On the October 8 issue of "Nature" there is a link to a notice I cannot read because it givesm me a DOI error(?). The title speaks of a new kind of accelerator being developed at CERN which uses particle "surfing" an electric field. It should be much shorter than current circular accelerators like LHC and uses much less energy. I am waiting for further informations.
Tullio

You mean this article, Tullio?
Machines that ‘surf’ particles on electric fields could reach high energies at a lower price.
http://www.nature.com/news/cern-prepares-to-test-revolutionary-mini-accelerator-1.18519

Yes, thanks. But I have to correct the article on free electron lasers. They are not kilometers long. There is one at Area Research Park in Trieste, Italy, fed by the Elettra synchrotron light source built by Carlo Rubbia and operating at Basovizza, a village on the Carso (Karst) highland near Trieste. I was there when Elettra was being built. The free electron laser is named after Enrico Fermi and is no longer than a hundred meters.
Tullio
See www.areasciencepark.it, the image shows Elettra, the ring, and Fermi, the straight building at its side.

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Tullio
See www.areasciencepark.it, the image shows Elettra, the ring, and Fermi, the straight building at its side.

http://en.areasciencepark.it/
Why are they so many italian scientists so interrested in particle physics?
Even at Fermi Lab Chicago:)

It is all the Fermi legacy, starting from his group in Via Panisperna in Rome in the Thirties ("I ragazzi di Via Panisperna"). When Fermi left for the USA after receiving his Nobel Prize also because his wife was a Jew, Edoardo Amaldi took his role and maintained it after the war, refusing all invitations from American universities and research centers. He was one of the Founding Fathers of both CERN and European Space Agency.
If you are interested in the history of the Fermi group, read the book "Personaggi e scoperte nella fisica contemporanea', by Emilio Segre', who was also a member ob the Fermi group, and stayed in the USA because he was also a Jew. I have edited the Italian edition of his book and had to deal with him personally, a very nice person.
Of course the main theoretical physicist of the Fermi group after Fermi was Ettore Majorana, who disappeared misteriously in 1938 in a trip from Naples to Palermo and back on a ship. His "Majorana fermions", who are their own antiparticles, are being investigated today. I personally think he killed himself for personal reasons. Physicists are human beings subject to the "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" from Shakespeare.He had nothing to do with nuclear energy and bombs, as writers like Leonardo Sciascia seem to think.
Tullio
PS The Fermi group also included Bruno Pontecorvo, who defected to the Soviet Union because he was a Communist. But the idea of neutrino oscillation, for which the Nobel Prize is assigned this year, is due to him.

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Physicists are human beings subject to the "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" from Shakespeare.

That's true and sometimes too much thinking can be fatal.
Ludwig Boltzmann is one tragic story. In Trieste btw.
Hugh Everett III another.

The closest I have come to a great scientist is Lise Meitner in her house in Kungälv.
She didn't get a Nobel Prize but her collegue Otto Hahn did using Lise's work.
Some believe that it was because she was a woman, a Jew and against military research on nuclear power. Others believe that the main reason was that Hahn in his account of the current experiments, and especially their interpretation, does not sufficiently emphasized her work.

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Ludwig Boltzmann is one tragic story. In Trieste btw.
Hugh Everett III another.
The closest I have come to a great scientist is Lise Meitner in her house in Kungälv.
She didn't get a Nobel Prize but her collegue Otto Hahn did using Lise's work.
Some believe that it was because she was a woman, a Jew and against military research on nuclear power. Others believe that the main reason was that Hahn in his account of the current experiments, and especially their interpretation, does not sufficiently emphasized her work.

More exactly Boltzmann killed himself in Duino, where Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his "Elegies".
Another case of a woman not getting recognition is that of Jocelyn Bell, who discovered pulsars while a graduate student working for her thesis. Her thesis adviser, Antony Hewish, duly received a Nobel przie.
Tullio

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Extra dimensions, gravitons, and tiny black holes

Extra dimensions may sound like science fiction, but they could explain why gravity is so weak.

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just got nice article reading here:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2014/02/10/if_a_coin_sized_black_hole_were_placed_at_earth_s_center_what_would_happen.html

& don't worry...CERN can't make that size of BH, even with 14TeV...
only small micro-BH which also naturally occur near our atmosphere!
;)

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non-profit org. Play4Life in Zagreb, Croatia, EU

We have to keep looking... doing the science, that's built into our DNA I think - to explore. There will be larger and larger versions of the LHC - as Sagan predicted. If ever we stop looking, like the Childhood's End we will have thrown the towel in on everything else. Like Sharks, we must keep moving, never declaring "we are done". The existential truth about life, the universe and everything... to paraphrase a few other writers... is out there.
If we could produce enough anti-matter to destroy Europe we would be well on our way to the stars by now. Drops in a very large ocean right now. I hear that mini-black holes are created in some of the higher energy collisions. I suppose in some SciFi eventuality one of these could latch on to enough matter before it collapses and eat the world - but I also read that - again - its energy. We are astronomical units away from being able to anything like that today. \

