Category theory is a branch of mathematics which attempts a formalization in terms of simple elements and associations between them. A rather abstract construction, indeed, and certainly one above my head (I am an experimentalist, for god's sake!).

This morning I received a copy of the book "WHAT NEXT ? White Paper of CSN1", a publication of the Italian INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics) addressing the question of what awaits us after the Higgs discovery, and what projects should be supported in the long-term future of HEP.
The book is the result of one year of work by many colleagues who have actively participated in four working groups and one task force, producing some preliminary studies of the discovery potential of this or that machine, and of the most important questions that need to be answered -and the projects that appear more suited to answer them. Editors of the work are Franco Bedeschi, Roberto Tenchini, and John Walsh.

The working groups were thus titled:

The title of this post is also the title of a self-published book by George Triantaphyllou, a greek physicist whom I met two weeks ago in Kolimbari, when we attended the ICNFP 2015 conference. I had met George at the same conference three years before, and this year we had some time to chat during a nice excursion in a botanical garden near Chania and at the conference dinner. As he was kind enough to offer me a copy of his book, I thought I would relate about it here today.

The first really exciting thing from Run 2 at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (at least for me) has finally appeared. A 2.9 TeV dielectron event was recorded by CMS on August 22. At this mass a new Z' boson is not excluded by Run 1 searches.... And in the whole Run 1 data the highest-mass dielectron event collected by CMS was only 1.8 TeV. So by raising the centre-of-mass energy by 60% we collect a 60%-higher-mass event, but with 0.5% of the collisions. It is nice to think that the event might really be the first hint of a new resonance !

Images of the systematic destruction of archaeological sites and art pieces in Syria are no news any more, but I was especially saddened to see before/after aerial pictures of Palmyra's site today, which demonstrate how the beautiful temple of Bel has been completely destroyed by explosives. A picture of the temple is shown below.