Physics

Snarky Puzzle Answers 2

This blog contains four snaky puzzle questions, their back stories, answers, and discussions. Due to family responsibilities, the video blog must be delayed until at least Thursday. click or skip a reading of this blog: April 18- Higgs? We ain’t got no Hig ...

Blog Post - Doug Sweetser - May 25 2011 - 12:12pm

For Adlène Hicheur

I was unaware of the following story, which was brought to my attention by Monica Pepe-Altarelli yesterday. Since I totally agree that nobody should be detained without proof of guilt for long periods of time, and since we are talking of a physicist, I am ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 20 2011 - 5:30pm

On Narrow Bumps

A question posed by Tony Smith in the thread of the previous post (which dealt with the choice of the bin width in histograms) triggered me to do a little work to produce a convincing answer to him. The issue is the following. Tony got interested in a few ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 18 2011 - 3:48am

Disproving Local Realism

Modern physics has disproved direct realism: There is no locally realistic description of our world possible. Although I have already explained this differently at several places, for example by refusing 'real stuff' as being a good explanation ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Mar 22 2013 - 12:17pm

To Be Is To Be Measured (Part 1)

Quantum mechanics allows us to perform the following experiment (see the article by David Mermin in Physics Today Vol. 38 No. 4): ...

Article - Ulrich Mohrhoff - May 22 2011 - 8:29pm

The Plot Of The Week- Same-Sign Dileptons

The plot of the week is actually a table this week. A histogram with several background components can be extremely informative, but sometimes a table provides more detail and one can focus better on interesting features. The table below has been produced ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 23 2011 - 6:43am

LHC Reaches 10^33 Luminosity!

Just a short post to mention that the Large Hadron Collider has reached tonight the top instantaneous luminosity of 1.075 * 10^33 cm^-2 s^-1. This is a new record for high-energy hadron colliders, improving over precedent records already set this year by t ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 23 2011 - 3:47am

CMS Sees Hint Of Upsilon Suppression In Quark-Gluon Plasma!

A few months ago LHC took a special run of proton-proton collisions at  2.76 TeV. Why the lower energy, now that we are accustomed to searching for new phenomena at the highest available energy of 7 TeV? Because of the wish to compare lead-lead collisions, ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - May 23 2011 - 7:30am

Argand Plane Crash

The complex plane should be known as the Wessel plane, after the Norwegian-Danish land surveyor. His paper of 1799 was ignored because few were reading the preprint server at that time. Mr. Bookshop in the big city of Paris gets his name associated with gr ...

Blog Post - Doug Sweetser - May 25 2011 - 1:00am

Guess The Plot 3- and a tribute

Upon being reminded by an automated messaging system, somewhat disturbingly, that today would be the birthday of an esteemed colleague-were he not dead- I decided to post a "guess the plot" entry which pays him a tribute. The figure below is for ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - May 24 2011 - 9:39am