Physics

For this instance of my "Guess the plot" series I wish to go back to the basics. So I picked a graph which allows me to illustrate a general concept, something about particle physics (but we could say physics in general, and actually extending to other exact sciences) which is a source of endless awe for me: the fact that some functions exist, in the infinite-dimensional space of all real functions of a real variable, which describe some specific feature of our world. The fact that the picture on the right -which is a clipped part of a larger graph- will be easily recognized by some readers…

Theoretical Physics - it is cool. Especially elementary particle physics. Especially Quantum Field Theory. It uses renormalizations of constants, which is out of comprehension to most layman people. You know why? Because theorists first write their Lagrangian for, say, electrons and photons and later on declare it not to be for electrons and photons. So if you are a layman, you just suck at this moment. They say - it was in fact written for "bare particles". You see, theorists know something experimentally unknown. Theorists say: in order to get the electron-photon Lagrangian we must carry…

The proof against local realism is humankind’s the most relevant finding in the realm of science and philosophy; there is no excuse to be ignorant about it while pretending to be interested and knowledgeable about cool science and its implications for philosophy. It was a difficult topic once, but from now on, there is no excuse anymore: Any good high school student, certainly any university undergraduate is able to follow the arguments as long as there is no religious/obsessive hurdle to overcome internally. Here is a study guide to the disproof of 'local realism' and the solution of the…

Quantum interference is really, really, really well-supported by data, data, data. Visualizing quantum interference is a blank slate. This may be a root source of frustration with any world view based on quantum mechanics. More of our brains are devoted to visualization than any other process. Given a diet of equations and stories, the visual section of our brains in the back of the skull must sit idle. "Idleness is the devil's workshop." In this blog, John Wheeler's delayed choice thought experiment will be explained. The idea briefly is to ask if a single photon goes down a specific path or…

Twin detectors recently installed in the first of three experimental halls in the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment are now recording interactions of elementary antineutrinos produced by powerful reactors at the China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group power plant located about 55 kilometers from Hong Kong. China and the U.S. lead the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, which also includes participants from Russia, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and the event marks the first step in the international effort to measure a puzzling property of neutrinos and antineutrinos that may…

Apologizing with those of you who feel they have had too little particle physics this week, I am reporting today after a longish pause on a new search performed by the CMS experiment, one which has some interesting features, at least to me. New heavy gauge bosons, electrically neutral and quite similar to Z bosons, are the result of adding a simple one-dimensional unitary group to the group structure of the Standard Model. Such an extension, which appears minimal and as such "perturbs" very little the low-energy behaviour of the theory, is actually the possible outcome of quite important…

Usually, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox is presented as if it potentially conflicts with the theory of relativity. This is because the correlation between Alice’s and Bob’s measurements seems to travel with superluminal speeds in one real world. The solution [1] of the EPR paradox shows that this view is upside-down, which is the reason it took so long to solve it satisfactorily. Scientists and philosophers where trying to understand the quantum mechanics involved without bothering with relativity, because the problematic seems to conflict with relativity. However, in that way, the…

Warning: this post contains no physics whatsoever, although some of you might still be interested in reading it...Relaxing in the hideaway of Elafonisos (see picture on the left) I am led to take a detached look at my work activities, and to try and determine whether I am doing some mistake here and there. I am talking about my excessive list of occupations, which unavoidably leads to neglecting some of them in favor of others, or (worse still) to manage all of them in a sub-optimal way. I think this is a quite common issue for senior researchers, and more in general it is something who…

The strong equivalence principle is a stately beauty queen of an idea. In the simplest of dresses, she refuses to dance with any theory except general relativity. The mundane reason for mass is beyond her concern. My call own effort at unifying the symmetries found in the standard model with gravity "GEM" for Gravity and EM, not to be confused with gravitomagnetism which sometimes goes by the same acronym. A duality between metric and 4-potential theory extends a hand between a metric explanation of gravity and Newton's scalar theory moving up to a 4-mansion. An obligatory cancellation in…

The Many Worlds Wiener Sausage is a very simple model that shows how apparent non-locality in the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox can arise. It can be understood by advanced high school students. But we saw that although it is a many-worlds model, it is not a quantum world! Today we will make the model look like the great spaghetti monster. There are two aspects about this that I find amazing: 1) It can still be understood by high school students but is nevertheless correct quantum mechanics. 2) It is one single and natural step that turns the model quantum, and this step has two…