If the Higgs exists, why has discovering it taken so long – and why, if no definitive discovery is announced next week, might it continue to take even longer?
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a large spiral galaxy surrounded by dozens of smaller satellite galaxies. Scientists have long theorized that occasionally these satellites will pass through the disk of the Milky Way, perturbing both the satellite and the disk. A team of astronomers from Canada and the United States have discovered what may well be the smoking gun of such an encounter, one that occurred close to our position in the galaxy and relatively recently, at least in the cosmological sense.
Right now both the ATLAS and CMS experiments are working around the clock to get results ready for the upcoming International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP). What happens when we have a big conference around the corner? We try to analyze as much of the data we have, of course! With all this pressure [...]
During a recent symposium at Fermilab, a speaker took the stage to defend government investment in basic science. He used an odd tactic: He called particle physics unreasonable.
This week has been of great interest for me being one of the participants to QCD@Work 2012. I have had my contribution accepted by the organizers and so I gave a talk. The conference was held in a really beautiful city, Lecce here in Italy. This conference is organized jointly by University of Bari and [...]
A new crack in the Standard Model may be starting to form. Recently analyzed data from the BaBar experiment show that one type of particle decay happens more often than predicted by the Standard Model. 
It’s a mystery where ultra-high-energy cosmic rays come from and what they’re made of. But a new technique, currently in the works, could drastically improve scientists’ chances of finding out.
This article first appeared in Fermilab Today on June 8, 2012. Fermilab’s Leon Lederman is leaving the laboratory that he served for ten years as its director and for many more as an internationally renowned physicist and science education pioneer. The directorate is hosting a farewell reception for Lederman today at 3 p.m. on the [...]
: Physics Without Ideology Bite by Bite The search for a theory of everything : satire about bad candidates and gentle fun about good candidates , such as the strand-spaghetti . model 9 June 2012 No Higgs would be the end of string theory In a month from now , we will hear , at the ICHEP conference whether the LHC has confirmed the 125 GeV Higgs signal . String theorists are trembling If the Higgs is not confirmed , then supersymmetry cannot be correct . And if supersmmetry is not correct , string theory is not correct . What a wonderful occasion for nature to show us the way . After 40 years , all these funny string theorists will hear from nature . Nature will finally tell them , for the first time in their life . Will string theorists jump around laughing and happy , or will they
Yang-Mills theory with the related question of the mass gap appears today an unsolved problem and, from a mathematical standpoint, the community did not recognized anybody to claim the prize so far. But in physics the answer to this question has made enormous progress mostly by the use of lattice computations and, quite recently, with [...]
My inactivity period was due to a lack of real news around the World. But I was not inactive at all. My friend Alfonso Farina presented to me another question that occupied my mind for the last weeks: What is the energy cost for computation? The first name that comes to mind in such a [...]