Machine Learning and Physics

Machine Learning has in use in the Large Hadron Collider for long enough that there is now a Coursera online course about it. Basically, machine learning is used to help handle the approximately one petabye per second of data collected from particle collisions. That is one kind of use of machine learning.

 Neural networks do the job of recognizing the content of images and video, and speech recognition much better than the traditional type of computer algorithms that people can write, so it is absolutely the right technique to give computers the senses of vision and hearing. The detection of "cat" or "utility" pole from two-dimensional arrays of bytes, which is computer vision, is generalizable to "seeing" patterns in data sets in N-dimensional arrays. This "data pattern sense" is a sense organ humans lack. Neural networks can help provide humans this sixth sense. 

 Beyond that, neural networks have to connect up with some type of symbolic representation, in order to be able to handle concepts, even simple relations like "bigger than", "smaller than", "behind", "above", etc.. The seventh lecture, Neurosymbolic AI, in the MIT introduction to deep learning, 6.S191 is from where I learned about it back in February, and a regret this year is that I have not been able to follow up on it. The idea is something like this (words added to clips from David Cox's slides):

I believe that the computer will have to connect what it can sense with its "data pattern sense" to symbolic representations, and then, what the computer can do will be no better or worse in its performance than whatever automated reasoning can do today, for instance, in mathematics theorem provers. So, if mathematics falls to Artificial Intelligence, then physics may follow, but not otherwise.

The obliquity of the ecliptic

On IndiaFacts, Anil Narayanan makes the case that the astronomers who wrote the Surya Siddhanta measured the obliquity of the ecliptic to be arcsin(1397/3438) = 23.975° and not 24° as has been translated by Whitney et. al. since 1858; since 24° would be expressed as arcsin(1398/3438) or arcsin(1399/3438) and never arcsin(1397/3438).

This is an important observation which bears repeating: The precision of the Indian R-Sine is 1/3438.

This puts the Surya Siddhanta to some 3000 BC.  Anil Narayanan promises more to support this date.

We currently know of at least 3 other items in Indian astronomy that point to 3000 BC, or thereabouts.

1) The value of the Sun’s equation-of-center given in the SS indicates a time range of 3000 BC or older;

2) The ubiquitously mentioned pole-star in Indian astronomy and literature, namely Dhruva (modern name Thuban), indicates a period about 3000 BC;

3) It is mentioned in the Satapatha Brahmana text that the Krittika Nakshatra rises exactly in the East, which occurred only in ancient times, around 3000 BC. Nowadays Krittika rises between East and North-East.

We will discuss these in other articles.

If Anil Narayanan is right, then he is also right about this:

The misconception, which has to do with the tilt, or obliquity, of the earth’s axis, also ranks among the most clever and successful obfuscations in Indian astronomy carried out by the European scholars of yesteryear. They skillfully achieved the difficult task of hiding the treasure in plain sight, so to speak.

The two questions that I have are - how was this angle measured or inferred, and what is the origin of the Indian standard radius of 3438?

Answer to 3438 - it is the approximate radius of the circle in minutes (the exact value is  3437.74677078...).

My criticism of Anil Narayanan's article - see Aryabhatta's sine table on Wiki.  1397 comes from a linear interpolation for 24° between rows 6 and 7 of that table.

That is,
22° 30' = 1350' has jya = 1315
26° 15' = 1575' has jya = 1520
What is the angle whose jya = 1397?
The linear interpolation answer is 1350' + (1397 - 1315) * (1575' - 1350')/(1520 - 1315)
= 1350' + 82 * 225'/ 205 = 1440' (exactly!)
1440' = 24°.

This is probably how Whitney et. al. came to 24°.   The question then was linear interpolation the method of calculation used? e.g., see the same Wiki article.  I think to establish the point made Anil Narayana's article, we have to know how intermediate values in the R-sine table were computed.

Or, following Anil Narayanan's philosophy, that the precision of the Indian R-Sine is 1/3438, the obliquity of the ecliptic in the Surya Siddhanta is not an approximate 24°:

According to Mr. Bentley, the Hindu astronomers (unless in cases where extraordinary accuracy is required) make it a rule, in observing, to take the nearest round numbers, rejecting fractional quantities: so that we have only to suppose that the observer who fixed the obliquity of the ecliptic at 24 degrees, actually found it to be 23 and 1/2.

