Short trip to Fermilab December 1, 2006
Posted by dorigo in internet, personal, travel.add a comment
I have a meeting at Fermilab next week which I want to follow in flesh and bones, so tomorrow I will be flying to Chicago for the umpteenth time - I think I am well over 80 by now. I know all the nuisances of the flight through Munich with Lufthansa: I could get safely to O’Hare blindfolded, serious. I will get in the 7.50 bus to the Venice Marco Polo airport, check in, have a free breakfast at the lufthansa lounge, rush to the 8.50AM flight to Munich (operated by Air Dolomiti), and then in Munich I will have just about enough time to grab a couple of pretzels in the Senator lounge (they’re great) and run to gate H-01 (or H-02, it’s the same thing).
This time in Munich I will find two colleagues from Padova, who however come from Rome tomorrow. We reserved seats close by, so we’ll have some time to chat. I hope, though, that I will spend most of my time surfing the web during the long flight to Chicago. As far as I know, Connexions by Boeing has not discontinued the service yet… Although they’ll do so by the end of the year, alas.
Whether I’ll blog tomorrow is entirely in Boeing’s hands!
A day for AIDS December 1, 2006
Posted by dorigo in Blogroll, internet, news, science.add a comment
Today, December 1st, is the world AIDS day. I just read a post about it by Brett Keller which I think you should give a look at. Please visit http://bdkeller.wordpress.com/2006/12/01/a-day-for-aids/
Polonium 210 for sale at US$69 December 1, 2006
Posted by dorigo in humor, internet, news, physics, science.8 comments
According to the Times online (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2478908,00.html), anyone can buy a small amount of Polonium 210, the radioactive, highly toxic substance that caused the death of Alexsander Livitnenko last month and is causing a headache to London security officials and British Airways - who has grounded three of its planes until they get decontaminated.
United Nuclear, a company based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, sells small quantities freshly produced by a nuclear reactor. No questions asked. Get your own order in the mail today! Here is the site: http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm .
America is really a free country… Just a little bit too free on some issues, for my taste.
The say of the week December 1, 2006
Posted by dorigo in games, humor, physics.7 comments
“When I hear of Schroedinger’s cat, I reach for my gun”.
(Stephen Hawking)
More on fine tuning, and Occam’s razor December 1, 2006
Posted by dorigo in personal, physics, science.1 comment so far
Andrea Romanino, the speaker at the Atlas-CMS workshop I reported on last week, left an interesting comment on my post “Fine tuning and new physics at the LHC”. I think it worthwhile to post it here by itself…
“I am glad my talk rised some interest and I would like to take this opportunity to further clarify the argument reported above.
People often ask whether the few percent fine-tuning present e.g. the MSSM should be taken seriously. I do not know the answer, but it is fair to say that the belief that new physics will show up at the LHC is based on this very type of fine-tuning argument: ‘new physics must show up at the LHC, or else a light Higgs would require a significant fine-tuning’. To be concrete, a permille tuning would allow the sparticles of the MSSM to be out of reach at LHC.
Of course percent is quite different from permille: the percent problem might indeed be irrelevant and the sparticles of the most traditional MSSM version might very well lay in that one order of magnitude separating percent from permille. However, I would not neglect the possibility that the little percent problem be an indication that we should expect a departure from the MinimalSSM.
That is why I believe not only that the LHC will be a success, but also that surprises are not excluded. A slightly non-MinimalSSM, or wilder alternatives perhaps, we will see.”
My own pitch on the whole thing ? Occam’s Razor allows me to believe in the Higgs, because it explains a lot of things with the smallest effort. Sure, it does not explain everything. But if, having accepted the Higgs, I find myself having to bargain a whole lot of new entities to make the Higgs mechanism cleaner (i.e. no fine tuning necessary), then I throw my hands up and declare I stop at the SM Higgs for now. If then I not only have to buy the MSSM, but even go further, I tend to “reach for my gun”, to paraphrase Stephen Hawking… Let’s find that one thing first, then maybe the Razor will not come slashing fancier models…
