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The Problem With Peer Review

In a world where misinformation, voluntary or accidental, reigns supreme; in a world where lies...

Interna

In the past few years my activities on this site - but I would say more in general, as the same...

The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown

Perhaps the most important thing to get right from the start, in most statistical problems, is...

Summer Lectures In AI

Winter is not over yet, but I am already busy fixing the details of some conferences, schools,...

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Tommaso DorigoRSS Feed of this column.

Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist, who works for the INFN at the University of Padova, and collaborates with the CMS and the SWGO experiments. He is the president of the Read More »

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My interview at Festivaletteratura

My interview at Festivaletteratura

Sep 12 2012 | comment(s)

At this link you can find the video of an interview I gave for Festivaletteratura Mantova (the literature festival held last week). I discuss science outreach, the media, the discovery of the Higgs boson and its impact on laypersons, and a more technical issue about the origin of mass. Unfortunately the interview is longish and I do not know whether I'll find the stamina to produce a writeup in English for this site. We'll see...


Why Quarks Come In Three Colours And Have Fractional Charge

Why Quarks Come In Three Colours And Have Fractional Charge

Sep 11 2012 | comment(s)

It sometimes happens that my comments in the threads of my own blog get long and detailed (do not take this as me boasting about anything - it is just a fact). When that happens, I reason that they deserve to be promoted to a post by themselves, because threads are read by way fewer readers, and some of them might thus lose some interesting bit.

Because of the above I am (re)posting the text below, which explains some "a priori" reasons why quarks come with fractional electric charges in multiples of one third, why the sum of charges of fermions in one family nullify, and why our universe chose to have quarks of three colours. Beware, some non-trivial concepts of quantum field theory are needed, but I will try to make this as painless as possible (but not more).
Multiverse: A Religion ?

Multiverse: A Religion ?

Sep 10 2012 | comment(s)

Last Saturday night Gian Francesco Giudice and I discussed the discovery of the Higgs boson and its aftermath in front of a wide audience gathered in the Aula Magna of Mantova University.

The event was #173 in the wide program of the town's literature festival, a week of seminars, interviews, performances by authors of books, journalists, and intellectuals in a broader sense.

5 Sigma: Writeup For Festivaletteratura

5 Sigma: Writeup For Festivaletteratura

Sep 05 2012 | comment(s)

On Friday evening I will be talking in the wonderful Piazza Mantegna, in downtown Mantova (see picture below). It is an event organized by Festivaletteratura (literature festival), where I will be armed with blackboard and chalks, plus a mike, and where I will explain the way a discovery of a new particle comes about.

On Saturday instead I will be at the aula magna of the Mantova University, where in company with Gian Francesco Giudice (a CERN theorist) I will discuss the Higgs boson discovery and the aftermath. That is a more "serious" event and we will be discussing in front of a paying audience. I hear that the event is already sold out, so it will (should) be interesting!
CMS Week in Lisbon

CMS Week in Lisbon

Sep 03 2012 | comment(s)

Large collaborations of physicists have a consolidated habit of meeting three or four times per year for a full week of discussions and talks. This has multiple purposes, one of them being the possibility to bring together members who live and work off-site (which may mean several thousand miles away from CERN). So, to alleviate a little the lab-centered life of experiments, one of these events every year is typically held away from the lab, in the site of one of the institutions participating in the experiment.
The Plot Of The Week - New SUSY Limits From ATLAS

The Plot Of The Week - New SUSY Limits From ATLAS

Sep 01 2012 | comment(s)

A new ATLAS search for supersymmetric signatures in 2011 LHC data has appeared last week in the arxiv. The result ? No hint of a signal, not even for ready money.

So if you are on a hurry, you can just have a glance at the graph below, which summarizes the measurement in terms of excluded regions of a slice of the complicated parameter space of SUSY theories.

Otherwise, if you want to know a bit more of what this is about, I can provide some detail.