 Rather the measured obliquity of the ecliptic is bounded by arcsin(1396/3438) and arcsin(1398/3438), i.e, between 23° 59' and 24° 1'  (23.983° and 24.017°).

Using the formula here: http://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Obliquity_of_the_ecliptic

or a more exactly formula one can estimate the range of times of that observation.

The start of India's space program

On the centenary birthday of Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, some remembrance of the beginnings of the Indian space program.

A Brief History of Rocketry in ISRO (2012)
PV Manoranjan Rao & P Radhakrishnan
Universities Press (India) ISBN 978-81-7371-763-5
page 2

"Independent India was lucky to have Jawaharlal Nehru as its first Prime Minister, for he shared a common ideal with Bhabha and Sarabhai.  He believed that modern science and technology were indispensable to the development of the country......Bhabha, in the 1950s and 60s, was considered the czar of organized research in India and, more importantly, had Nehru's ear!  Thus, when Sarabhai, with Bhabha's support, came up with a space initiative for the country, Nehru said 'yes' even though  the country was passing through a very difficult phase both economically and politically.

From Fishing Hamlet to Red Planet: India's Space Journey (2015)
Chief Editor P.V. Manoranjan Rao
HarperCollins, ISBN 978-93-517-689-5
page xix

"At that time India was facing severe economic and political hardships - there was a food shortage and that humiliating war in the north east.   Yet when Bhabha and Sarabhai came up with the space initiative, Nehru lent his wholehearted support.

India's Rise as a Space Power (2014)
Professor U.R. Rao
Foundation Books, ISBN 978-93-82993-48-3
Pages 7-8

"Given the background work of Dr Sarabhai and his co-workers at PRL and the expertise developed by Prof. Bernard Peters, Prof. M.G.K. Menon and their colleagues at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Bombay, who had flown a number of balloons from Hyderabad to carry out cosmic ray investigations,  Dr Homi Bhaba [sic] invited Dr Vikram Sarabhai to become a member of the Atomic Energy Commission and initiate space activity under the the umbrella of the Department of Atomic Energy.  Dr V. Sarabhai constituted the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) with Prof. E.V. Chitnis, ...."

Vikram Sarabhai - A Life (2007)
Amrita Shah
Penguin Books India, ISBN 978-0-67099-951-4
Pages 120-122, scattered excerpts

"When exactly Vikram came up with the notion of a space programme for India is not known.  R.G. Rastogi, his former student, claims to have heard him talk prophetically of setting up a rocket-launching programme 'by 1963' as far back as in the 1950s.  Praful Bhavsar, who had taken a leave of absence from PRL to do post-doctorate work at the University of Minnesota, recalls Vikram telling him something similar in 1959..."
"According to Rastogi, even Vikram's co-director at PRL, K.R. Ramanathan, was openly skeptical. 'He is too young, he has no idea how the government functions.  He will not get the money nor will establishment scientists allow it to happen.'...But Ramanathan had not counted on the chief weapon in Vikram's formidable arsenal of contacts: Homi J. Bhabha. 

It is tempting to speculate that Vikram and Bhabha, the two princes of Indian science, used their youthful days in Bangalore to spin up dreams for the future......It is tempting because of the uncanny sureness with which they set about their plans and their suggestion of complicity in so many of their actions. 

In August 1961, for instance, more than a year before the Chinese invasion and at a time when Nehru was still very much at the helm of the country's affairs, the union government, urged by Bhabha, identified an area known as 'space research and the peaceful uses of outer space' and placed it within the jurisdiction of the DAE.  As a part of the move, PRL was recognized as the 'appropriate centre' for research and development in space sciences.  And Vikram was co-opted into the board of the AEC.  More interestingly, in February 1962, the DAE created the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) under Vikram's chairmanship to oversee all aspects of space research in the country.  Vikram had overcome the first seemingly impossible hurdle.

Harper’s Index: thermostat and test scores

https://harpers.org/archive/2019/08/harpers-index-august-2019/

Percentage change in women’s math test scores in a room that is between 80° and 90° F rather than 60° and 70° F : +27

In men’s math test scores : –7

Traced the source to:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0216362

Battle for the thermostat: Gender and the effect of temperature on cognitive performance

The math test in question was adding pairs of five digit numbers, 50 pairs in five minutes.
The verbal test was given the letters ADEHINRSTU, build as many (German) words as possible in 5 minutes.