The apparent Great Silence in our local universe does suggest to some minds that something terrible and fatal does happen to all nascent planetary civilizations. I suppose that a super-long shot could just be errant particle physics accelerators doing something unexpected, outside of our scientific understanding causing an accidental end to everything. The designers of CERN definitely aren't taking any risks that we know of. If thought for a moment that we could create black holes, anti-matter or tear the fabric of space time we would be doing it on the other side of the solar system / another star... having used that same tech to get us there to boot. We are a long way from that right now.
I once heard that two near-critical cores of Uranium were suspended on ropes a few meters below Chicago City streets separated by an inhibitor. (Fermi was that - anyone? I think it was...) Had the two ever come together, Wrigley field would have been a large smoking crater. The only safety mechanism at the time was an axe hanging on the wall intended to cut the ropes - which would have required a Spock to sacrifice his life in order to drop the cores.
I also read a possibly apocryphal story that a major NE university once beat a chunk of Uranium with sledge-hammers in the quad , noting that the mass heated and sparked when compressed. Unlikely that would ever had gone bang, but entirely possible for it to fizz enough to do some damage to the school and surrounding areas. Many people died during Americas and the UK's pursuit of nuclear weapons - and the record books are full of scientists that accidentally blew up themselves - or more often their sorry assistants.
We can accidentally hurt ourselves then, but the gap between the apocalypse sooth Sayers and the scientists is a large one.
With progress there is risk, but in so much as we understand what we are doing today - and the consensus of the best minds is that we do and that the standard model of particle physics is right - then CERN is an entirely safe endeavor.

There are multiple outlying theories that tell us that the universe - even time itself - exists on a knife edge that could just suddenly stop some day. Maybe, and that is about as unlikely as CERN sucking us into another dimension.

With such a long a la carte menu of eventualities to worry about on this earth, there are more pressing fears for we humans to consider. I worry about road traffic accidents every time I get into a cab - engineer here. That is a valid fear, but probably another one best left at home. We unfortunately have limited life spans for now - best bet in my experience is to go out and live to the full and not worry about the long-shot bad stuff that is out of our control... or we would never get into the airplane in the first place - and that's no fun.
CERN is sexy and big enough to be scary, but that's all - just another physics experiment in the end. I submit our time is better served being excited at the potential for new science, ...the hoverboards, the warp drives and the missions to stars we may get out of CERN or whatever CERNs grandchild is named and not dwell on our own mortality.. at least not beyond the scientific discoveries of eating well, quitting smoking and trying to live a relaxed, healthy life full of love, hope and possibility.
Life's for the living, universe is for the exploring, science is for the doing. That will do for me.

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theregister.co.uk says that in the Atlas results there is a hint of another Higgs boson, bigger then the one detected in 2012. I am currently running ATLAS@home and am following the subject.
Tullio

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Remembering CERN's April fool in March..


http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rainbow-gravity-universe-beginning/

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I think it is positive that they don't take themselves too seriously. Even they do not really know what they might find, but no reason why they shouldn't
look.

I think they should..

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A CERN reply to a post of mine. Will have to wait until April when the machine is back online. Now it is shut down for Christmas and Geneve needs of electricity.
New Boson
Tullio

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Thanx for the update, Tullio.

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According to "Nature Physics" of 22 December the CMS detector at LHC was looking for a graviton when it found the unexpected bump in photon production at 750 GeV. The bump was confirmed by the Atlas detector with even more photons. Let us wait for next year, now LHC has been shut down. My best wishes to everybody.
Tullio

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According to "Nature Physics" of 22 December the CMS detector at LHC was looking for a graviton when it found the unexpected bump in photon production at 750 GeV. The bump was confirmed by the Atlas detector with even more photons. Let us wait for next year, now LHC has been shut down. My best wishes to everybody.
Tullio

Looking forward to more updates on the project. Best wishes Tullio.

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Fabiola Gianotti is now Director of CERN. She is the third Italian Director after Carlo Rubbia and Luciano Majani. I never met them, but while at Trieste Area Science Park I had a call from Rubbia's secretary because in a hot July day the UPS of Area had shut down all electricity, leaving Rubbia with a blank terminal.Since it was a Friday afternoon all Area employees had gone to swim in the Adriatic, and I was the only person she found. I had to explain to her that as an employee of Bull Italy i had no access to the Area UPS room. I have just bought a small UPS to keep my SUN workstation alive in case of a blackout, but I don't know how long it would keep it alive. The laptop has its own battery, and the Windows 10 PC depends on the home electric circuit.
Tullio

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The January issue of CERN Courier has an article about ENLIGHT, which is a cooperation combining all centers of hadrontherapy for cancer. In Europe there are two centers using both protons and carbon ions. One is HIT in Heidelberg, the second CNAO in Pavia and a third is being built ai Wiener-Neustadt in Austria. My daughter Elisa was writing software in her thesis for the Italian CNAO center, which was planned in Milano and then moved to Pavia.
Tullio

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