I once was an active chessplayer, but work duties have long taken tournaments off my plate - I simply do not have the time to sit through long hours of chess battles. So I play blitz online on chess.com (my handle is "tommasodorigo", in case you wondered).
Large amounts of ink (well, electrons) have been spilt over the web in the past few months to discuss the #MeToo movement. It seems this blog will eventually join the crowd, although a bit belatedly, and with a slightly different viewing angle. After keeping silent on the matter, I am stimulated to discuss it after a BuzzFeed article exposed several cases of alleged sexual harassment and related inappropriate behavior by world-class cosmologist-cum-science-pop-guy-cum-skeptic Lawrence Krauss. Plus, yesterday was international women's day, and I never miss a chance to miss a deadline.
Statistical hypothesis testing is quite boring if you apply it to cases where you know the answer, or where the data speak loud and clear about one hypothesis being true or false. Life at the interface between testability and untestability is much more fun.
This is just a short note - a record-keeping, if you like - to report that my long review on "Collider Searches for Diboson Resonances" has now appeared on the online Elsevier site of the journal "Progress of Particle and Nuclear Physics". I had previously pointed to the preprint version of the same article on this blog, with the aim of getting feedback from experts in the field, and I am happy that this has indeed happened: I was able to integrate some corrections from Robert Shrock, a theorist at SUNY, as well as some integrations to the references list by a couple of other colleagues.
Dark Matter (DM), the mysterious substance that vastly dominates the total mass of our universe, is certainly one of the most surprising and tough puzzles of contemporary science. We do not know what DM is, but on the other hand we have a large body of evidence that there must be "something" in the universe that causes a host of effects we observe and which would have no decent explanation otherwise.
Great news for the CMS experiment - and for Italy, and for my institution, Padova, where I coordinate accelerator-based physics research for INFN. Professor Roberto Carlin, a longtime member of the CMS experiment, where he has taken many important roles in the construction and operations of the experiment, and recently was deputy spokesperson, has now been elected spokesperson. This consolidates a "rule" which sees Italian physicists at the lead of the experiment every other term, after Tonelli (2010-12) and Camporesi (2014-16).
Great news for the CMS experiment - and for Italy, and for my institution, Padova, where I coordinate accelerator-based physics research for INFN. Professor Roberto Carlin, a longtime member of the CMS experiment, where he has taken many important roles in the construction and operations of the experiment, and recently was deputy spokesperson, has now been elected spokesperson. This consolidates a "rule" which sees Italian physicists at the lead of the experiment every other term, after Tonelli (2010-12) and Camporesi (2014-16).
Great news for the CMS experiment - and for Italy, and for my institution, Padova, where I coordinate accelerator-based physics research for INFN. Professor Roberto Carlin, a longtime member of the CMS experiment, where he has taken many important roles in the construction and operations of the experiment, and recently was deputy spokesperson, has now been elected spokesperson. This consolidates a "rule" which sees Italian physicists at the lead of the experiment every other term, after Tonelli (2010-12) and Camporesi (2014-16).
Great news for the CMS experiment - and for Italy, and for my institution, Padova, where I coordinate accelerator-based physics research for INFN. Professor Roberto Carlin, a longtime member of the CMS experiment, where he has taken many important roles in the construction and operations of the experiment, and recently was deputy spokesperson, has now been elected spokesperson. This consolidates a "rule" which sees Italian physicists at the lead of the experiment every other term, after Tonelli (2010-12) and Camporesi (2014-16).
Great news for the CMS experiment - and for Italy, and for my institution, Padova, where I coordinate accelerator-based physics research for INFN. Professor Roberto Carlin, a longtime member of the CMS experiment, where he has taken many important roles in the construction and operations of the experiment, and recently was deputy spokesperson, has now been elected spokesperson. This consolidates a "rule" which sees Italian physicists at the lead of the experiment every other term, after Tonelli (2010-12) and Camporesi (2014-16).
Great news for the CMS experiment - and for Italy, and for my institution, Padova, where I coordinate accelerator-based physics research for INFN. Professor Roberto Carlin, a longtime member of the CMS experiment, where he has taken many important roles in the construction and operations of the experiment, and recently was deputy spokesperson, has now been elected spokesperson. This consolidates a "rule" which sees Italian physicists at the lead of the experiment every other term, after Tonelli (2010-12) and Camporesi (2014-16).
Some shameless self-promotion is in order today, as my review titled "Hadron Collider Searches for Diboson Resonances", meant for publication on the prestigious journal "Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics", has been made available on the Cornell Arxiv.My review covers quite extensively the topic, as it is not constrained in length as other reviews usually are. At 76 pages, and with 500 references, it aims to be the main reference on this type of physics for the next five years or so - at least, this is the stipulation with PPNP. Whether I managed to make it such, it is something to be judged by others.The plan of the work is as follows:
The field of particle physics is populated with believers and skeptics. The believers will try to convince you that new physics is about to be discovered, or that is anyway at close reach. The skeptics will on the other hand look at the mass of confirmations of the current theory -the Standard Model- and claim that any speculation about the existence of discoverable new phenomena has no basis.
