The diphoton excess at 750 GeV turned out to be a statistical fluke after all. The first hint hat it was not a real signal was the lack of excess dijet events at that energy.
The good news of 2016 was that advanced LIGO announced the detection of gravitational waves and the era of gravitational wave astronomy finally began.
In business news, the oil price finally bottomed at 26.66 - too low and too late for several US oil companies. A wave of bankruptcies triggered major losses in corporate bond markets and many market observers blamed the Fed and previous quantitative easing programs for the misallocation of capital. But the Keynesian view prevailed and the Fed abandoned its rate hiking program and instead initiated QE4 and QE5.
However, the new QE programs came too late to rescue the stock market and political observers considered the market turmoil a major reason Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump, who convinced voters that he will make the stock market great again. Hillary's surprise announcement that she finally filed for divorce from Bill was not enough to turn her campaign around.
In other news, season 2 of Better Call Saul was a great success as expected, but most Hollywood movies in 2016 were disappointing - also as expected.
5 comments:
Donald as President is a comforting thouht. It's become obvious to me in my dotage that he has god-like abilities and will perform miracles.
... and he is such a nice guy.
IMHO, there is a real possibility that LHC will fail to find supersymmetry, advanced LIGO will fail to detect gravitational waves and ITER will fail to get > 1 energy efficiency (the last one is almost certain). For me, Big Academic Science is running a trifecta in 2016. It's going to be a fascinating year.
I agree as far as the LHC is concerned, advanced LIGO pretty much has to detect something (or else ...) and I thought JET already reached Q > 1.
I misspoke, a very common occurence. According to Wikipedia,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus
"In order to achieve break-even, a Q value greater than 1 is required. A self-sustaining burning plasma requires at least Q=5 (since the alpha particles carry one fifth the fusion energy) and a power plant requires at least Q=10."
Post a Comment