Zombies at CERN!

The Halloween night is just round the corner and I could not keep myself from showing you a film trailer dealing with a very well themed topic: ZOMBIES!

Well, you might think I’m going mad: it might even be Halloween but what the point of talking about zombies in The Gravity Room?

Zombie al LHC

Visto che tra poche ore sta per arrivare la notte di Halloween non potevo sottrarmi dal mostrarvi il trailer di questo questo film che tratta di un argomento perfettamente in tema con la giornata: gli ZOMBIE!!!!

Bene voi ora direte che sto "uscendo di matto" perché se è vero che vi è un attinenza tra il giorno della pubblicazione e l'argomento del film non si capisce il perché questo post debba essere pubblicato su "The Gravity Room".

Petition: secure the EU research and innovation budget

Read more here

Frans Pretoriou visiting CENTRA

Frans Pretorious, one of the major world experts in Numerical Relativity, is visiting our group and will give a Colloquium on Wednesday. 

Also, tomorrow Frans will be part of the jury of Helvi Witek's Ph.D. defense, so let me take this opportunity to wish her good luck (not that she needs it!)

Angry Birds to teach particle physics

From http://www.symmetrymagazine.org 

“
The vengeful Angry Birds cardinal sets his sights on a new target: teaching kids particle physics.

By Signe Brewster

CERN and Angry Birds-creator Rovio announced last Friday that they will team up to produce a learning program for children between 3 and 8 years old. The partnership will focus on the Angry Birds Playground brand, which is designed to make learning about physics fun and accessible for all ages. It is based on Finland’s national kindergarten curriculum.

“It’s not so much to teach kids in a serious way, but to bring them into science in a playful and inspiring way,” says Rolf Landua, head of CERN’s education and outreach group. “Rovio has quite a comprehensive educational program, which is available on the Internet. To hook onto that and provide content that gives young children an idea of what CERN is doing and what modern physics is about with the help of the little angry birds, I think that’s quite promising.”

The birds in the Angry Birds game are angry because pigs stole their eggs. Landua says that in the Playground game, children will walk around an island and search for traces of the eggs. As they do so, they will be asked to solve puzzles, some of which will relate to CERN research.

The announcement took place at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, which is the largest publishing fair in the world. CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer and Rovio Chief Marketing Officer Peter Vesterbacka shook hands to seal the agreement."We are also discussing further collaboration with Rovio, perhaps on physics games for older children, or the development of a new game around the Angry Birds in the CERN universe,” Landua says. Rovio released Angry Birds in 2009, after which it quickly became a hit on the iPhone and other devices. The company has since adapted the characters for use in other products, such as playgrounds and the new educational system. 
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The Physics of Angry Birds.

               

"One bad day for science"

This is the subject of a mailing list I have just received from some people at my Portuguese institution in response to this article.

I think it represents well the astonishment of nonitalian people and scientists towards the nonsenses of the italian (lower case is mandatory) law, politics and, i'm afraid to say, public opinion.

Recommended by us: gravitons

“  Gravitons Sesame Street has a learning game that goes with the jingle "One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn't belong." Can you find which one is different? If you've read anything about the kinds of physics we do at Fermilab, you've heard lots of words ending with "on" – words like proton, neutron, gluon, photon, boson, fermion and on and on and on. One of the words you might have encountered is the graviton. Let's get one thing out of the way: At the moment, gravitons are entirely theoretical constructs that delicately walk the knife-edge precipice between the domains of scientific respectability and the shady world of hand waving. The fantastic success of quantum theory to describe three forces – electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces – provides a considerable impetus to try to marry it to the fourth force of gravity. In the same way that the photon is known to be the quantum particle of the electromagnetic force and the gluon is the quantum particle of the strong force, the "graviton" is the name given to a hypothetical quantum particle of the gravitational force. However, a quantum theory of gravity has so far been elusive. Einstein's theory of general relativity has been the most successful description of gravity, but when it encounters the quantum realm, it predicts nonsense, with impossible infinities popping up throughout the calculations. Infinities like that are nature's way of saying "back to the drawing board." And though theoretical physicists have quite a way to go in coming up with such a model, it is still possible to work out some of the properties of gravitons. (Continue to read on Fermilab Today)

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