Physics

A 325 GeV New Quark In DZERO Data?

Spring is my favourite season in Batavia, watching peaks blossom in every distribution... A comment by Lubos Motl (in the thread of a post of mine on Higgs searches in ZZ decay modes) alerted me of a new result by the DZERO collaboration, where a significa ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 26 2011 - 9:29am

Nielsen On The CDF Bump

Worth mentioning because of its irrelevance: that's my other choice for a post which points out a new preprint by H.Nielsen, the Danish physicist who became famous by hypothesizing that the future was influencing the past in order to prevent us from d ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 26 2011 - 9:06am

Jon Butterworth on the ATLAS Higgs Signal

Another comment on the ATLAS rumour is worth mentioning today, even if it comes a bit late, because it is written by Jon Butterworth, who is a ATLAS collaborator who also writes for the Guardian. You can find it here. In particular here's a notable qu ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 27 2011 - 3:10am

An Interview On The ATLAS Signal

The interest for the tentative new signal of a Higgs decay to photon pairs does not seem to cease. Yesterday I gave a short interview to Fabio De Sicot, on the latest Higgs rumour. Fabio works for an Italian radio station, Radio Città Fujiko. The interview ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 27 2011 - 8:31am

A Simple Derivation Of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

In his recent blog post " The World Is Not Woven From Real Stuff ", Sascha Vongehr wrote: Some merely claim that we need quantum mechanics so that the electron does not fall into the atom’s nucleus. Any classical electric charge would spiral into ...

Article - Ulrich Mohrhoff - Oct 9 2012 - 2:03am

Quantum Reflections

In his article “The World Is Not Woven From Real Stuff” Sascha Vongehr raised the important matter of quantum physics and our perception of the natural world. He argued that “the feeling that facts are just out there in a really existing world, is strictly ...

Blog Post - Steve Davis - Nov 3 2011 - 4:17am

The big bang was not an Explosion: However an explosion is a metaphor for what the big bang was.

The big bang was given it's name by Fred Hoyle, in order to make the theory sound absurd.  He metaphorically called it an explosion.   In the mist of time most people even some scientist lost the metaphor part of that and thought of it as an explosion ...

Blog Post - Hontas Farmer - May 1 2011 - 5:08pm

If Schrödinger Cats All Die, Do The Alive Ones Go To Hell?

Schrödinger’s cat is in a quantum superposition of two states, namely |Dead> and |Alive>. If we open the box and find the cat dead, where is the living one? You all know the answer: In the ‘parallel universe’ where I pull the cat out alive. Let me a ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Jun 8 2011 - 9:11pm

The Say Of The Week

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." R. Feynma ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 2 2011 - 1:48pm

Sexy Standard Model Symmetries 2: Experimental Corrections

Thanks to all that read my previous post, “Sexy Standard Model Symmetries”. Most probably did not notice quite a few technical exchanges between David Halliday and myself. I was pretty darn sure I had a way to represent electroweak symmetry using quaternio ...

Blog Post - Doug Sweetser - May 5 2011 - 8:19am