Physics

Collatz Conjecture: Decided Or Undecidable

Undecidability is weird, much weirder than quantum theory, which is benign by comparison. Let me give a simple example for something that may well be undecidable: Take any natural number N. If it is even, divide it by two. If it is odd, then first multipl ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - Jun 8 2011 - 11:13am

WIMPs Result Sheds Some Light On Dark Matter?

The expansion of the universe should slow as time marches on, some even conjectured it would slow and then collapse again- that's what all that mass and its gravity in the universe should do. But Hubble showed us distant supernovae in the 1990s and re ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 7 2011 - 11:59am

Ettore Majorana: The Mystery Might Be Solved

Ettore Majorana was maybe the most brilliant student of Enrico Fermi, and an outstanding physicist. He disappeared on March 25th 1938 at the age of 32 years, under mysterious circumstances and leaving no trace behind. The hypothesis that he committed suici ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 8 2011 - 3:41pm

Guess The Plot 4: Two Hypotheses

Today's guess of the plot will be very poor of comments on my side, for reasons I will disclose in due time. Also, it is unfortunately a rather expert-only one, since it represents something that experts will surely recognize for its generalities, whi ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 10 2011 - 2:43am

DZERO Refutes New CDF Dijet Resonance!

And here they come. Much awaited (and anticipated), today the DZERO collaboration presents their findings in the search of the same dijet resonance which made it to the New York Times as well as to several physics blogs around the web, and which brought fr ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 10 2011 - 9:41am

Entropic Gravity Snatches Spinoza Prize

The British have their Copley medals, the French the CNRS Gold medals, the Germans have Leibniz awards, and the Dutch... they have their Spinoza prizes. Each year three to four Spinoza laureates split a total of ten million euros (14.3 mln US$). In the Net ...

Blog Post - Johannes Koelman - Jun 11 2011 - 6:43pm

Gamma Gamma Girl Graphs

I got counter snarked. At the end of my blogs, I include what I call a snarky puzzle. If you can follow along with the technical parts of my blogs, a snarky puzzle is  suppose to be a playful but snide problem with a straightforward answer. David Halliday ...

Blog Post - Doug Sweetser - Jun 22 2011 - 11:02am

The Plot Of The Week- A Black Hole Candidate

CMS has recently produced an updated search for black hole production in the 7 TeV proton-proton collisions delivered by the LHC. The data sample now consists of 190 inverse picobarns of collisions collected in 2011, and the limits set on black hole produc ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 14 2011 - 2:57pm

LHC About to Reach The 1/fb Goal

The LHC has been running very well in the last few weeks, and I can announce, with some anticipation, that the 1-inverse-femtobarn line will be crossed in the next few days. Check it out in the figure below, which shows, together with the delivered luminos ...

Blog Post - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 14 2011 - 7:30am

Electron Neutrinos From Muon Neutrinos!

New results from the T2K collaboration have been presented at a KEK Physics Seminar today, and they are really interesting stuff. In a nutshell, six electron neutrino events have been seen by their far detector, illuminated by a pure and intense beam of mu ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Jun 15 2011 - 7:13am