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 …

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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 …

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 …

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 …

Re-discover Neptune with Processing

As we saw in the previous post, it's quite easy to make even not-so-basic physics simulations with Processing and Jeffrey Traer's library for physics. This time we'll give a closer look to the discovery of Neptune. We won't be really accurate here, I just want to give you the gist of it. Reverse engineering the …

What’s Inertia? Ask Feynman!

He had taught me to notice things and one day when I was playing with what we call an express wagon, which is a little wagon which has a railing around it for children to play with that they can pull around. It had a ball in it—I remember this—it had a ball in it, …

The Felix Baumgartner Equation

Introduction We want to describe, even in not with a fully realistic accuracy, the motion of Felix Baumgartner while...falling from the sky as it happend on October 14, 2012. To do this, we well make use of Wolfram’s Mathematica. The Austrian daredevil jumped from a helium ballon at an altitude of 39,014 m and opened …

The Computational Universe

The Laws of Nature When you first encounter physics at school, you are initiated to the common idea that at least in principle every phenomenon could be explained if we knew which are exactly the "Laws of Nature". This idea is pretty simple, but not free from conceptual problems. First of all, you are assuming …

Sunday Afternoon TED Talks

 Stephen Wolfram: Computing a theory of everything Brian Cox on CERN's supercollider Patricia Burchat sheds light on dark matter Brian Greene on String Theory Jill Tarter's call to join the SETI search