Today I gave a seminar at the Physics Department of the University of Helsinki, to talk of "Controversial Phenomena in Collider Data and the 5-Sigma Criterion in HEP", invited by Juska Pekkanen and Mikko Voutilanen, two CMS colleagues. 
The seminar is more or less the same I have given several times in the past year around Europe and the US. It contains some statistics, some HEP history, and some material taken from my recent book, "Anomaly!".

The CMS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider has pulled off an extremely neat new measurement of the Higgs boson production rate - one which, for some reasons, is extraordinary in its own right.

Despite being the decay mode with the highest probability (two thirds of Higgs bosons die that way), the H->bb process is among the most elusive to put in evidence in LHC data, because b-quarks are quite commonplace there. 

As I explained in the previous post of this series, students in high schools of the Venice area have been asked to produce artistic works inspired by LHC physics research, and in particular the Higgs boson.

This is the first of a series of posts that will publish the results of artistic work by high-school students of three schools in Venice, who participate in a contest and exposition connected to the initiative "Art and Science across Italy", an initiative of the network CREATIONS, funded by the Horizon 2020 programme

The European Commission has launched a couple of weeks ago the campaign "Europe in my region 2017", an initiative aimed at getting the general public informed on the projects funded by the European Community in their area of residence or activity. There are open day events scheduled a bit everywhere, a blog contest, a photo contest, and other initiatives of interest.

Dr. Alex Durig (see picture) is a professional freelance writer, with a PhD in social psychology from Indiana University (1992). He has authored seven books in his specialization of perception and logic. He claims to have experienced great frustration resolving his experience of perception and logic when it comes to physics, but he says he no longer feels crazy, ever since Anomaly! was published. So I am offering this space to him to hear what he has to say about that...





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On Dorigo's Anomaly! and the Social Psychology of Professional Discourse in Physics, by Alex Durig