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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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The Hubble Legacy Archive For You

The Hubble Legacy Archive For You

Mar 29 2012 | comment(s)

The Hubble Legacy Archive is now open for you to browse ! Thousands of unscrutinized images of the sky as pictured by the Hubble Space Telescope are there for you to browse, reprocess, analyze. They even challenge you to find hidden treasures, and submit them for their scrutiny. It is a marvelous opportunity to get personal with all the beauties of our cosmos. There is an online tool for changing colours and contrast of each picture.

Have a look at what you can find with just seconds of searches: the picture below portraits one of my favourite targets in late summer nights, Stephan's quintet (here shown only four of the main components).



DZERO Confirms New Chi_b(3P) State

DZERO Confirms New Chi_b(3P) State

Mar 28 2012 | comment(s)

While most High-Energy Physicists nowadays are kept busy with the idle search for non-existent new physics beyond the standard model in the form of improbable Supersymmetric particles, phantom leptoquarks, fairy Z' resonances, putative colorons, invented gravitinos, and what not, the subset of lucky experimentalists who decided to go against the flow and kept their feet on the ground are provided with endless entertainment in the study of resonances that are as real as your breakfast today. 
The Say Of The Week - Higgs Properties

The Say Of The Week - Higgs Properties

Mar 23 2012 | comment(s)

After fixing the Higgs boson mass to the best fit value mh = 125 GeV, the SM does not have any free parameter left to vary. Therefore all the anomalies in the present data must be statistical fluctuations and disappear with more statistics. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the average of all data agrees with the SM prediction [...] and the global χ2 is good: 16 for 15 dof (we recall that with n>>1 degrees of freedom one expects χ2 = n+-sqrt(n) ).
The Higgs Mass In Atomic Mass Units

The Higgs Mass In Atomic Mass Units

Mar 20 2012 | comment(s)

Whenever I try to explain something about particle physics to a layman, I run into the problem of mass/energy units. A Giga-electronVolt is not something you may expect people to be familiar with, and on the other hand it is not appealing to explain directly how it is defined: "if you take an electron and accelerate it by passing it through a potential difference of one billion Volts, that's the energy it has at the end: one GeV": this distracts the listeners by forcing them to focus on electrostatics, with the potential outcome that the conversation may diverge due to additional questions, like "Does the electric field need be uniform ?" or even, "What is a potential difference ?".
The Move I Did Not Find

The Move I Did Not Find

Mar 19 2012 | comment(s)

There is nothing like computer-assisted post-mortem analysis of your chess games to get you back to reality about the potential of your brain: the computer sees so much more than you do, and so much quicker, that you can't help throwing your hands up sometimes.
ICARUS Refutes OPERA's Superluminal Neutrinos - AGAIN!

ICARUS Refutes OPERA's Superluminal Neutrinos - AGAIN!

Mar 16 2012 | comment(s)

The ICARUS collaboration - operating a neutrino detector sitting not far from the OPERA experiment in the underground Laboratori del Gran Sasso in Italy - produced a refutation of the superluminality of neutrinos a while ago. That refutation was based on studying the energy spectrum of the neutrinos in the CNGS beam, coming from CERN through a trip of 700 km under the Earth's crust: superluminal neutrinos should have lost some energy due to electroweak radiation, which was not borne out by the data.