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!

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 …

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 …

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 …

A few thoughts about the 750 GeV diphoton bump

The big news in particle physics during the winter 2015-2016 is certainly the excess found by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations in the invariant mass of two high-energetic photons in the data acquired in 2015 at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then it's time to catch …

Prof. Higgs, Pay me my money down!

I waited few days before writing anything about the Nobel Prize for Physics 2013. As most people know at this point, this year the prize was awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently …

The Higgs Boson: A God Particle, After All?

Forewords My opinion about this issue shifts as more data are accumulated according to the Bayes theorem, so it may change in the near future after the LHC Run2 starts. Anyway, it seems to me that data are pointing towards J. A. Wheeler's self-aware Universe. What if the truth was that we are afraid of …

Conosci i tuoi mesoni

Il primo layer dell'inner detector (ID) di ATLAS dista 4 cm dall'interaction point (IP), per cui: * pi0 decadono immediatamente (ctau~25 nm) e nel detector arrivano solo i gamma; * pi carichi hanno ctau~7 m ed entrano nell'ID; * K0_S decadono rapidamente (ctau~2.6 cm) e nel detector arrivano solo i prodotti di decadimento. il vertice dei K0_S e' una delle …

The Hunt for the Higgs Boson

Forewords The hunt officially started on Oct 19th, 1964 when Peter Higgs published a paper called "Broken symmetries and the masses of gauge bosons" on Physical Review Letters (Vol 13, No. 16). Nowadays, his brilliant explanation about the origin of the mass of elementary particles is being tested in two laboratories: at Fermilab, 80 miles …