Physics

Alas, Poor Proton! I Knew Him, Rydberg Constant

Think a a mere 0.0350 millionth of a millionth of a millimeter is unimportant?  Think again.    At the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, an international team of researchers has now measured the proton with experiments they say are ten times more acc ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 16 2010 - 12:50pm

Status Of The "Find The Higgs" Plot

The CDF experiment has just released their new average of top quark mass measurements, obtained with analyses that use up to 5.6 inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions provided by the 2-TeV Tevatron collider: the new measurement is  M(top) = 17 ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 13 2010 - 12:45pm

The Rumored Rumor Had Been Rumored Before

Funny. While dozens of online media are abuzz with the (non)-news, and while Fermilab Today tweets that there is no Higgs in store for us and a blogger in search of fame is just spreading unconfirmed voices which have no foundation, Lubos Motl over at the ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 13 2010 - 2:49pm

Prayer to the Funding Agency Reviewer

Prayer to the Funding Agency Reviewer (dedicated to those who worry about the detrimental effect of rumours) Oh Funding Reviewer, on whose hands Rests the destiny of full many an experiment: Be true to yourself, and bias not Thy sober judgement through th ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 15 2010 - 5:27am

So Was The Rumor More Than Just A Rumor, Or Was It A Honest Rumor?

So, now we know. There is no 3-sigma signal from the Tevatron.... Sure, because they have not combined their MSSM searches yet! Crucification I will spend little time here discussing the various colourful ways by means of which I have been depicted:- unrel ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 17 2010 - 8:17pm

ATLAS Reach For The Higgs Boson

The Atlas collaboration made public, just in time for the 2010 ICHEP conference in Paris, the projected reach of their searches for standard model Higgs bosons. This is a whole set of interesting new results which, although necessarily still based on simul ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 21 2010 - 6:59am

Help Me Write A Suitable Disclaimer

I am preparing a disclaimer to be added to the bottom of my posts here. The problem I am trying to solve-at least in part- is that the colleagues in the scientific collaborations I work for apparently fear that I be identified, by science reporters or othe ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 22 2010 - 6:17am

Upsilon Mesons Popping Up In LHC Data

The CMS collaboration at the LHC collider has just produced its very first results on the production of Upsilon particles, with 280 inverse nanobarns of proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV center-of-mass energy. I wish to discuss these results here, to expla ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 23 2010 - 9:33am

Extreme Amateur Science: Building the Sun in your Basement

Mark Suppes' Fusion Reactor In 2008, DPR discussed the emergence of an extreme case of amateur research [READ more] where a growing number of independent citizens (see the list) are developing working fusion reactors at home. ...

Blog Post - Matthew T. Dearing - Jul 25 2010 - 8:04pm

Pessimist in Elafonisos

While a thousand physicists gather in hot Paris and listen to talk after talk, I am confined in a small island of the Mediterranean, trying to relax and gather my ideas for the next few aggressive months of data analysis, a course of subnuclear physics in ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jul 24 2010 - 6:20am