Physics

Farewell, Chicco!

When I became an amateur chess player and I enrolled in the "Esteban Canal" chess club in Venice, about a quarter of a century ago, I met and got to know personally dozens of people sharing my interest for the game of the kings. Many of them beca ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 9 2009 - 1:46pm

Cosmological Phase Transition- New Model Suggests Dark Energy 'Froze' The Universe

Imagine a time when the entire universe froze- according to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size it is today.    A cosmological phase transition, similar to ...

Article - News Staff - May 10 2009 - 9:21am

Coming Clean

Chessplayers are a strange lot. Those who get attracted by the game and end up sticking to it, making it the game of their life, are typically intelligent, creative thinkers; yet among them one may usually count a unusually large number of nutcases. It is ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 18 2009 - 3:25am

A Sunday Afternoon in New York

On my way back to CERN from Fermilab (yes, I am betting on two tables at a time these days, as our Poker-addict friend Garth Sundem suggests), I made a 7-hour stopover in New York. Originally this was meant to save money to my employer, because other combi ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 11 2009 - 12:07pm

Is Austria Leaving CERN?

With an unexpected move, the Austrian Minister of Research and Science, Johannes Hahn, announced last Friday that he intends to put an end to the 50-year-long participation of Austria to CERN. Such a move is hard to understand, in light of the great prosp ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 11 2009 - 3:08pm

Dark Matter and Dark Energy as Undiscovered Particles of Scalar and Vector Fields.

Dark matter, dark energy and scalar tensor vector theories of gravity are widely thought of as at odds.  I have shown that if the scalar and vector fields common to alternative gravities are considered as any other quantum fields on a curved space time the ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - Jul 5 2009 - 9:26pm

Jamming Analysis- Condensed Matter Physics Gets Cool Again

Researchers in condensed matter physics at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago have created an experimental and computer model to study how jamming, the physical process in which collections of particles are crammed together to beh ...

Article - News Staff - May 13 2009 - 9:02pm

Nit-Picking On The Omega_b Discovery

A first observation of the Omega_b baryon-a quite exotic particle composed of a bottom quark and two strange quarks- has been recently published by the DZERO collaboration. Their paper claims to observe the so-far-unseen particle in 1.3 inverse femtobarns ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Sep 14 2009 - 7:49am

Nit-Picking On The Omega_b Baryon: Part II

In a previous article here I considered from a statistical standpoint the signal of Omega_b candidate decays extracted by the DZERO collaboration in a large dataset of proton-antiproton collisions-the ones produced by today's most powerful hadron coll ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 18 2009 - 3:29pm

Austria will not leave CERN

Good news today. Yesterday afternoon Werner Faymann, the Austrian Federal Chancellor, announced that Austria will not leave CERN, as previously suggested. An official confirmation of this decision will be received this afternoon by letter by the President ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 19 2009 - 10:45pm