The Price of a Making a Discovery

While many people love science, few would agree to invest money with very low chances of getting anything in return. Are we at a tipping point in history? The Gothic Cathedral of Science It took decades to go from inception to construction, but here we are: humans have created a machine to explore the deepest …

The two times I thought I discovered new physics but it was an error

An account of the two times I thought I have discovered new physics, but it was a mistake!

The Prime Numbers Cross: Mathematical Oddity or Hint of a Deeper Pattern?

I have always been fascinated with "origins": the origin of life on Earth, the origin of human beings, the origin of the Universe, and of course to fundamental particles. I reserve a sort of special place to a mathematical entity that some people regard as fundamental: prime numbers. A prime number is a whole number greater than 1 whose …

When Your Gravity Fails and Negativity Don’t Pull You Through: The Case for Negative-Mass Dark Matter

In early December 2018 the physicists' blogosphere went berserk because of a 2017 paper (in fact still a preprint to this date: arXiv:1712.07962) in which the author James Farnes, University of Oxford, tries to explain Dark Matter and Dark Energy with a seemingly preposterous hypothesis: the presence of a negative-mass fluid that permeates the Universe. …

Spooky Computers at CERN

Quantum of what? Physicists have been wrestling for more than a century with quantum mechanics, a set of rules that govern the behaviour of atoms and other small systems - small compared to a human being. As a matter of fact, even what quantum mechanics is about is not so obvious: first, because if everything …

Aria di Terremoto?

Le teorie popolari, si sa, spopolano laddove quelle scientifiche non arrivano. E' soprattutto la zona grigia - dove qualcosa tutto sommato abbiamo capito, ma non tutto tutto - dove si avventurano molti non esperti, che cercano di dare una spiegazione plausibile all'origine di fenomeni naturali catastrofici ma purtroppo difficilmente prevedibili come ad esempio un tempo …

La Teoria della Relatività: Generale, Ristretta, Speciale o meglio Locale

Quando ero bambino trascorrevo interminabili pomeriggi nel paese dove abitava una delle mie nonne. Specialmente durante l’inverno, poco interessato ai risultati delle partite di Serie A e attanagliato dalla noia, mi capitava di guardare dalla finestra le luci provenienti da un altro piccolo centro abitato, abbarbicato sulla cima della collina di fronte. Le luci delle …

Virtual Reality will solve our problem with Global Warming. Or maybe not.

  Less is more Less stuff, less waste. It's as simple as that. In fact, some people are actively advocating what's sometimes called "happy degrowth", i.e. embracing a new kind of global economy based on an ecological paradigm and essentially rejecting capitalist ideas. Degrowthers believe we need to shift to a more modest lifestyle as …

Touring the Solar System

Recently, I have read a very recommended book called "The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission" by Jim Bell (see its Goodreads entry). The book, as you can imagine from the title, recounts the story (so far) of the two Vogayer spacecrafts, and of the people who made this possible. There is also a …

Live Blogging: Solar Eclipse 2017

7:44am The sun is rising here in Toronto. He'll take a nap in the early afternoon between 1:10-3:40pm. The peak is expected around 2:30pm. Stay tuned for more updates! 8:55 We have to consider ourselves lucky we can see a solar eclipse at all. In fact, this phenomenon is not a direct consequence of any profound …