"Our sample consisted exclusively out of students from universities in Berlin. The advantages of this subject pool is that they are relatively easy to recruit and homogenous in their cognitive skills. The disadvantage of this subject pool is that it is not representative of the whole population with respect to age and education level. 

About the results:

"Taken together, these results show that within a temperature range of 16 and 33 degrees Celsius, females generally exhibit better cognitive performance at the warmer end of the temperature distribution while men do better at colder temperatures. The increase in female cognitive performance appears to be driven largely by an increase in the number of submitted answers. We interpret this as evidence that the increased performance is driven in part by an increase in effort. Similarly, the decrease in male cognitive performance is partially driven by a decrease in observable effort. Importantly, the increase in female cognitive performance is larger and more precisely estimated than the decrease in male performance."

 What this result establishes, IMO, is that each person, or at least student in Berlin, tends to put forth most effort in a indoor temperature setting that suits them.   This may have some relevance to supposedly gender-neutral tests, the test setting may be important.

A Peek into Einstein's Zurich Notebook

Here.

realclimate.org - sigh

Over at realclimate.org, there is a discussion going on, "If you doubt that the AMOC has weakened, read this".  This is one of two articles mentioned by this commentary in Nature: "North Atlantic circulation slows down". 

As the blurb says,

Evidence suggests that the circulation system of the North Atlantic Ocean is in a weakened state that is unprecedented in the past 1,600 years, but questions remain as to when exactly the decline commenced.

And the article not by the leaders of the discussion at realclimate.org is mentioned thusly (excerpts):

"Thornalley et al. provide a longer-term perspective on changes in AMOC strength during the past 1,600 years....The researchers found that the strength of the AMOC was relatively stable from about ad 400 to 1850, but then weakened around the start of the industrial era.....However, the roughly 100-year difference in the proposed timing of the start of the AMOC decline in these two studies has big implications for the inferred trigger of the slowdown. Caesar et al. clearly put the onus on anthropogenic forcing, whereas Thornalley et al. suggest that an earlier decline in response to natural climate variability was perhaps sustained or enhanced through further ice melting associated with anthropogenic global warming. Nevertheless, the main culprit in both scenarios is surface-water freshening."

(Caesar et. al. is the first article.)   I quoted just about that much and asked for comments on this.  This morning there are 168 comments on that thread, most of them are entertaining, IMO, a troll; but my comment - nowhere to be seen.

From my perspective - entertain the trolls, and rail about Brietbart, ignorance, etc.; but ignore, IMO, a legitimate request to hear the perspective of the authors of the first article on this commentary.

If this is their attitude, then saving us from climate change will be in spite of climate scientists and not because of.

Szilard: The Mark Gable Foundation

A comment from CIP on Peter Woit's blog discussing the "Breakthrough" prizes (which are million dollar awards to big-name scientists, sometimes for ideas that did not work out, scientifically speaking, though they led to huge payouts) led me to this, by John G. Cramer:

Last October I added a Google Analytics link to my online archive of these AV columns. Among other things, this allows me to conduct a "popularity contest" of my old columns. Rather to my surprise, the clear winner as the most popular of my 177 Alternate View columns so far is AV-04, "The Retarding of Science", published in the mid-December 1984 issue of Analog. That column was my only tongue-in-cheek foray into humor in writing these columns, but the surprising interest this 30 year old column seems to have gathered encourages me to do it again.

The December-1984 column was inspired by a Leo Szilard short story, "The Mark Gable Foundation", which described the creation of an endowed non-profit foundation for the specific purpose of slowing the pace of scientific progress. In the story, a physicist emerged from cold-sleep 200 years in the future to find that most of his scientific training was obsolete and that science was progressing "altogether too fast as it is". He enlisted the help of the world's wealthiest man to create a non-profit organization, The Mark Gable Foundation, dedicated to retarding scientific progress.

