We talked about the history of symbolic computation, the achievements FORM made possible, and the role institutions must play in supporting scientific software development.
Read the full interview to learn about the most important tool you've never heard of:
cerncourier.com/a/the-most-i...
And yet, the contributions of those working to improve and distribute it, bringing it up to the standards of the accelerators to come, struggle to be recognised. For the latest issue of the Courier, I spoke with Jos, Thomas Gehrmann, and Joshua Davies upon the release of FORM version 5.
One billion proton pairs collide every second in CERN's flagship particle accelerator, flying off at almost the speed of light. FORM is crucial in predicting the outcomes of these extremely high-energy events.
It was about twenty-five years later that Jos Vermaseren, on the hunt for a more sophisticated and portable tool, wrote the first version of FORM.
Thus he created Schoonschip, one of the earliest computer algebra programs. Written in the nowadays obscure assembly language, only maintainable by Veltman himself, and with a name chosen to "tease the foreigners", Schoonschip could handle the 50.000 terms for the quadrupole moment of the W boson.
That time, though, the formulas were too long. Even assuming one could reach the end, the odds of a plus turning into a minus, or a term slipping between lines, were close to a hundred percent. Not to mention the hassle of fetching thousands of blackboards.
In the 1960s, Dutch physicist Martinus Veltman had a problem: checking that certain particle models wouldn't yield silly infinities. That's the sort of puzzle theorists normally crack with blackboards and chalk, along with large cups of coffee.
“The campaign for intersex people’s human rights has come a long way in the past two decades… Unfortunately, as this research shows, it is still dangerous to be born this way.”
Politics aimed at enforcing binary sex result in harmful interventions on intersex people. We must resist such politics.
“We plan to submit CEPC for consideration again in 2030, unless FCC is officially approved before then, in which case we will seek to join FCC, and give up CEPC.”
cerncourier.com/a/cepc-matur...
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“Although our proposal that CEPC be included in the next five-year plan was not successful, IHEP will continue this effort, which an international collaboration has developed for the past 10 years,” says study leader Wang Yifang.
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🚨📰📣Breaking physics news!
In October, the Circular Electron–Positron Collider (CEPC) study group completed its full suite of technical design reports. However, CEPC will not be considered for inclusion in China’s next five-year plan (2026–2030).
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The Circular Electron–Positron Collider (CEPC), a 100-km electron–positron “Higgs factory” proposed in China, has reached the technical-design stage but will not be included for approval or construction in the country’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030).
cerncourier.com/a/cepc-matur...
Working at the CERN Courier is a great honour, and I am deeply grateful for it. This time, we had the pleasure of wrestling with the history of quarkonia, the X17 anomaly, ATLAS's confirmation of a top-antitop excess, and much more. I hope you'll enjoy our latest issue!
I jumped on board as the train was shooting past at supersonic speed, but working on such a significant issue is a honour I struggle to capture in a post.
Go and read the new #CERNCourier – before I get too emotional!
One hundred years ago today, Werner Heisenberg wrote to Wolfgang Pauli of radical ideas about quantum mechanics. As this special anniversary edition of #CERNCourier shows, a century has not sufficed to fully understand or apply the theory.
Read it now: cerncourier.com/p/magazine/
The CERN Courier has been the high-energy physics magazine for almost seventy years. On a smaller scale, it has been my personal, essential source of information on the field.
It is thus with great pleasure that I announce I have joined it as an Associate Editor. I’ll do my best!
I’ll spend my next week at Helgoland, celebrating 100 years of #quantum mechanics on Heisenberg’s legendary eureka island. If you’ll attend the conference as well, come shake my hand! 🧪🔬🔭
Ufff, luckily all people in my exact field start with a 160% credibility prior!
I profoundly thank you for your kind words, which mean a lot to me. The one thing I love about your text is its absolute conceptual clarity — being clear commenting it was, thus, quite easy!
Dear Professor Chen, I’m pleased and honoured to see this post!
This discussion is part of a foundations of physics physics I’m delivering on a weekly basis – and I think there’s no better place to explain why “laws” are interesting than your introduction!
Just found this (Italian!) YouTube breakdown of Laws of Physics by physicist @davidedebiasio.bsky.social on his channel Spazi Attorcigliati. He dives into the first 20 pages—ontology, nomology, laws as constraints. I'm honored!
Thanks to #ChatGPT I could follow along! www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDBD...
I am pleased to announce that, for the ‘Science Toolbox’ Festival, I will talk about quantum superpositions, measurements, wave functions of the universe, and parallel worlds. See you on 8 April at 6:30 p.m., in room P2 of the Paoloni complex – University of Padua.
#physics #lecture #quantum 🔬🔭🧪
One hundred years have passed since Werner Heisenberg, recovering on the Helgoland island, had the epiphany that allowed him to formulate his new science. To celebrate this anniversary, we will retrace the path that led many physicists to believe that every measurement branches reality.
When you flip a quantum coin, there is a copy of you that sees heads and one that gets tails. It's a bold, radical proposal. Maybe, enough to grasp what physics suggests about the nature of the universe.
Hugh Everett, while searching for the meaning of quantum mechanics, was confronted with a reality that split and proliferated endlessly. He realised that each experiment has the power to create as many worlds as are its possible
outcomes.
How many parallel worlds are there out there?
How many copies of you, living almost identical lives, are reading these very lines?
How can we answer such questions?
I am surprised and saddened that hundreds of students graduate from QFT courses thinking that renormalisation is a trick and having no idea what an EFT is.
Did you know that the “dark dimension hypothesis” suggests our universe might contain an extra spatial dimension at mesoscopic scales—potentially just a few micrometers across?
youtu.be/3trCZghXTsE?...
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He’s at the forefront of the swampland program, trying to assess which apparently consistent particle physics models can couple to a quantum theory of gravity.
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In my latest interview for the ISQG (International Society for Quantum Gravity), I had the pleasure of discussing these and several other questions with Dr. Miguel Montero, from the Instituto de Física Teórica in Madrid.
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