The singularity is near December 2, 2006
Posted by dorigo in Blogroll, computers, internet, italian blogs, mathematics, news, personal, science, travel.5 comments
David Orban has a new blog, in italian. Apologizing to most of my English speaking readers, I’d like to link his site here, pointing out that he just posted a seminar he held on Nov. 22nd on the technological singularity and the coming to an end of the era when intelligence was only human on earth.
His seminar is very nice. The 59 minutes streaming video (with slides) can be seen from his page. Check it out at http://feeds.feedburner.com/davidorban … I will write more about the subject of the technological singularity later - I am currently on a flight to Chicago (yeah, Connexion still on until the end of 2006 after all) and while I can surf the web, this thing is kind of slow…
The new W mass from CDF is out, but… December 2, 2006
Posted by dorigo in news, physics, science.add a comment
… you will need to wait for a little while longer before you get the correct number.
That is, we do have a measurement: it is Mw = 80336+-48 MeV+- 100 MeV. The last number, however, is a blind offset that has been purposely left unknown until everything is approved and the analysis gets unblinded. This procedure has the aim of avoiding the “experimenter’s bias”, which manifests as a tendency of favoring results that are in line with previous determinations of the same quantity.
This very precise result - the single best determination of the W mass so far - has been obtained with just 200 pb-1 of electron and muon data collected in Run II. If you thnk that we have more than 8 times that amount of data already on tape and waiting to be analyzed, you will concur that the future is bright.
CDF will probably reduce the total uncertainty of the W boson mass to less than 25 MeV by the time Run II ends. That is a very nice determination of a fundamental parameter of the standard model, and it carries quite some value by itself as a scientific result. However, many of us are interested in a precise number of the W and top quark masses because electroweak theory allows to determine indirectly (up to some theoretical uncertainty which is still small compared to experimental ones) the Higgs boson mass - which we would all love to know with precision!
I wrote about this in a former post, see my “physics made easy” page above (today I feel too lazy to find the link for you and place it here!)