The Mark Gable Foundation achieved this objective by creating, for each major field of scientific investigation, a panel of distinguished scientists which would meet monthly to award prizes and grants for the best recent scientific work. (The Foundation, as Szilard pointed out, bears some resemblance to the U.S. National Science Foundation.) This plan, it was explained, would keep the best of the older scientists away from their laboratories and busy with unproductive travel, meetings, and report writing and would cause the younger scientists in need of funds to go for the "sure thing" that would be certain to lead to publishable results, thereby filling the scientific journals with trivial results and channeling research in the direction of the safe, the fashionable, and the obvious, and away from the more risky innovations and breakthroughs at the frontiers of knowledge.

The AV-04 article written in 1984, announced a new organization:

The time has come for a new initiative. I would like to announce the creation of a new scientific organization, the American Association for the Retardation of Science and Engineering (acronym: AARSE), dedicated to the retardation of scientific progress wherever it may occur, in whatever field, in whatever place. AARSE is created for the specific purpose of encouraging the retardation of scientific progress and of giving appropriate recognition to those who have done the most in the recent times to further this goal. 

 One of the first awardees:

Finally, we wish to honor those who have been able to substantially retard scientific progress by fuzzing out the distinction between science and non-science. There have been several notable efforts in this area. For example, there has been a particularly effective campaign to associate the word "research" with the act of looking up some bit of information in a book where it happens to be written down. Thus: "I will have to get back to you after I research that in the World Almanac." Equally important is the effort to apply, without regard to training or education, the term "engineer" to anyone who gets his hands dirty in his work. Thus the janitor becomes a "Building Maintenance Engineer" and the garbage man a "Solid Waste Engineer". But perhaps the most significant effort in this area goes to those who have been attacking the meaning of the word "science" itself by labeling certain fundamentalist Christian beliefs with the appellation "Creation Science". This brilliant application of the technique at a stroke confounds the distinction between science and religious dogma and brings scientific research into direct conflict with religion in a way which has been sadly absent since the times of Galileo and Darwin. For this outstanding achievement in the retardation of science we are pleased to present Gold-Plated AARSE Awards to the Institute for Creation Research of El Cajon, California, to the State Legislatures of Arkansas and Louisiana, and to clergymen, laymen, and laywomen everywhere who have contributed to this massive and effective effort. 

Manjul Bhargava on fringe science

Fields medalist Manjul Bhargava has a higher tolerance for fringe science than I do -- and perhaps I need to learn from him.

Perhaps Ramanujan’s struggle to find an audience for his work and the hardship he underwent to be taken seriously by the mathematics establishment of his time informs Dr. Bhargava’s relatively tolerant take on the inclusion of sessions on ancient Indian science in the proceedings of the Indian Science Congress. Last year, an ex-pilot made the apocryphal claim that an ancient Indian sage had laid down detailed plans of ancient airplanes; this year, too, a bureaucrat successfully submitted in the environmental sciences sub-conference a ‘research paper’ on how Lord Shiva was a “great environmentalist” — though he didn’t go on to present it.

To Dr. Bhargava, this is “fringe” science, though he adds that it’s in the very nature of science congresses the world over to occasionally entertain speculative claims and “fringe” science. The key, according to him, is that fringe science be treated as such and not be given greater space than actual scientific discussions or talks. “I was upset at the last Congress [in Mumbai] that the fantastic achievements of the ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) were barely covered in the media and all space was taken up by those discussions. Real scientists there were wondering, ‘Hey, what about us?’” he says. Moreover, he adds, at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), there were always claims that someone had solved the Riemann hypothesis [a bedevilling maths problem, nearly a century old, whose solving guarantees a million dollars in prize money from the Clay Mathematics Institute]. On the other hand, the solution to another tricky problem — of rapidly testing whether a given number was prime — was proffered by an Indian computer scientist, Manindra Agrawal and his two graduate students. “They are computer scientists and not professional mathematicians. Imagine if their work wasn’t accepted at an ICM… solutions can from anywhere,” he reasons, “Science marches ahead when as many ideas are allowed to be communicated.”

Evolutionary web

Per this NYTimes story, the human evolutionary tree looks something like this crude drawing - not to scale.  The dotted lines indicate some extent of inter-breeding.  I have added "South Asians" to the narrative as well.  Given that supposedly India has a human genetic diversity rivaled only by that of Africa, and that India remains under-studied, I expect a lot more surprises in the future.

