A Quantum Diaries Survivor

While exchanging ideas with a dear colleague of mine on possible applications of differentiable programming to the optimization of the design of detection instruments, I came about an interesting, crazy idea which, since I do not have enough time to investigate at the moment, is only suitable for this blog. The rationale is that if it is a viable, patentable idea worth something, once it is published here it becomes of public knowledge and hence non-patentable anymore... Which in turn means nobody owns it, and it can be exploited without problem, like the Salk vaccine.

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Katrin Link for APPEC, the Astro-Particle Physics European Consortium. APPEC is a consortium of 19 funding agencies, national government institutions, and institutes from 17 European countries, which is responsible for coordinating and funding national research efforts in astroparticle physics. The interview stems from the help that the JENAA group (a joint effort of APPEC, NuPECC and ECFA) is trying to offer to the research plan of the MODE collaboration, a group of physicists and computer scientists for which I am serving as the scientific coordinator.

Design and purpose are definitely not two things that scientists consider as their guiding ideas in trying to decypher the fabric of our Universe, or of natural phenomena in general. So teleology should not belong to this blog, I agree.

Today the University of Padova has issued a call for Ph. D. positions to start in October 2021, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy has 23 new openings. The English version of the call page is here.

Note: this is an updated version of the article. For the original discussion of the muon anomaly, published before the release of results, please scroll down.

The remains of what probably was Marni Dee Sheppeard were found last week in the mountains of the west coast of New Zealand, near Otira. Although a positive identification is still pending, this does seem to mean that Marni has died while hiking in her beloved mountains, some time between mid November and December of last year.

Almost exactly 15 years ago, I was following a nice conference in the Azores island of San Miguel, where I witnessed with a bit of gloom how the Standard Model was capable of explaining to the tiniest level all observed features not only of electroweak physics observables, but also of low-energy hadronic physics in weak decays of bottom hadrons, from a number of different experiments. I especially remember a talk by Guido Martinelli, among others, who was remarking that if new physics was there, it was really well concealed.

Ok, don't get me wrong here - the title of this post is not meant to mock my LHCb colleagues. I have friends there, and the experiment has been doing amazing physics in the past decade, with scores of new particles found, and tough questions posed to the data and to the Standard Model.

Last Monday at 10.30AM I eagerly queued up at the International Red Cross site of Padova, the town where I live and work, to receive a first vaccination shot against Covid-19. I duly received my dose and went back home with some relief. Little did I know that my relief would turn to anger very soon. My anger arose when I soon heard the news that the treatment with the vaccine I had been given, Astra-Zeneca, was being temporarily stopped, following the detection of a possible adverse reaction. But you should read on before you conclude that I am an idiot (as you indeed should, if the above was all there is to it).

And to complement the title: "...and what the heck is that, anyway?" 

The Italian "Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei" is an old institution, founded in 1603 to promote and cultivate natural science studies. It counted Galileo Galilei as a member, and it has never ceased to pursue its goal. Nowadays, it is an excellence cultural centre and is among the advisors of the President of the Republic.

I have put this post under the "psychology" category, although it discusses a chess game, for one important reason. Chess is a game, an art, a sport - you can categorize it in many different ways. However, what characterizes chess the most, in my opinion (an educated one, as I am an amateur with a long past of chess tournaments)  is the chance it gives to the players to mess up with each other's mind.