Physics

The Monte Carlo Method

These days I am in Paris, for a short vacation- for once, I am following my wife in a work trip; she performs at the grand Halle at la Villette (she is a soprano singer), and I exploit the occasion to have some pleasant time in one of the cities I like th ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Sep 17 2023 - 9:15am

Mesmerizing Shapes- Symmetries According To An AI

Having spent the past 12 months coding up an end-to-end model of an astrophysics experiment, with the sole aim of searching for an optimal solution for its design by use of stochastic gradient descent, I am the least qualified person to judge the aesthetic ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Sep 26 2023 - 8:01am

An Introductory Machine Learning Book For Physicists And Astronomers

Last week I received in my mailbox a copy of the Princeton University Press book "Machine Learning for Physics and Astronomy" by Viviana Acquaviva. They sent me a copy because I had reviewed its contents for Princeton Press. I am happy with the b ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 4 2023 - 5:21am

Email Communication With Academics On PhD Openings

As I am waiting in Prague airport for my flight back home, after a few days spent discussing the options of the SWGO collaboration for the detectors we are going to build, I came across (through compulsive scrolling on twitter) a thread that caught my atte ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 4 2023 - 10:03am

Two Educational Activities

The occasional reader of this blog will excuse me if yet again I do not report here of this or that new result by the LHC collaboration, and instead discuss matters of lesser relevance. But to me, education is important. Even if I am not a University profe ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 26 2023 - 4:16am

The Proton, A Bag Of Garbage

Since most of the building blocks of our own body are protons, the above title might disturb sensitive readers. On the other hand, describing a proton as a bag of garbage has several merits, as it is a fruitful analogy that may be carried forward when we w ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Oct 31 2023 - 11:32am

One Year Internship In Padova For Master Graduates In Sciences

Did you recently finish a Master in a scientific discipline, and wish to do some research before deciding whether to embark in a Ph.D.? Do you fancy coming to Padova and work with me and a team of physicists, computer scientists, and astrophysicists on det ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Nov 13 2023 - 6:59am

Five Exciting Projects- No, Six

A number of Master courses in the STEM area mandate students to find a research project abroad to which they participate for 3-6 months. Many of the students find projects that arise their interest through internet searches- at least this is the way I got ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Dec 7 2023 - 9:54am

A Pattern Recognition Problem

Next month I will be giving three lectures to high-school students on using artificial intelligence for research in fundamental physics, and as usual I am not yet worried by the schedule enough to start thinking at the presentations. Except that in one cas ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Dec 28 2023 - 7:46am

A Year In Review

2023 is over and I am looking back at my achievements and failures, to take stock and try to learn something from the matter. This blog looks like a reasonably good place for such an exercise, so I am writing here an inventory of what happened to me in the ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Dec 31 2023 - 9:10am