politician under king Silvio the II. Guzzanti always maintained some sort of twisted coherence in his reactionary positions and vitriolic approach to the political issues he handled -one remembers, for instance, his leading of the Italian Mitrokhin commission which tried to assess the veridicity of some files disclosed by a russian ex-spy. From Wikipedia:

A New Z' Boson At 240 GeV ? No, Wait, At 720!?

Aug 03 2009 | comment(s)

Readers familiar with this blog know that I am a die-hard skeptic on the issue of physics beyond the Standard Model. However, today I am wearing my fluctuation-enthusiast hat, and I will be trying to argue in favor of the possible signal of new physics that is coming out of the Tevatron data. Please do not get confused: everything is still in order. Maybe.

$Detailed Balance Explained To My Son$

Detailed Balance Explained To My Son

Jul 30 2009 | comment(s)

Detailed balance is a simple and powerful rule to describe the dynamics of two-state systems.

If you know the probability of a transition from a state A to the other state B of a physical system (in some appropriate time unit), and you also know the probability of the reverse reaction $B \to A$ , then you automatically know what is equilibrium condition for N bodies distributed in the two states:

$N_A P(A \to B) = N_B P(B \to A)$ .

Rudiments Of The Method Of Maximum Likelihood

Jul 29 2009 | comment(s)

Besides the usual share of random readers who google something and get directed here by mere chance (to be read: by the sheer amount of valuable information I have posted here), this blog is read by an interesting mix of particle physicists, students, experts in other fields of Physics, and Science amateurs -plus a small number of science reporters looking for news.

Of course I love each and every one of my faithful readers like good teachers love their pupils, but among the varied crowd, the readers which I am most happy to host here are students and amateurs, because they provide me with true motivation for spending my time writing popularization articles. Without them, many of my posts would lose their meaning.