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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 Quote of the Week: Audio and Video Quarks!

The Quote of the Week: Audio and Video Quarks!

Mar 21 2010 | comment(s)

The replication of fermion generations is one of the outstanding puzzles in particle physics. Could there be also a fourth generation of quarks and leptons ? There is no convincing theoretical or experimental reason why not. In some grand unified schemes consistency with the evolution of masses and couplings may indicate only three generations, but these models are not uniquely established. Thus it is important for collider experiments to continue the search [...]
Higgs Mass Limits: 130-210 GeV !!

Higgs Mass Limits: 130-210 GeV !!

Mar 19 2010 | comment(s)

A brand new result in Higgs boson physics has been presented by my old-time CDF colleague Wei-Ming Yao at the Moriond QCD conference two days ago. It is the combination of CDF and DZERO limits on the Higgs boson, and it constitutes a significant advancement in our knowledge of the standard model.

The result is simple to state in a single sentence, although it will take me several pages to explain it acceptably. The Higgs boson is excluded at 95% confidence level in the 130-210 GeV mass range, if there are four generations of matter fields.
The Say of the Week

The Say of the Week

Mar 16 2010 | comment(s)

"A male astrophysicist talks physics to the astronomers and astronomy to the physicists, but then he meets another astrophysicist, and they discuss women."

Unknown
Have You Ever Seen A Galaxy ?

Have You Ever Seen A Galaxy ?

Mar 15 2010 | comment(s)

Have you ever seen a galaxy ?

I mean, not a picture of one. The real thing. A picture is a representation of reality, and as such it conveys to our senses only a pale suggestion of the stimulation that experiencing the real thing provides. In a world where images, still and in motion, have a dominant role in our lives, we tend to forget how different are some things when we experience them directly.
Two Jets, Two Protons, Nothing Else

Two Jets, Two Protons, Nothing Else

Mar 13 2010 | comment(s)

I was delighted to receive news this afternoon of three new interesting results produced by the DZERO collaboration in the analysis of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) processes.

QCD, the theory of strong interactions between quarks and gluons, is the "boring" part of the physics of high-energy hadron-hadron collisions. It used to be more more exciting twenty years ago, when the theoretical calculations were not as refined as they are now, and there was still a lot to understand in the physics of strong interactions between quarks and gluons. But nowadays, things are much more clear.
How Do We Fix Science Journalism ? Simple - We Don't.

How Do We Fix Science Journalism ? Simple - We Don't.

Mar 09 2010 | comment(s)

How do we fix science journalism ? Simple: we don't. We let it sink, and be reborn in a different form.

It is rather utopic to insist that in a world of changing means of communications, a world where printed matter is losing ground to the advantage of electronic media, the diffusion of scientific information may or shall stay the same.