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 »

The Higgs Potential: Source Of All Our Troubles

Sep 10 2009 | comment(s)

The slide below was shown yesterday at an invited talk that Antonio Masiero gave in the University of Bologna, during an open session of the CMS Physics week (see, I am careful to note I am not breaking any rules by showing material relevant to internal CMS business: the session was open!).

Watch Out For Anomalous Couplings In WW Production

Sep 09 2009 | comment(s)

The CDF collaboration has recently released a study of the production of pairs of W bosons in a large bounty of proton-antiproton collisions produced by the Tevatron collider -3.6 inverse femtobarns of them, or roughly 300 trillions, give or take 6%.

The measurement of the production cross section of this clean and rare electroweak process (its absolute rate, that is) is the most precise ever obtained so far, and reaches down to a level of uncertainty which cannot be improved further significantly at the Tevatron, because it is now limited by the uncertainty in the overall integrated luminosity mentioned above.

Rubbia and the Brutalized Gorilla

Sep 08 2009 | comment(s)

Sometimes I come to think this blog is overextended: it happens when I realize it contains more things than I can remember, even ones I would really like to have at my fingertips. I was reminded yesterday of a very funny story which a reader left in the comments thread of a rather meaningless post, and decided I should make a separate post of it, since it made my day reading it and it might make yours too...

The story was told by Leon Lederman in an introduction to Carlo Rubbia in the proceedings of a conference held in 1984 in Santa Fe:

"... Now I have some interesting news, a story that is at the least apocryphal. It concerns the heroic contestant in one of those ancient trials by strength which are so natural for our "Carlo". This trial was

Improving Science Education

Sep 06 2009 | comment(s)

I received an interesting question today from an Alex Ziller in the comments thread of a recent post. Here it is:

Do you think blogging actually improves Science? (I know, one should first define what "improving Science" actually means).

I think this matter has been debated elsewhere not too long ago -where by "elsewhere" I mean "some site I sometimes visit, can't recall where". Nevertheless, I consider it a crucial question to ask, and one with several facets. Here is my short answer to Alex -of the kind of depth a comments thread is worth:

The Say of the Week

Sep 06 2009 | comment(s)

"It is better to treat p values as nothing more than useful exploratory tools or measures of surprise. In any search for new physics, a small p value should only be seen as a first step in the interpretation of the data, to be followed by a serious investigation of an alternative hypothesis. Only by showing that the latter provides a better explanation of the observations than the null hypothesis can one make a convincing case for a discovery."

Luc Demortier, "p values and nuisance parameters", CERN-08-001, p.24.

A walk on the wild side

Sep 05 2009 | comment(s)

Sometimes I forget that my time constraints force me to make a choice between writing on my blog and reading other people's, and so I start reading random stuff in physics blogs I am acquainted with, to then find myself listlessly drifting from a site to the next in a uninterrupted chain, often circular. It is a walk on the wild side, fortunately a typically short one.