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Tommaso DorigoRSS Feed of this column.

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 »

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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:
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 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 , then you automatically know what is equilibrium condition for N bodies distributed in the two states:

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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.
"Non ho mai chiesto di occuparmi di mafia. Ci sono entrato per caso. E poi ci sono rimasto per un problema morale. La gente mi moriva attorno"

(I never asked to work on mafia. I got to do it by chance. And then I continued because of a moral issue. People around me kept dying.)

Paolo Borsellino (Italian Judge, killed by mafia in 1992)
One year ago, a paper by a distinguished group of theorists announced first evidence of new physics from measurements of the properties of B_s mesons performed at the Tevatron by the CDF and DZERO experiments. They had combined all the available information, obtaining a result which disagreed with the Standard Model (SM) prediction by more than three standard deviations.