Physics

On my way back to CERN from Fermilab (yes, I am betting on two tables at a time these days, as our Poker-addict friend Garth Sundem suggests), I made a 7-hour stopover in New York. Originally this…

Chessplayers are a strange lot. Those who get attracted by the game and end up sticking to it, making it the game of their life, are typically intelligent, creative thinkers; yet among them one may…

No poll.

Imagine a time when the entire universe froze - according to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size…

When I became an amateur chess player and I enrolled in the "Esteban Canal" chess club in Venice, about a quarter of a century ago, I met and got to know personally dozens of people sharing my…

The job of experimental particle physicist is strongly correlated with worldwide travel. Paid for and self-inflicted, sure. But not exactly always pleasant, nor to exotic destinations. In fact,…

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched June 2008, has certainly started its career with a (big) bang, discovering a new class of pulsars and watching flaring jets in galaxies billions of…

Triggered by a preprint appeared three days ago on the ArXiV -a fundamental resource for particle physicists willing to stay in touch with the latest developments of the theory and new experimental…

2008 was a horrible year for the Large Hadron Collider. Just nine days after an extremely successful, highly publicized start-up on September 10th, when hundreds of reporters gathered at CERN to…

These are hard times for evil guys like me, who are always willing to speculate wildly on particle physics results -only to secretly chuckle at the ripples their extrapolations make, knowing for a…