Author: fc1959

Despite its pretty vulgar use as the place where food for the family is prepared, kitchen as you know is a very nice place to do physics experiments. In this periodic letter, I already described the physics of coffee making, the phase

Last week it was the “Nobels’ week”. As every first week in October since 123 years, three to nine startled scientists pick up the phone and listen to a voice announcing they have been awarded a Nobel prize in chemistry,

Factorized equations are a way to express in a simple, usually linearized fashion, the empirical dependence of a phenomenon on a number of variables. Maybe the most famous one is Fermi’s “four-factors” formula, to express the neutron criticality of a

Mike Brown is a Caltech astronomer who is fixated with trans Neptunian objects, that is chunks of matter in orbit around our Sun at a distance larger than Neptune’s major axis of 30 astronomical units (that is, 30 times the distance

Some time ago, Stefano, a brilliant mathematician in our research group, came to my office with a smile painted on his face. He started with his classic “Look what I just found…”, and went on discussing a mostly complicate argument,

After weeks of long work in the happy company of two friends, we are now facing the decision of which journal to submit our manuscript to. It is not the very first time that also “economy” factors are taken into

The experimental discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of CERN in Geneva around the mass value of 125 GeV, will remain as one of the major scientific discoveries of our time, and a great success

Two weeks ago, we left Phil Anderson mumbling about massless bosons, on his way back from Cambridge in the summer 1962. He would end up writing a short paper, about one year later, in which he added the word “plasmons”

When you step on a scales and look down at the number, what that number is telling you is how much force the mass of your body exerts on the ground. It is Newtonian mechanics saying just that force equals

… not even Alabama (a kid’s joke). One of the first courses I created after landing in the Physics department in Lille, around 2006, was a class of condensed matter physics. It seemed amazing to me, but what was taught