Physics

The Plot Of The Week- Trileptons From Internal Conversions

A process which caught some of the LHC Higgs analysts by surprise in the recent run of analyses for summer 2011 conferences is the production of multiple-lepton events by a process called "internal photon conversion in Z events". What is it, and ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 28 2011 - 5:58am

As Is Well Known About Elliptic Orbits

When we teach, and even communicate with people whom we assume to belong to some sort of common circle with ourselves, we simply assume that our audience knows or at least have heard about certain things. For example, with people belonging in some sense to ...

Article - Ladislav Kocbach - Oct 30 2011 - 11:06am

Sixty Nanoseconds

In the OPERA experiment, the distance between CERN and Gran Sasso was approximately 450 miles. The difference between the neutrino arrival and the calculated speed of light was approximately 60 nanoseconds. If the results are confirmed by FERMI, it would m ...

Blog Post - Bobby Knight - Oct 30 2011 - 8:05am

Quantum Vacuum: How To Balance Nothingness

What is nothingness? It's a philosophical question, to be sure, but in physics the ground state of the universe can't be described by the absence of all matter, contend some theoretical physicists. There must be a 'quantum vacuum'. The ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2011 - 12:01pm

Faster Than Light Neutrinos And Relativity

There is a certain amount of confusion on the relationship between Einstein's Theory of Relativity and the recent experimental results that seem to point towards neutrinos that are faster than light by an amount of about 7 km/s. So let me try to clari ...

Article - Paolo Ciafaloni - Oct 31 2011 - 10:36am

ELI to Join the Hunt for Ghost Particles (Halloween Edition)

Europe is moving forward at high speed to build ELI (Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility), to be completed by the end of the century. The location for the facility will be announced next year, possibly at the opening ceremony of the summ ...

Blog Post - Bobby Knight - Oct 31 2011 - 6:14am

RETRACTION: Deriving And Fixing The Force Equations (6/5+1)

RETRACTION: I have decided to retract three blogs (Deriving … 4/5, 5/5, 6/5+1). I was unable to figure out a reasonable statement concerning gauge symmetry. When the blogs were initially written, I focused on the field equations, mainly the Gauss-like law ...

Article - Doug Sweetser - Nov 8 2011 - 12:38am

The First Time I Met Paolo G.

The following is an excerpt from a book I am working on intermittently. I do not know whether the project will ever see the light, and it just occurred to me that I could share a tiny bit of it with you in my blog. Enjoy!---- ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Nov 3 2011 - 7:36am

Future Influence: The Quantum Physics Of Precognition Or Pseudoscience?

From time to time and against strong resistance from the scientific establishment, inspired scientists come out of the closet and dare to publicly consider whether the future can influence the present. Is it in principle possible that we may be able to pa ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Dec 5 2011 - 3:48am

Riling Relaxed Systems- A New Idea On Equilibrium

In a recent study, scientists used simulations to model the behavior of a closed, granular system comprising a chain of equal-sized spheres that touch one another and are sandwiched between two walls. Energy travels through this system as solitary waves, ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 3 2011 - 4:31pm