Who Killed President Kennedy? A Review of Evidence

On November 22nd I had the pleasure to attend a lecture at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs with my brother Robert Asaadi who is a PhD student in the political science.

The reason I drove all the way to Minneapolis to see this lecture was simple, the former Governor Jesse Ventura was coming to discuss the evidence supporting the conspiracy theory around the killing of President Kennedy.

Now he didn't appear alone, with him was Judge John R. Tunheim who served for more than 11 years as a United States District Judge since taking his oath of office on December 29, 1995. Tunheim served as chairman of the U.S. Assassination Records Review Board, an independent federal agency responsible for reviewing and facilitating public disclosure of previously classified government records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Anyone who has ever seen an interview with Governor Ventura knows that he is not a man to speak lightly on such a subject nor does he pull punches. However, unlike what comes across when in a hostile setting (say like fox news) he is a very respectful man and whether you agree or disagree he speaks plainly and directly while still respecting the opposite opinion.

The University of Minnesota has made the audio available (which you can listen to here).

Of course no single issue was resolved here...but it was exciting to hear from two people who have studied this issue in a scholarly way (one from the judicial aspect the other from dedicating reading and publicly available information) that this issue is far from settled and the things that at one time were considered outrageous (such as the presence of more then one shooter) is now becoming more generally accepted!

I would encourage anyone if given the opportunity to see Governor Ventura speak they should defiantly seize upon it.

New measurement by OPERA...same strange result?!?!

So the BBC is reporting that the results of the neutrino run done most recently by the OPERA experiment is confirming their previous result and continuing to find superluminal neutrino speeds.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236

In this iteration of the experiment OPERA attempted to address, amongst many points, one of their largest sources of uncertainty. Namely, the bunch length of the protons that were being sent from CERN and were producing the neutrinos that they were measuring.

By shortening the bunch widths you have a greater certainty about where the neutrinos are being created and thus you know your initial time to a much higher degree of accuracy.

Needless to say this is a big deal if it is true.

They have updated their paper to include this systematic "fix" as well as complete discussion of various other effects taken into account can be found here on the arxiv.

This is a very exciting find in physics and with the reported plan to submit this paper for review to a journal a final vetting is in due course.

Now we must wait for this experiment to be repeated by the many other long baseline experiments, such as MINOS here at Fermilab and T2K in Japan!

So if your days have been anything like mine in recent weeks anytime I talk to anyone with even a vague semblance of what particle physics is and that I am an experimentalist (in training of course) the question comes....
"So what about CERN proving Einstein wrong with those things going faster than light?"
 


To which I respond politely, "Crazy stuff...but anytime someone says they see something going faster than light I put my hand on my wallet because something is fishy".

If the person is nice/interested enough to want a further explanation I try to explain what the OPERA measurement is along with loads of caveats that I don't work on this experiment,  as scientists they did hundreds of cross-checks, and that they wouldn't release this result if they weren't convinced something is strange here...etc...etc...

If someone is daring enough to push and ask what I think about it my response has been simple: "Science is about repeatability and accuracy so I'll wait till the next group of experimentalists weighs in".

Today on the BBC I saw the news announcement that "Faster-than-light neutrino experiment to run again". Aside from the obvious things wrong with the title of the argument (this wasn't an experiment to search for faster-than-light neutrinos) the article explains that during this next run they are going to attempt to remove on of the largest possible sources of systematic errors in the OPERA measurment, namely the length of the length of the proton bunch widths being sent towards Gran Sasso from 10 microseconds to ~ 1 nanosecond  with ~ 500 nanoseconds between pulses.

While you still can't measure exactly which neutrino is from which proton the way you would like to in a perfect measurement, this should allow them to be more accurate on average than before and take away a source of error many people I would consider experts have said is of greatest concern.
While I'm sure this is only one  of many improvements that will be made to this measurement to address all the...shall we say..."constructive criticism" the OPERA experiment has received since their result. The bad news is that if they end up with a null measurement and find that neutrinos don't in fact go faster than the speed of light the news and fan fare will be much less...because while for scientists a null result is still a result...for the rest of the world a null result is not news.

So I think we have some interesting times in experimental physics coming in the very near future!

Quantum Man: Richard Feynman

There was an exceptional lecture about Richard Feynman given at CERN a few days ago that was shared by a colleague and wanted to repost here.

From the CERN document server: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1386327

Lawrence Krauss gives a very nice overview of some of the things that I think made Feynmann exceptional both in his physics and in being a human in a field of giants (physics).

Like most people coming up after this exceptional man I too was influenced by his writings and his legend and as I make the transition from graduate student to Post-doc I can only hope to have my path as rich as Feynman's was!

Fermilab's Tevatron Shutdown Event

So this Friday is the shutdown of Fermilab's Proton/Anti-Proton Collider the Tevatron. After almost 30 years of service and numerous discoveries the collider has run her course and is scheduled to be turned off.
Instead of this being a sad event Fermilab is going to let the old girl go out with a bang! A celebration is planned and I hope to be able to blog about it and bring pictures and thoughts about the days activities.

CDF has their experiments collaboration meeting going on over the next few days (at which I am giving a talk on my own analysis) and then a big celebration planned on Friday when they finally shut down the detector and the accelerator.
Live streaming media from both the Main Control room as well as CDF and D0 control rooms will be provided by Fermilab Visual Media Services.

Additionally, Chicago's own National Public Radio WBEZ did a show about the Tevatron that can be found here

The festivities and physics to come are sure to be exciting. So instead of being sad about the end of one of the most ground breaking experiments in science...here is a picture of a Corgi in a swing....adorable!

Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam

Here is the article on the anomaly being reported for the speed of neutrinos from CERN to the OPERA detector in Italy

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897v1

Good read and helps deal with the first set of questions I had about this phenomenon. (Accuracy of the position measurement for one)

Now time to digest and see before we turn the world of physics on its head!

Neutrinos going faster than the speed of light?

All the buzz is there...did experimentalists observe neutrinos going faster than the speed of light?

To be honest I don't know and am still gathering information. I'll bet many of my friends and colleagues are in the same boat as me being asked questions through the many channels available to us (Facebook, Twitter, etc...)  to weigh in when we are just finding out ourselves.

There will be a webcast of a talk by the collaborators from OPERA tomorrow and here is the link
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=155620

Hope this helps everyone in figuring out if this is real...I will have more to say on this in the coming days!