I believe it is appropriate if I restart this column today, after a two-month period of semi-inactivity, with a description of what has been going on in my private - well, semi-private - life.
The few of you who regularly follow this blog may be rightly wondering why I have not published new posts in the last two weeks. The reason is overload. I have a few deadlines on January 31 that I need to meet, and several other errands to attend in the meantime. Hence I have decided to leave the blog behind until the end of this month.
As a follow-up of yesterday's post on the very opportune Pomeranchuk prize given to Stan Brodsky, I would like to report here on a funny anecdote Stan related to me today. The anecdote is interesting to all of us who believe the world of physics research is fully trans-national - well, it is, but there is apparently some more work to do to improve the situation further.
I was quite happy to hear today that Stan Brodsky, a professor of particle physics and astrophysics at Stanford University, has received together with Victor Fadin the 2015 Pomeranchuk Prize from the Russian Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) of Moscow. Stan is a great guy and his contributions to QCD are of wide range.
Two weeks have passed since the CERN Jamboree of December 15th, which will be always remembered for the spurious 750 GeV signal observed by ATLAS and CMS in their mass spectra of photon pairs. It is unfortunate, as dozens of very important new measurements and search results were shown by the experiments on that occasion, but they all got overshadowed by a fluctuation.