CMS proton-lead ridge: color glass condensate?

Two years ago, I reported the observation of surprising two-particle correlations at the CMS in proton-proton collisions, something that was previously observed at Brookhaven's RHIC in their 2005 gold-gold collisions.You know that the LHC sometimes collides lead nuclei against lead nuclei instead of proton-proton pairs but a few weeks ago, it tried something something new, the proton-lead (asymmetric) collisions. Physics World tells us about a (not...

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Was Sandy systemically caused by CO2?

Anthony Watts wrote down a nice table describing which folks believe or at least pretend to believe that CO2 "caused" Hurricane Sandy and which people don't. If I simplify it a little bit, activists, liars, and crackpots such as Al Gore support the link while scientists don't. I am kind of pleased to see that for the first time, most of the media seem to agree that the people promoting the hurricane-CO2 link are hacks.I was intrigued by a member of the former group, hardcore leftist activist Mr George Lakoff, who wrote the following text for the...

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Different ways to interpret Feynman diagrams

Feynman diagrams are the funny pictures that Richard Feynman drew on his van:You see that a Feynman diagram is composed of several lines that meet at vertices (at the nodes of the graph). Some of the lines are straight, some of them are wiggly: this shape of each line distinguishes the particle type. For example, straight lines are often reserved for fermions while wiggly lines are reserved for photons or other gauge bosons.Some lines (I mean line...

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Is Hurricane Sandy unprecedented?

East Coast people's reports about their observations and courage are more than welcomeUpdate ex post facto: Sandy deserves the label "non-event" even more so than Irene didThe media are full of panic and strong words inspired by Hurricane Sandy, the "Frankenstorm" as some writers nicknamed it. Of course, this moniker – perhaps originally meant to indicate the Halloween time – is popular especially among those crackpots who want to argue that the...

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Doha, Qatar will host a climate conference

What a paradox!Qatar is a peninsula located on the opposite side of the Pilsner Gulf than Iran. Its economy is the wealthiest one not only in the Islamic world – even in comparison with Kuwait and UAE – but it's almost certainly richer than the economy of your country. The GDP per capita exceeds $100,000; no kidding. Not bad for a nation (2 million people) whose average IQ is 78. Sometimes if your ancestors are dumb enough to choose a desert as their...

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Preons probably can't exist

Don Lincoln is the star of several cute Fermilab videos in which he explains various issues in particle physics. He's also authored several related texts for Fermilab Today.He chose a much more controversial topic, namely preons, for his fresh article in the Scientific American:The Inner Life of QuarksPreons are hypothetical particles smaller than leptons and quarks that leptons and quarks are made out of. But can there be such particles?At first...

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