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On A Roll

What? Another boring chess game?Buzz off, this is my blog, and if I feel like posting a chess game...

When The Attack Plays Itself

After a very intense day at work, I sought some relaxation in online blitz chess today. And the...

Toponium Found By CMS!

The highest-mass subnuclear particle ever observed used to the the top quark. Measured for the...

The Problem With Peer Review

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

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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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Amanda Knox: Guilty

Amanda Knox: Guilty

Dec 04 2009 | comment(s)

The verdict is out: Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito killed Meredith Kercher.

The murder of the young British student in Perugia two years ago was a highly disputed case, and the proof of guilt of the two young lovers -a US citizen studying in Perugia and her boyfriend- appears largely based on indicia, and not on the more solid ground one usually expects for a conviction in similar instances.
Plot Of The Week - Top Quarks Aplenty

Plot Of The Week - Top Quarks Aplenty

Dec 03 2009 | comment(s)

I do not know about you, but top quarks fascinate me. Since my early years as a student in particle physics I participated in the top search, and then the top discovery, with the CDF experiment at the Tevatron collider; and I then worked for many more years with top quark samples. And that particle is fascinating for many different reasons: its phenomenology, the richness of its decays, its mass close to the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking.

I feel honored by having had a chance to study the first few tens of top quark events that physicists have been able to produce, and yet I regret that during the last few years I have been unable to put my hands on the much larger datasets collected by the CDF experiment.
Carnival of Physics

Carnival of Physics

Nov 30 2009 | comment(s)

The Carnival of Physics is an event organized by Gravità Zero and Gravedad Cero, two sites of scientific outreach in Italy and Spain. I participate with three recent articles which are published on their site. Most other contributions are in Italian and Spanish, but you might still find it interesting to visit the two sites (which feature different contributions). Among the sponsors of this enterprise are WIRED, El Pais, Publico, and La Stampa.




LHC Breaks Beam Energy Record!

LHC Breaks Beam Energy Record!

Nov 30 2009 | comment(s)

Last night the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has circulated the highest-energy beams of particles ever produced. The beam energy has been brought up from the injection energy of 450 GeV to 1.18 TeV, thus outperforming by 20% the flattop beam energy of the Tevatron collider, Fermilab's proton-antiproton collider, which operates at a beam energy of 980 GeV.
Watch Venice's Acqua Alta Tomorrow!

Watch Venice's Acqua Alta Tomorrow!

Nov 29 2009 | comment(s)

Tomorrow morning Venice will sink under a maximum tide predicted to reach 1.30 meters above average sea level. The event will occur at 8.35AM, a time when Venetian residents are in the streets trying to bring children to school or to reach their workplace. You can see the predicted evolution of the tide in the graph below, where the red curve shows the time variation of the season's average, and the blue one the actual prediction for tomorrow. The peak of 130 cm above average sea level is predicted to occur at 8.35AM -which is 2.35AM in New York, or 5.35PM in Tokyo.
The Say Of The Week

The Say Of The Week

Nov 28 2009 | comment(s)

"There is no such thing as a theoretical uncertainty. All there is is theoretical stupidity"

Guido Altarelli