Physics

It happens in the best families, so they say. Two experiments work 24/7 to produce an improved result on the Higgs search, and the result is disappointing, to say the least.

I am talking about the Tevatron, of course. For a little while longer, CDF and D0 will have the exclusive on Higgs boson searches. Last March, we all rejoyced when we saw that the Tevatron was starting to become sensitive to a high-mass Higgs, and indeed it excluded its existence in a range of masses between 160 and 170 GeV. We were waiting for more exclusions for the winter conferences of 2010, when more data would be used to produce improved results. Instead, no improvement, but actually, a retractatio. How is that possible ??

I recently discussed here the Tevatron results of searches for new Z bosons in electron-positron or dimuon samples collected by CDF and DZERO, pointing out that there seem to be a couple of intriguing upward fluctuations in the data. One of the dielectron fluctuations sits at a mass of 240 GeV, the other, also in the dielectron spectrum, is at about 720 GeV. Neither is compelling.

The decision to pursue physics in my tertiary years sprang from a rather naive mindset of my youth: the belief that this constantly evolving field had cracked open the chest of mysteries that we normally call ‘life’. As much as I struggle to recall the specific impetus that drove such an arrogant assumption, I am equally satisfied that my desire, founded on a false basis, has led to my current understanding of the truth – not the truth of life but the truth of reality. The proverbial notion that our knowledge of the universe is like a grain of sand on the beach became increasingly apparent as I peered more deeply into the silicinate structure of the physical realm as portrayed by the brilliant minds of the past and present.

Today CNN features a short video with an interview to Professor Nielsen, the mastermind behind the whole "Higgs comes back from the future to prevent its own creation" crap.  I wrote about the matter a couple of times in the past, and will not reiterate here that I think his suggestions to pull out cards from a deck to decide whether to carry on basic research with the LHC is a unmitigated pile of you know what.

Friday, October 16, 2009

The “Om” from you tube is profoundly pleasant. I agree with the traditions, thoughts and expressions presented here. Obviously based on Sanskrit’s from Buddhism and Hinduism I still agree with the content while technically labeling myself a practicing Christian. To some this may seem ironic if not hypocritical. Unlike many, I have never thoughtfully felt a conflict with the obvious clash of some radically interpreted fundamentals within these belief systems. While the majority of believers in these respective religions or philosophies towards life would argue against me, I see the similarities as the ultimate truth. At the very least a common goal of trying to make sense of the world.

What is the most important object physicists manipulate everyday?

My answer with no hesitation is : the Lagrangian !

What is it? simply the object that contain everything one need to know about a given physical system.

Last May the CDF collaboration published their observation of the  baryon, a particle made by a very exotic "bss" quark triplet. The CDF result came almost one year after a similar measurement was published by the competitor experiment, D0.

Today I got access to a collection of very cool pictures of the CMS detector, one of the two experiments designed and built to study proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Many of those pictures, which were taken by Michael Hoch (CERN/CMS) in the last couple of years, have circulated in the web for a long time, and individual ones have been used in several places. However, they are very nice to browse one after the other. And I think they are even more interesting to watch if one has not had the privilege of visiting the giant detector in its underground cavern, during its assembly last year. So I take the liberty of showing them to you here, in case you missed them - or just like to refresh your memory on this technological marvel.

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A little known fact about quantum mechanics is that it disproves God's omniscience. Now, we all know that a watched pot never boils. What does this have to do with God's omniscience? Well, did you also know that an unwatched electron doesn't really exist? (Maybe we should call the universe "the vast unwatched"?) Before I lose you, let me say that I promise all of this will be tied together by the end of this post.