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 …

Of Time, Entropy and Consciousness

My fascination with entropy began during my Freshman year, when a colleague suggested me to read a book written by the Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine . For some reason unknown to me, the Belgian-Russian physicist was awarded the honorary citizenship of my hometown - an honour later awarder to another Nobel laureate, Gerard 't Hooft - so maybe …

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 …

A Brief History of Entropy pt. 4 – How to Avoid the Communication Breakdown

Pontecchio, Italy, December 8th 1895 A gunshot in the distance marked the beginning of the communication era based on electromagnetic waves. A sunny springtime afternoon, a villa in the heart of Italy's countryside. Guglielmo, son of the marquise Giuseppe Marconi and Annie Jameson (perhaps you tasted the famous whiskey brewed by her father) is a very …

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 …

The three-body problem

The publication of the novel "The three body problem" written by Chinese author Cixin Liu rekindled my interest about this long-standing issue in classical dynamics. As also pointed out in the novel, an empty space is stationary (and boring). An empty space plus a spherical body is also stationary (still boring). An empty space plus …

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 …

A Little Bit of Entropy

I'm reading a very interesting book written by Seth Lloyd called "Programming the Universe: a quantum computer scientist takes on the Cosmos". Highly recommended! I enjoyed in particular how entropy is compared to a spreading disease: a disease of ignorance. What is it all about? Let me explain briefly. From statistical mechanics, entropy is a measure …