A Quantum Diaries Survivor

One of the things I like the most when I do data analysis is to use "pure thought" to predict in advance the features of a probability density function of some observable quantity from the physical process I am studying. By doing that, one can try one's hand at demonstrating one's understanding of the details of the physics at play.

I (T.D.) am very happy to host here today a guest post by Daniel Hoak, a member of the LIGO collaboration, who participated in the discovery of gravitational waves that made headlines one week ago in the world media. Daniel earned his PhD in 2015 with the LIGO collaboration, and is currently working at the Virgo detector outside of Pisa. Daniel's picture is on the left.

Yesterday and today I have been spending time in Rome together with 600 Italian colleagues, at a symposium named "What Next". The idea is to discuss what should be the strategy of the institute to participate and support basic research in fundamental physics in the next few decades.The format of the event is of short summary talks by ten "working groups" that examined different macro-areas: Precision SM Physics, Cosmic Ray Physics, Neutrino Physics, Flavour Physics, Gravitational Waves, Beyond the SM Physics, New Technologies, Fundamental Physics, and Dark Matter (I might have forgotten one). To each summary, delivered by two or three leaders of each working group, follows an open discussion that is allotted at least as much time as the presentations.

I believe that the recent discovery of gravitational waves has been described in enough detail by reporters and bloggers around, that my own contribution here would be pointless. Of course I am informed of the facts and reasonably knowledgeable about the topic, and my field of research is not too distant from the one that produced the discovery, so I could in principle offer something different from what you can find by just googling around. But I have a better idea.What I think you cannot read elsewhere are the free thoughts I had as I listened to the announcement by the VIRGO collaboration. So maybe this may be a different kind of contribution, and of some interest to you.

After the ATLAS and CMS collaboration disclosed their first Run 2 results on diphoton searches, less than two months ago, the realization that it would be impossible to keep up-to-date with all the theoretical ideas that were being put forth was immediate. The flood of papers discussing the 750 GeV bump was - and still is - too much to handle if reading papers is not your primary occupation.This is unfortunate, as many of my colleagues believe that the new tentative signal is real.

With a long delay, last week I was finally able to have a look at the book "From the Great Wall to the Great Collider - China and the Quest to Uncover the Inner Workings of the Universe", by Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau. And I would like to report about my impressions here.

The following text, a short excerpt from the book "Anomaly!", recounts the time when the top quark was about to be discovered, in 1994-95. After the "evidence" paper that CDF had published in 1994, the CDF and DZERO experiments were both running for the first prize - a discovery of the last quark.----

A Sino-Italian workshop on Applied Statistics was held today at the Department of Statistical Sciences of the University of Padova. The organizers were Alessandra Brazzale and Alessandra Salvan from the Department of Statistical Sciences, and Giorgio Picci from the "Confucius Institute". 

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.

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.