Physics

One of the positive side-effects of preparing a seminar is being forced to get up-to-date with the latest experimental and theoretical developments on the topic. And this is of particular benefit to…

This afternoon I am leaving to Belgium. I have been invited by the Université Catholique de Louvain to give a seminar on the status and the future of the Higgs boson searches at the Tevatron collider…

A lot of my sophomore year in astronomy was spent solving harmonic oscillator problems.  A harmonic oscillator is something that moves with a periodic motion—say, a pendulum swinging or a mass…

Jim Croce, whose major was psychology in Villanova University, perhaps, had a minor in physics, I don't know, when he graduated in 1965. His song "Time in a Bottle" conjures…

Earlier today I reported about the publication of a paper by a non-professional physicist, Carl Brannen. Now I have to do the same for a paper -the first one in a long and groundbreaking series, you…

This just in: Carl Brannen (here his blog) got a paper on gravitation published in a scientific magazine. Carl, who is the typical amateur who many "established scientists" in the blogosphere have…

"Quidquid oritur, qualecumque est, causam habet a natura. Cum autem res nova et admirabilis fieri videtur, causam invetigato, si poteris, ratione confisus. Si nullam causam reperis, illud tamen…

To see the future, you must know the past: these nine words nicely summarize a syllogism which knows few exceptions. Turning to known data to check the power of one's extrapolations is a quite well-…

What is spacetime geometry?     Think of a very large ball. Even though you look at the ball in three space dimensions, the outer surface of the ball has thegeometry of a…

"Why three families ? Why the particular symmetry structure ? [...] If the Higgs particle turns out to exist as conventionally described, with a reasonably low mass (say less than 200 GeV) then that…