Physics

What is sexy? That is in the eye of the beholder. The eye dominates, using roughly 40% of our CPU. We don’t ask movie stars to understand spread-spectrum communications technology, unless…

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory has detected the antimatter partner of the helium nucleus, antihelium-4. This new particle, also known as the anti-alpha, is the…

Why should there not be ‘stuff’, or ‘real things’ instead of weird quantum mechanics at some microscopic scale? In other words, how can we accept that direct realism is wrong without getting too ‘…

It was bound to happen, and well predicted in advance, but it still feels good to report it here. The LHC last night exceeded by a good 15% the previous record instataneous luminosity for hadron…

Note: updated list of links at the bottom.(Older Note: Bet on this signal! See at the bottom of the article! Odds are two to one in your favour now!) (Older note: Update at the bottom.) It seems I am…

In its first years the development of quantum physics occurred violently. As a consequence some cracks sneaked into the fundaments of this branch of physics. A careful investigation brings these…

Mixing Science and Religion is always a hot topic. Recently, there was for example a debate between Sam Harris and Robert Winston in the Guardian, about, you guessed it, science versus faith! Harris…

That's because you never learn anything new. [By the way: if you were coming here to learn the solution of my riddle about the mysterious plot I posted here yesterday, be patient - I will publish an…

After the disturbance created by the Higgs rumour in ATLAS, I think we can go back to normal business - in this case, keeping my word on discussing things that were left hanging. Your response to my…

A picture is worth a thousand words. This is true both for photographs and for graphs, but sometimes the words are spoken to the wrong ears. I would like to offer you a very simple, visual test today…