Physics

Wave functions and characteristic vectors. The first thing that draws attention is the concept of the wave function. It is a probability density function that is correlated with an observable. On its…

A new paper produced by the DZERO collaboration got me quite interested today, for several reasons. The analysis is based on a large data sample: over seven inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton…

The Standard Model of particle physics has been under attack since its original formulation, in 1967, and yet it has so far resisted every assault; in so doing it has become one of the most…

The following parallelepiped was found by Clifford Reiter und Jorge Sawyer (Lafayette College, Easton, Pensilvania) with brute force computer trials. It is a parallelepiped with all three sides being…

Last week in Tesero, in front of an audience of 150 interested laypersons, I spoke about the marvels of particle physics (the poster of the conference I gave is below, click to enlarge). My first…

Some 80-90 years ago, an unknown Californian guy named George A. Linhart, unlike A. Einstein, P. Debye, M. Planck and W. Nernst, has managed to derive a very simple, but ultimately general…

Is cosmic inflation faster than the speed of light? Cosmic inflation already works if the universe's volume doubles a mere 260 times. Every doubling takes 109 fundamental time steps tPlanck. If we…

On Friday evening I was in Tesero, where a crowd of 150 interested laypersons attended my talk on particle physics, organized by the very active Gruppo Astrofili Fiemme. There, among other things, I…

When I was in my late teens, my father (a chemical engineer) took an interest in quantum mechanics.  Two words from his conversation at that time stuck in my mind, namely Hamiltonian and…

Coincidences in fundamental physics, sometimes in the form of so called “fine tunings”; what are they? Generally speaking, some parameter happens to have a value very close to some other interesting…