Physics

The island of Crete, in the middle of the Mediterranean sea, is home to ICFP 2012, a conference in high-energy physics. I arrived yesterday night and this morning I woke up with a gorgeous view of…

Last Transit of Venus was more fruitful than could be expected. Thousands of amazing images were taken and this is just enough to appreciate the high point of the event. Things more physical or…

Cosmological Constant - it's the blog's title, but something more, As you may know, Einstein himself called it his greatest blunder. Why did he say these words? Let us see...When Albert Einstein…

The CERN average of searches for rare B decays to muon pairs has been shown yesterday in a talk given by Mitesh Patel at the "Physics at the LHC" conference, which is being held in Vancouver (BC)…

The fourth FQXi essay contest “Which of Our Basic Physical Assumptions Are Wrong?” is underway.   Wittgenstein knew precisely which one; I am all about that one as you may know, but we are…

Direct Realism falling in Wittgenstein’s Silence: Accelerating the Paradigm Change that Renders Relativistic Quantum Mechanics Natural Abstract: Quantum mechanics (QM) and at times still even…

The LHC collider has been producing proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV for two months now, and the integrated luminosity collected by the CMS experiment has surpassed the…

[Clarification: I tweaked the title because the focus of this blog was intended to be quite small.  While scalars and vectors are used in a dizzying array of areas in many dimensions,…

The issue of how dense the dark matter is near Earth is far from settled. Recent work by Moni Bidin, Carraro, Mendez and Smith holds that the density of dark matter near Earth is 0.04 gigaelectron…

Almost exactly a year ago, I made a medium storm in the water glass by publishing my exchange with what I ironically called the "Future King of Physics". I then asked Perimeter Institute in Canada,…