Physics

While school-age models of atomic nuclei show them as being spherical, like a basketball, they are more like the shape of a football.  Yet for some particular combinations of protons and…

With the Higgs boson in the bag, the game called "global fit" that particle physicists have been playing for a couple of decades has changed significantly. The knowledge of the Higgs boson mass…

"A detailed study of four-jet hadronic events at LEP 1.5 has been reported by the ALEPH collaboration. From selected four-jet events, the invariant masses of jet pairs are computed, and out of the…

ATLAS has just produced a very nice new study of jet production in Z-boson events. I will describe a sample graph below, but before I do I find it useful to explain to the less knowledgeable among…

One of the most intriguing effects in subatomic physics is the phenomenon of violation of the discrete symmetry called "CP". It is intriguing at various levels. First of all, CP violation is…

In quantum physics, objects can be in more than one place at a time and future events can change the past - don't get caught up too much in that or you won't sleep at night. A new paper says quantum…

I have decided to rescind this proposal.  Stars in a galaxy travel at one velocity, light at the speed c.  There is only one velocity involved in applying the product rule to the…

Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) collaborators are reporting what could be a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) signal at the 3-sigma level. In common parlance, that is 99.7 confidence -…

Pictures showing the structure of matter and the organization of subatomic particles in different categories abound. Indeed, cataloging and classifying entities subject of study is a powerful means…

Probably no signs of gravitational waves, signs of dark matter but not a discovery. That is the word from this first day of the American Physical Society's meeting in Denver Colorado.   In…