Physics

This just in: the controversial Opera result on superluminal neutrinos is affected by a previously unaccounted for experimental error, which completely overturns the conclusions. This is explained in…

About a month ago I held a three-hour course on "Statistics for Data Analysis in High-Energy Physics" in the nice setting of Engelberg, a mountain location just south of Zurich. Putting together the…

Sophisticated physicists appreciate the dance of abstract symbols. I need to build something. The abstract is more real when made out of clay and pipe cleaners. In this blog on the 1D Euler Lagrange…

February 23rd 1987 is a day indelibly imprinted on the minds of everyone interested in astrophysics. At 7:36 GMT that day, now 25 years ago, the big one hit us. There was no escape. For 13…

A nice new search for heavy quarks has been completed by the ATLAS collaboration in 7 TeV proton-proton collisions data collected in 2011. The ideas behind the search are instructive to describe, so…

Those working on quantum gravity have to accept the fact they are unlikely to ever compete for a Nobel in physics. No matter how brilliant and how widely accepted the contribution, a Nobel prize in…

I just ask. If I look at a glowing something with an antenna, I will not get any signal, I think. This is, I believe, because the radiation comes as photons, more or less, because it is a result of…

Often when reading about cutting edge physics and the amazing feats of the Large Hadron Collider, we are treated to crazy scenarios involving “virtual particles”, also variously referred to as “ghost…

The  6 minute YouTube video, available in high def, provides a walking tour of my private Pop Science art collection. One painting spent a summer month in Lancaster, PA as part of a juried show.…

I had a new computer simulation. We set up each model from the birth of universe to the present, and calculated GPE using computer simulation in each level. As a result, we could verify that “pair…