Physics

No Comment On The Latest Rumor

As many of you know, I expressed here my strong doubts that the rumoured Higgs signal found by members of the ATLAS collaboration in the two-photon final state was due to a real particle, and went as far as to bet 2:1 against it (you can take the bet by ju ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 6 2011 - 6:34am

Guess The Plot- Chapter 2

My attempt at stimulating your curiosity with a scientific graph last time worked quite well, and I want to try it again. This time, however, you should not consider yourself eligible to participate if you are an experimental particle physicist (or in the ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 6 2011 - 9:13am

Excess? What Excess? ATLAS Clarifies.

In a display of nonchalance that should teach us a thing or two, the ATLAS collaboration has put an end to the Easter Higgs Rumour (EHR), which brought the blogosphere in an excited state for at least a week, and experimentalists and theorists for even mor ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 10 2011 - 1:35pm

Schroedinger's Burlesque 2.0

Recently scientifically 2.0 so topical Schrödinger's cat jumped into being in the 1935 three-part article (in German) in Die Naturwissenschaften, just at the end of part one: Man kann auch ganz burleske Fälle konstruieren. Eine Katze wird in eine Sta ...

Article - Ladislav Kocbach - May 9 2011 - 4:44am

Guess the Plot 2- Solution

Okay, the riddle I posted two days ago   was indeed solved by theorists- albeit ones with good internet connections and smart search engines. The figure, pasted below for your convenience, is from the CDF collaboration, and it refers to a "famous" ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 9 2011 - 2:59pm

Gotta Get 11 Dirac Gamma Girls, Plus 5 Doing An Imaginary Twist

This is a new title: Gotta Get 11 Dirac Gamma Girls, Plus 5 Doing an Imaginary Twist [Note: based on discussions below, I decided to alter the title from "Gotta Get 16 Gamma Girls". The core figure in the blog is not of the 16 gammas in the Dira ...

Article - Doug Sweetser - Jun 14 2011 - 8:21pm

Rotating Schrödinger’s Cat To Death

You may suspect the beating of a dead horse by now, but the problem is actually that the animals in question are still alive. As was discussed, the alive cats expect to see something when the box opens. If we interact with the Schrödinger cat superpositio ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Jun 8 2011 - 9:08pm

A Top Cross Section Measurement I Like

The measurement of the production rate of top quark pairs at the Tevatron is by now a very well developed technology, where it is hard to invent anything new. Eight years ago, however, there was still the chance to develop new techniques and explore new la ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 14 2011 - 1:35am

Quantum Teleportation Of Cats

Time to reveal the solution to the cat killing mystery introduced in “ If Schrödinger's Cats All Die, Do the Alive ones go to Hell? ” and further explained in “ Rotating Schrödinger's Cat to Death ”. The solution is a huge letdown for all cat ha ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - May 16 2011 - 1:54pm

Choose Bins Wisely

The presentation of data is a very rich subject, on which there is a whole lot to discuss, even by restricting to the issues relevant to our dear field of experimental high-energy physics. Usually too little thought is given to it, even by expert researche ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 16 2011 - 11:33am