The dotted lines are small perturbations (a few percent of the genome) in each case.  I expect the "tree" of language families and languages to actually have much denser cross-connects in an undiscoverable reality, because the evidence on languages is much less rich than the evidence from genes; even constructing the basic tree for languages is a struggle.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Physical Insight

Physicist Lee Smolin has an interesting pre-print in the History and Philosophy of Physics section of arxiv.org : "Lessons from Einstein's 1915 discovery of general relativity".  ( If one has read books at the level of Penrose's popular works, this paper should be quite comprehensible.)

Smolin argues, that contrary to the myth created by Einstein himself, it was not beautiful mathematics that led Einstein to his theory of general relativity.  Historians of physics have gone through Einstein's notebooks, and what they shared with Smolin led him to this:

I had a very happy day about fifteen years ago when I visited Jurgen Renn in Berlin and he showed me images of the notebooks in which Einstein had created general relativity. What impressed me was that Einstein was using the same techniques all physicists use to grasp the essential features of a phenomena they want to model. These are the development of approximate expressions, together with theplayful creation of simple examples and models. These are the tools every physicist is taught, which they employ throughout their career, first, to do their homework and, later, to make progress in their research.

The mathematics Einstein used may appear beautiful to some who study it, but what is going on in Einstein’s notebooks was not beautiful. It was hardheaded and pragmatic.  When you dine at a fancy restaurant you may be impressed by the aesthetic presentation of a dish as it is brought to the table. But this is only the last step, just as the freshness of the ingredients as they come from the farm is only the first step. In between, hidden in the kitchen, it is all just hard, practical work. Mistakes are made, but these, ideally, never leave the kitchen. In Einstein’s kitchen—his notebooks it was no different.

It was Einstein's physical insight and intuition that gave him his greatest successes, and when he had no new insights and relied on the beauty of mathematics, as in his futile quest for a unified theory, he got absolutely nowhere. 

Smolin draws the lesson:

The lesson is that the task of formulating a physical principle must come first—only when we have one in hand do we have a basis to look for new mathematics to express the new principle.

The physical principles "that Einstein invented such as the principle of equivalence and the principle of the relativity of inertial frames"..."are directly about nature."

They constrain, and can be falsified by, individual experiments. They require no mathematics to express them: their contents can be entirely captured in a verbal description of an experiment. Historians talk of “thought experiments”, but in fact the principles invented by the young Einstein referred to genuinely doable experiments.

All very good, but then Smolin goes on to propose that background independence ("...the laws of nature should be statable in a form that does not rely on the specification of a fixed geometry of spacetime") might be one such physical principle. Here, I'm lost. This seems to me to be a statement the real content of which can only be expressed in mathematics. I'm hard-pressed to think of genuinely doable experiments that test this principle.

Smolin weighs in on the holography principle: "This says that a model world with gravity can be described as if it were a world without gravity, with one fewer dimension, where that surface theory has one degree of freedom per Planck area", and says that this principle does not have the physical content of the principles of relativity and equivalence, and cannot be tested in single experiment.

So color me puzzled. But it suits my particular inclination that physics proceeds with physical insight, not with mathematics. Of course, if we're stuck with no unexplained anomalous observations or experimental results, and we have no good physical principle, then we can only pay attention to the mathematics, and hope that it leads to something. The history of the last forty years of particle physics is that this is a slender straw to cling to.

The plunge in DNA sequencing costs

These pair of remarkable charts are from the US National Human Genome Research Institute:

A nation stuck in high school

The Martian is a movie worth watching.  It is about the struggle for survival of an astronaut stranded on Mars.  The story is in the "hard" science fiction category, i.e., it mostly gets the science right, and the technology is not far from feasible.  If we don't blow ourselves up or pollute ourselves to death, we will be the spacefaring species whose first baby steps are depicted in this movie.  But will America be leading these steps?

This story about the movie, (and witnessing America's news shows and political debates) makes me think that high school is a traumatic experience for Americans, which very few outgrow.

• "15 Times The Martian Made Science Nerds Look Totally Bad-Ass"
• "But at its core, it's just a feel-good movie about science nerds."
• "This isn't your average Interstellar-like tear-jerker, after all; this is an all-out love letter to math. And chemistry. And physics. And botany. And again (and most importantly) nerds. Argue what you will about the scientific accuracy of each and every plot line (although chances are experts won't find too many moments to discredit), but The Martian officially makes it cool to be a nerd."

