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 …

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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!

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 …

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 …

The Scariest Thing of All

This post is not about politics, but the failure of statistics applied to politics. Our technology, the science behind big data, Bayesian statistics, and ultimately their incarnation in Nate Silver's model, all crumbled down last night. Sure, the FiveThrityEight blog keeps saying that there was a high level of uncertainty associated with the polls, mostly due …

Why don’t we build a particle accelerator orbiting the Sun?

Disclaimer: this is a blog post, not a paper. Seriously, I'm not suggesting to build such an accelerator, but I believe that by trying to answer this question the reader can learn something about the intriguing realm of accelerator physics. The Large Hadron Collider operating at CERN is the most powerful collider ever built by …

Are more babies born under a new moon? – pt.2

In a previous post I used a dataset taken from my Facebook friends to debunk the claim that more babies are born under a new moon. I have now a chance to increase the test statistics significantly, not because in the meanwhile I made many more friends, but because people collaborating to the FiveThirtyEight blog …

Has Particle Physics Been Hijacked by ET?

After the two sophons arrive on Earth, their first mission is to locate the high-energy particle accelerators used by humans for physics research and hide within them. At the level of science development on Earth, the basic method for exploring the deep structure of matter is to use accelerated high-energy particles to collide with target …