Superconductive Leon Cooper: birthday

Sheldon Cooper is named after two people: physicist Leon Cooper and – with apologies to Sheldon Glashow – the film actor and producer Sheldon Leonard. Today, on the last day of February 2013 and the last day of a 700-year-long popeful period, the first man in the list celebrates his 83th birthday. Congratulation to Leon Cooper! He is of course most famous for his and BCS theory of superconductivity for which they received the 1972 Physics Nobel Prize.While...

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Czech president's alleged high treason: a childish yet harmful game

Even followers of stations such as Fox News could learn about a story that makes my homeland look like a banana republic:Czech president could face high treason charges for his controversial amnestyCzech president Václav Klaus will leave his job in 9 days – after 10 years which he spent at the Prague Castle by bringing inspiration and ideas to everyone and by impressively defending common sense, conservative values, and the Czech national interests – and the Club of Czech Klaus haters has prepared a nice gift for the economist: a trial to investigate...

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Sir Ranulph Fiennes' frostbite highlights global warming

There have been numerous stories of the same kind (even on this blog) but they apparently never stop coming. Sir Ranulph Fiennes (63) decided to become the first human to cross Antarctica in winter:Sir Ranulph Fiennes to Attempt First Wintertime Trans-Antarctic TrekThe page above and many others revealed that a key purpose of the event was to promote the global warming panic:But this trek is not merely another notch in Fiennes’ belt (which, presumably, is comprised entirely of notches). Ironically, the expedition team hopes ‘The Coldest Journey’...

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Learning physics is futile without practicing

LHC news: CMS released two papers with 20/fb of the 8 TeV 2012 data. Remarkably enough, both the dijet paper (Figure 5) and the dilepton paper (Figure 5) show 2-sigma excesses for a possible new object of mass 1,750 GeV or so. They're much weaker signals than what is expected from the typical theories for the objects searched in these papers but the overlap of these excesses is still a bit interesting.After a break, I answered a package of questions...

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Mauritia: microcontinents must have been around for eons

And pairs of opposing large continents may have been more typical than a single unified oneTons of articles including one at NPR have been written about a new finding. Lava sands with zircon xenocrysts found on the beaches of Mauritius (island which is East from Madagascar) support the idea of a microcontinent dubbed Mauritia that existed between the continents (...) of Madagascar and India for tens of millions of years sometime 70 million years...

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A pro-firewall paper

The black hole firewall saga has continued with several new papers. Since the last blog entry about the topic, three Japanese authors proposed something that they call a self-consistent model of the black hole evaporation, probably without any firewalls. Because a starting point is semiclassical gravity, the paper can't be self-consistent, however.Rodolfo Gambini and Jorge Pullin propose that loop quantum gravity "solves" the firewall problem by...

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Mauna Loa carbon dioxide: a fit

I wanted to find a nice function that gives a satisfactory description of the carbon dioxide concentration as a function of time.Mauna Loa, one of the five volcanoes underlying Hawaii, a middle Pacific state of the U.S., is the most standardized place where the concentration is measured. See this NOAA page on Mauna Loa weekly and the raw data I have used.If you open the page with the raw data, you will get over 2,000 weekly concentrations of carbon...

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Unstable Universes: guest blog

Guest blog by David Berenstein, Assoc. Prof. in Santa BarbaraIt’s a fine day for the Universe to die, and to be new again! Well, maybe not, but the Internet is abuzz with a reincarnation of the unstable universe story. (You can also see it here, or here, the whole thing is trending in Google). In other words, this is known as tunneling between vacua. And if you have followed the news about the Landscape of vacua in string theory, this should be old...

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Ludwig Boltzmann: a birthday

Off-topic: Yuri Milner, Facebook's Zuckerberg, and Google's Brin launched a Life Sciences counterpart of the Milner Prize, the same money. Because it's about life sciences, the chairman of the foundation is the chairman of Apple.Ludwig Boltzmann was born on February 20th, 1844, in Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Empire. He hanged himself 62 years later, on September 5th, 1906, near Trieste, (then) also in the Austrian Empire, where he was on...

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