Quintuplets in physics

Cool anniversary: In late January, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the announcement of the discovery of the W-boson. Today, we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Z-boson. They were comparably important discoveries to the recent discovery of the God particle.Sport: Viktoria Pilsen defeated Hradec, a much weaker team, 3-to-0 in the last round so we won the top soccer league for the 2nd time (after 2011). Because the Pilsner ice-hockey team...

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AGW: due to cosmic rays and freons?

Lots of skeptics and the überalarmist Alexander Ač sent me the information about a widely discussed paperCosmic-Ray-Driven Reaction and Greenhouse Effect of Halogenated Molecules: Culprits for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change (arXiv, PDF)WUWT, Google Newswritten by Qing-Bin Lu, a physicist (mostly biophysicist) at the University in Waterloo, in October 2012. The first detail that seems bizarre to me is the amount of hype surrounding...

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An extremely cloudy Prague in 2013

A Czech Canadian e-pal has complained to me that "the month of May was worth [an excrement]: cold, windy, rainy etc". But that's nothing compared to the first five months as we have experienced them in Czechia.The Czech media such as The Week (EN) have told us about some cold hard figures describing the weather in Prague between January 1st and May 17th, 2013.In this 137-day-long period, the number of hours when it was "clear skies" in Prague was...

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SUSY GUT with \(A_4\): six predictions for fermion masses

Stefan Antusch, Christian Gross, Vinzenz Maurer, and Constantin Sluka of Basel, Switzerland (Antusch is also affiliated with the Werner Heisenberg Institute, a part of the Max Planck Instiute in Munich) released an extremely intriguing preprint:A flavour GUT model with \[\Large\theta_{13}^{PMNS} = \frac{\theta_{\rm Cabibbo}}{\sqrt 2}\]Their model – or class of models – combines the constraints of supersymmetry, grand unification, and the \(A_4\)...

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Encouraging high school students talented in physics

...and astronomyIn the afternoon, I spent about 5 hours in Techmania, our local science center/museum built in some no longer operational construction halls of Škoda Works, a major factory in our city.Your humble correspondent was partly invited as a (now aged) kid who could have benefited from similar events and who could have an idea what kind of aid may be helpful to the kids. There were high school teachers, primarily from a gymnasium in Cheb...

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Heuristic ideas about bounded prime gaps

Why Yitang Zhang's proof is probably far less fundamental than the claimYitang Zhang worked at Subway before he would land a mathematics job. And when he did, he wasn't publishing almost anything for years before he would offer a proof of something rather important weeks ago. That turned the name of the popular math instructor in New Hampshire into one of the most well-known names of number theorists in the world. Some increasingly popular links...

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Smoluchowski, Milanković: birthdays

Two Slavic, Austrian-Hungarian physicists were introduced to the sunlight on May 28th. Marian Smoluchowski was born as a Pole in Austria in 1872; Milutin Milanković was born as a Serb in (then) Croatia, Kingdom of Hungary, in 1879. Smoluchowski was a statistical physicist; Milanković was a climatologist, astronomer, geophysicist – and also a construction engineer.Marian Smoluchowski was born to an upper-class family near Vienna. He studied physics...

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Anticommunist uprising in Pilsen: 60 years ago

One of the numerous historical events that strengthen my pride in my hometown of Pilsen was the 1953 Uprising which was the first credible post-war anticommunist uprising in the Soviet bloc and the only violent anticommunist rebellion in the history of the communist Czechoslovakia (1948-1989).Pilsen's communist headquarters in the 1950s. We're voting for the candidates of the National Front and against the remilitarization of West Germany, blah blah...

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Global warming is here to stay

Kevin Trenberth wrote the following text:Global warming is here to stay, whichever way you look at itSo it must be a spherical global warming! Before I will mention every sentence of Trenberth's musings, let me offer you a quiz.Click the image above to zoom in.You see a graph that seems to be a graph of some temperatures. You see that the maximum that the temperature has reached on this graph is slightly above 0.7 °C. On the horizontal axis,...

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Eric Weinstein's invisible theory of nothing

On Friday, I received an irritated message from Mel B. who had read articles in the Guardian claiming that Eric Weinstein found a theory of everything or something close:Roll over Einstein: meet Weinstein (by Alok Jha)Eric Weinstein may have found the answer to physics' biggest problems (by Marcus du Sautoy)Geometric Unity (a lecture at Oxford that no physicist attended)First, the puns involving names emulating Einstein are extremely far from being...

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Sheldon Glashow on future of HEP in the U.S.

...plus a wonderful interview with Nima about HEP and failures of science popularization at the end...Sheldon Glashow, a co-father of the electroweak theory, wrote a 6-page essay aboutParticle Physics in The United States, A Personal ViewIt is as phenomenological or experiment-oriented as you can get. Glashow complains that the SSC was cancelled, America lost its leadership in high-energy physics, and the next collider after the LHC is unlikely to...

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