Physics

The sixth Snarky Puzzle Answers leads off with the story of a minor controversy. [Click or skip this video reading on YouTube.] Two related Snarky PuzzlesSeptember 20, "Deriving the Maxwell Source Equations Using Quaternions (2/5)" Snarky puzzle: This blog was too long. Make the author suffer. Let him figure out why B2 - E2 is invariant under a Lorentz boost. October 4, "Deriving The Hypercomplex Gravity Field Equations (4/5)" Snarky puzzle. Show that b2 - e2 is invariant under a Lorentz boost. I am pretty sure I did that calculation once. BackgroundThe short answer is that both B2 - E2…

Higgs boson hunters often catch themselves dreaming of the boson having a mass high enough to give rise to the spectacular decay into two Z bosons, and then four charged leptons in the final state. At a hadron collider -let's talk of the LHC to be specific- such a signature is the only one providing events which, once properly selected, are more likely signal than background. The situation of observing an event display being able to tell for sure what it represents, among the infinite possibilities and the intrinsic indetermination of quantum processes, is reassuring and gives a physicist a…

While people are busy with their own knee-jerk reactions trying to stifle my criticizing the scientific community, the Wall Street Journal did what was predicted by that very criticism, namely turning the way that the scientific community deals with the faster than light neutrino results into an asset for global warming denial: Robert Bryce in “Five Truths About Climate Change”: “The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might —repeat, might— travel faster than the speed of…

Gravity is the force conquering the structure of the universe. By recognizing the components of the universe, we are estimating the quantity of components composing the universe through size of gravity and gravitational potential energy (GPE).  In this paper, it is being shown that the universe can be created and expanded through pair creation of positive energy (mass) and negative energy (mass) from zero energy condition. Also, GPE is composed by 3 units of U++, U--, and U-+ when negative and positive energy exists, U-+ (GPE between negative mass and positive mass) has positive…

I read with interest and some amusement (on the mouse joke) the piece written here by Sascha Vongehr. I find his arguments wrong and decided to answer him in the comments thread of his post, but my answer got a bit too long and I did not want to hijack a nice discussion that was developing there; plus I found out that what I was writing could be suitable for this blog in its own right. So below I explain what I criticize about his arguments. In short, Sascha takes the general scepticism by physicists to the 6-sigma result on superluminal motion found by Opera as an indication of them wanting…

"We consider the scattering of charged W bosons [...] the sum of all diagrams still diverges as s/Mw^2. Heavy leptons cannot help us, so the only solution is to introduce a scalar particle which cancels these residual divergences [...] Here, h is just the Higgs particle. If we had not previously introduced it to generate the heavy boson masses, we would have been forced to invent it now to guarantee renormalizability [...] Higgs particles have so far eluded experimental searches [...] one might speculate that they do not exist as elementary fields, adn the higgs "particle" we have introduced…

RETRACTION: I have decided to retract three blogs (Deriving … 4/5, 5/5, 6/5+1). I was unable to figure out a reasonable statement concerning gauge symmetry. When the blogs were initially written, I focused on the field equations, mainly the Gauss-like law, and ignored the force equations entirely. Finding a solution that works with the the field and force equations were not looked for. A consistent proposal should do all three things (fields, forces, and solutions) with grace. I have concluded it is not possible to achieve these goals with the Lagrangian as written, hence the retraction. The…

Fabrizio Tamburini (left) is an old friend - I have known him since 1976, when we both used to attend the gatherings of the newborn Associazione Astrofili Veneziani, at the Lido of Venice. The love for astronomy had brought us together, but we took different paths in our scientific activities. Fabrizio remained maybe more faithful to his old love for the universe, and is now a well-known and respected astrophysicist, who studies original ideas in the physics of photon propagation and more. I repeatedly invited him to write about his research here, but so far he has not accepted, mainly for…

To say that a system implements a given computation is to say that something about that system - some aspect of its behavior - is described by the computation. It is thus a way of characterizing the system. Precise criteria are needed for implementation. Once we have that, we can use it to study models of physics and see what they predict in terms of what observer-computations they implement (assuming computationalism about mind). I am applying this to the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. I am posting an explanation of my implementation criteria on my blog. It's drawn from my…

One of the issues that emerged in the discussion of whether researchers should be bloggers is the fact that it is always dangerous to wear multiple "hats", i.e. carrying multiple responsibilities which may sometimes come in conflict with one another. Wearing two hatsOf course this is a very common and old problem. I am indebted to Jim S.M., who sent me a few excerpts from Churchill's autobiography, which are very relevant to the issue besides being quite amusing: DURING the first three weeks of my captivity, although I was a party to all plans of revolt or escape, I was engaged in arguing…