PS: Prof. Paul Krugman, in his blog:

Anyway, it’s quite sad that after all these years political coverage still treats the momentous issue of who will lead the world’s most powerful nation like a high school popularity contest.

Insect with gears in its legs!

The British leafhopper has gears to make its hindlegs move in synchrony!

A pile of bunk

In his recent NYT column, Ross Douthat refers to this conversation on edge.org between Daniel Kahneman and Yuval Noah Harari.  Kahneman is a Nobel Laureatte, and Harari is a historian who has won attention for successfully pushing his greatly oversimplified view of reality. 

The best you can say about this conversation is that Harari is talking about many decades from now; and there's little original there - the masters of science fiction have long covered all these scenarios.

Let's take a few:

Nobody has a clue how the world will look like in, say, 40, 50 years.

There is nothing new or profound about that.  Consider the changes over the lifetime of a person who lived 1900-1980.  

But in the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the military, it's done, it's over. 

This might be true in the future; but if it was true today, the USwould have ended the civil war in Syria, and failing that, it would certainly wipe out in zero time the excrescence that is ISIS/Daish. But military operations still require putting people in harm's way;  remote air power is insufficient to defeat ISIS; it needs "boots on the ground".

And the handful of people trickling in from Europe and America to join ISIS would not cause such consternation and alarm, if humans were so not-valuable for military purposes.

People never die because the Angel of Death comes, they die because their heart stops pumping, or because an artery is clogged, or because cancerous cells are spreading in the liver or somewhere. These are all technical problems, and in essence, they should have some technical solution. And this way of thinking is now becoming very dominant in scientific circles, and also among the ultra-rich who have come to understand that, wait a minute, something is happening here. For the first time in history, if I'm rich enough, maybe I don't have to die.

The attitude may be there (Steve Jobs might be an exception?) but this way of thinking is delusional.  Not that there is an Angel of Death,  but  in thinking that "having some technical solution" means being able to achieve such a solution.    The problem of reconciling quantum mechanics and the General Theory of Relativity is a technical problem, and in essence, it should have a technical solution.  Good luck with that!   And how far have we gotten with curing cancer?  Or understanding the cause of autism?   All these are "technical problems".    Finding efficient computation for  NP-complete problems is a "technical problem" with a "technical solution".

If any ultra-rich person thinks that the world is like the Star Trek universe, where the Captain asks how long will it take to solve this never-before encountered complex engineering or scientific problem, and the crew says "5 hours", and the Captain says, "make it 4, make it so", and it all happens, please send that ultra-rich person my way, so I may join the ranks of the ultra-rich in short order.

On the genetic roots of human disease

The New York Times carried this intriguing report by Nicholas Wade.

In brief: the theory used to be that some genetic mutations exert their bad effects only late in life, after people have had their children, and so were not eliminated by natural selection.  So some small set of common variants of genes were taken to underlie various diseases, and there was a hope that understanding the genes would lead to understanding the disease and from that to effective methods of treatment.

But improvements in genomics seems to show that very large numbers of rare genetic mutations are responsible for diseases.  So the situation is lots of genetic variants lead to common diseases, i.e., many different causes lead to similar effects.  The downside of this new understanding is that interpreting our genes is more difficult that we had hoped, that understanding and treating diseases influenced by genes is going to be hard.

At a meta level, it is interesting how such a simple and satisfying theory, and very respecting of Ockham's Razor,  is likely to be wrong.

Cockroaches are social animals!!!

Via CIP, the hidden-from-us social life of cockroaches.

Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/why-global-warming-skeptics-are-wrong/
Via realclimate.org, an excellent essay by William D. Nordhaus.

OPERA - faster than light neutrinos resolved?

Tommaso Dorigo

It appears that the source of the problem is a connection of a fiber optic cable to a hardware board, which introduces a time delay which gets subtracted in the neutrino timing measurement.

So, no new physics from Opera neutrinos after all. Einstein may rest in peace, Relativity holds, and new physics model builders can have a good night of sleep tonight.

Strange Planet

Our wondrous universe.  (Discover magazine blogs).

The Higgs at last?

Dorigo.

PS: Strassler 

PPS: Gibbs  Read this one for sure.