At CERN, while we are about to shed light on the fundamental question of the creation of mass after the Big Bang, we are also close to solving another basic mass-related problem. The kilogram is the only base unit of the International System of Units (SI) whose official definition is still based on a material [...]
Ladies & Gentlemen, Protons & Neutrons, The Large Hadron Collider’s Accelerator Division has successfully collided, for the first time, two 4 TeV proton beams! Congratulations to all who made this possible. I can promise that everyone is looking forward to what may be discovered! Now enjoy some images courteous of @lhcstatus and @ATLASExperiment. [...]
Antonio Ereditato resigns as OPERA spokeperson following the failure of the supeluminal neutrino affair. He will be part of history but through a harsh lesson we all learned. He remembers me another character of history of physics in a similar situation, Prosper-René Blondlot and N ray affair. So, science is a self-correcting process but some [...]
An international collaboration of scientists has reported a landmark calculation of the decay process of a kaon into two pions, using breakthrough techniques on some of the world's fastest supercomputers.
: Physics Without Ideology Bite by Bite The search for a theory of everything : satire about bad candidates and gentle fun about good candidates , such as the strand-spaghetti . model 29 March 2012 How fundamental physics research is influenced by violent men Sabine Hossenfelder has a new preprint , on minimum length in nature : http : arxiv.org abs 1203.6191 Read it . What you find is a 70 page overview and not one conclusion that is noteworthy . It only sums up 80 years of research by saying that minimal length is implicit in essentially all of modern physics , but that its existence is still an open . issue How can she make such a weak statement in the field she dedicated her life to To understand this you must know that she is constantly attacked by one of the worst woman-haters around
The National Science Board announced Monday that it chose Leon Lederman as the 2012 recipient of the Vannevar Bush Award. The award is given to people who are lifelong leaders in science and technology and who have made substantial contributions to the welfare of the nation. While the general public might know him best for [...]
The Majorana Demonstrator collaboration began moving their experiment into the Davis Campus on the 4850 Level this week.
At the end of my last post, I left you all with the above plot (from this ATLAS conference note) without any real explanations. It’s actually quite a nice result, so I thought I might go through it in a little more detail today. So what does the plot show? Reading the axes, it shows [...]
Today, I’m going to be talking about some lesser known LHCb results. In fact, I’m going to discuss physics that some people thought LHCb couldn’t do, given the detector and software design. What am I going to be talking about? Electroweak physics. Yes, you read that right, not the heavy quark physics which LHCb was [...]
At the moment the LHC is making the transition from no beams to stable beams. It’s a complicated process that needs many crosschecks and calibrations so it takes a long time (they have already been working on the transition since mid February.) The energy is increasing from 7TeV to 8TeV, and the beams are being [...]
So as many are finding out today the world of High Energy Physics (HEP) in the US is having its future further blurred with the announcement from the Office of Science directors announcement that the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) that “we cannot support the LBNE project as it is currently configured…(this decision) is a [...]
Following my recent work on stochastic processes and quantum mechanics (see here and here), after I showed its existence with numerical computation (see here), this time I moved one step forward with an experimental setup. The idea come out from my son Giorgio. He is a teen with a lot of ideas and was of [...]
If attendees at the welcome reception for CERN’s first artist-in-residence learned one thing last night, it was that Julius von Bismarck is not afraid to disrupt others with his art.
Can you think of any? Here’s what I mean. When we set about justifying basic research in fundamental science, we tend to offer multiple rationales. One (the easy and most obviously legitimate one) is that we’re simply curious about how the world works, and discovery is its own reward. But often we trot out another [...]
The decommissioning of the Tevatron represented the end of an era, but it also is ushering in the next generation of physics by providing valuable equipment to other experiments.
No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog post. One of the amusing tales in particle physics is the story of how the “penguin diagram” got its name. We won’t go into that here, instead, we’ll make use of some of the tools we’ve developed with Feynman diagrams to understand the physics behind [...]
Scientists on the ICARUS experiment at Gran Sasso, Italy, announced today that they had found no evidence of superluminal neutrinos in a cross-check of earlier analysis from the OPERA experiment, also located at Gran Sasso.
Retired CERN physicist Cristoforo Benvenuti learned a thing or two about building a better solar panel through his work on particle accelerators. The Geneva International Airport recently ordered 300.
TweetRichard Feynman on pages 24 and 25 of his book “The Character of Physical Laws” describes how both gravitational and electrical forces are linked in terms of a common relationship with respect to the inverse square law. Richard Feynman – Law of Gravitation "The inverse square law appears again in the electrical laws, for instance, [...]
Scientists recently proved possible a way to converse when radio waves won’t do. For the first time, physicists have successfully transmitted a message using neutrinos.
The Tevatron may be shut down for good, but – as evidenced by the catalogue of results presented at this week’s Rencontres de Moriond conference – the collider’s experiments still have plenty to say. In some areas, the Fermilab experiments still hold the advantage over those at the higher-powered Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
On March 7, Alan Alda, the actor best known for playing medic Hawkeye Pierce on yesteryear’s TV series M*A*S*H, visited the home of the Large Hadron Collider, CERN.