Some stuff for 05.07.2012

(1) Stephen Hawking's party for time-travellers. I wonder whether it was organized in order to drag attention from the recent $100 bet he lost :-)

(2) Three (!) stories in the last Nature issue about the collapse of Spanish science happening right now: [1], [2], [3]

Take care,

Misha

Schizophrenic Neutrinos

I had a fellow artist who was completely ignorant in sciences, but tried to make an impression that he "knows something" every now and then. Once he asked me:

- Do you know who is the greatest schizophrenic in the Universe?
- No, who?
- An electron. Know why?
- Why?
- Because he thinks that he is a wave and a particle at the same time!

Back then I found that funny, and I still would, if Igor Ivanov didn't share a link to the following preprint today:

R. Allahverdi, B. Dutta, R. N. Mohapatra "Schizophrenic Neutrinos and $\nu$-less Double Beta Decay"

The abstract starts as "We point out a novel possibility for neutrinos where all neutrino flavors can be part Dirac and part Majorana." :-)


Take care,

Misha

Theorists vs experimentalists again

Here is how I imagine the difference between experimental and theoretical particle physicists:


Left: Blind Reese can't spot the cheese. Right: Neither Phil can get a meal.

The LHC will be launched tomorrow

You may follow it online: here is a live display of the beam status. You may also follow CERN on twitter.

via cherstn (friends-only)

Four brothers... from the same institute

via Igor Ivanov's blog. A link to the original article.

Links for 19.10.2008

Useful:

• Springer Online Reference Works - online encyclopedia of math
• Advanced physics forums

Interesting:

• Why LaTeX is like Latin - by Paul Goldberg. "LaTeX, like Latin, does not prevent one from writing down a statement that is incorrect. ... But it does help to prevent vagueness."
• Essay: Fifty Years of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics in Physical Review Letters - by Serge Haroche.
• The complete work of Charles Darwin online
• Old scientists never clean out their refrigerators - the story of the Miller-Urey experiment
• Website of Michio Kaku, and his opinion about the last Nobel Prize.

Blogs:

• How you can save the world - an interesting blog, written by many well-known contributors, string theorist Michio Kaku among them.

Funny:

• Iran minister admits holding fake Oxford degree
  
• 'Punch drunk' pony rescued from swimming pool
  

Links for 14.09.08

Scientific:

• Webcam at LHC - want to know what's going on there?
• Frequently asked questions in mathematics - by Alex López-Ortiz.
• Mathematical constants - by Steven R. Finch.
• NIST digital library of mathematical functions
• Theoretical computer science cheat sheet - a .pdf file there.

Interesting:

• Google launches the digitalization of old papers
• Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth yet?
  

The LHC switches on this morning

Sincerely, I don't want to contribute in the worldwide discussion about the "black hole consisting of antimatter" (c) which will destroy the Universe, but there is a nice picture from Google today:

Brian Green about string theory

No, this is not another rap (take a look at his hands, yo). These are very clear and understandable explanations of "what the string theory is" by Brian Greene:

via Greg Laden's blog