Physics

Direct Realism falling in Wittgenstein’s Silence: Accelerating the Paradigm Change that Renders Relativistic Quantum Mechanics Natural Abstract: Quantum mechanics (QM) and at times still even relativity are sold as incomprehensible theories that nobody ‘really’ understands. However, QM is natural under a modal realist paradigm, which itself may be natural to many who grew up integrated with virtual realities. As usual with paradigm changes, the following generations’ biggest difficulties will be with grasping what the previous generations’ big hang-up was. In order to facilitate the current…

The LHC collider has been producing proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV for two months now, and the integrated luminosity collected by the CMS experiment has surpassed the mark of 4 inverse femtobarns (see figure below). That's already about 80% of the total bounty of 2011! Integrated luminosity is a measure of the amount of interactions produced by a collider. For protons ran against proton, one inverse femtobarn corresponds to roughly 80 trillion collisions. Of these, the detectors can only store a small part due to data acquisition bottlenecks, but this is not a…

[Clarification: I tweaked the title because the focus of this blog was intended to be quite small.  While scalars and vectors are used in a dizzying array of areas in many dimensions, quaternions are constrained to work in one plus three dimensions.  One could say one plus three equals four, which is true, but I say one plus three because with quaternions, the one has different math properties from the three.  What happened in the comments was the first two folks admitted they were looking for a blog with a different subject, one that might have me linking quaternions to…

The issue of how dense the dark matter is near Earth is far from settled. Recent work by Moni Bidin, Carraro, Mendez and Smith holds that the density of dark matter near Earth is 0.04 gigaelectron volts per cubic centimeter, the work of Bovy and Tremaine says it should be more like 0.3 gigaelectron volt per cubic centimeter. The problem is that Bovy and Tremaine make a basic logical error at the outset which invalidates what on the face of is otherwise a masterful work of theoretical astronomy/cosmology. Unfortunately that logical error of circular logic falsifies their counter argument. Let…

Almost exactly a year ago, I made a medium storm in the water glass by publishing my exchange with what I ironically called the "Future King of Physics". I then asked Perimeter Institute in Canada, Oxford University, and FQXi, to distance themselves from Joy Christian instead of any further supporting his pseudoscience. Joy was at his game for several years already, and quite a few voices have told me over the last year, that my article, especially the Quantum Randi Challenge nature of it, is what finally convinced them: for the first time they really confidently understood that Joy is a…

Georgy Nikolaevich Flerov (1913-1990) is the father of the superheavy element production in the USSR (now Russia). Under his guidance scientists at the Flerov Nuclear Institute in Dubna were successful in synthesizing a significant number of heavy elements, non-existing in nature. Elements with Z =102 (Nobelium), 103 (Lawrencium), 104 (Rutherfordium), 105 (Dubnium), 106 (Seaborgium), and 107 (Bohrium) were synthesized in Dubna JINR during G.N. Flerov's presence as director. Several decades later and after his walk to the other side, Flerov takes his prestigious place in the pantheon of…

"The decay widths have higher-order perturbative QCD corrections, and these are particularly important for the  decay which dominates over a wide range of (light) Higgs masses. The main effect is to cause the quark mass to run from its "constituent quark" value at  to a lower value at ." R. Ellis, W. Stirling, and B. Webber, "QCD and Collider Physics", Cambridge UP 1996. Compare to the graph above, which shows the branching fraction of the Higgs boson to several final states, including charm, bottom, and tau pairs. Why is the tau-pair final state favoured with respect to the charm-…

When I started writing this blog, I wasn't sure about its direction, so I began by presenting something that I was curious about and hoped that others would find it interesting, while attempting to explain it would further my understanding. So I presented a classic derivation and asked for comments. The comments informed the second blog and made it much better than it would have been. I think this is a nice format. So, in this blog, I will present another classic derivation and ask the readers some questions about it, and, I'll try to ask a few questions relating to more modern developments…

REALITY AND RELATIVITY Before we begin, let's put one thing on the record. Albert was not wrong; it's just that we have a much more detailed, precise understanding of what he was saying.  Over the past century relativity has been used to investigate ‘space-time’.  Space-time has been assumed to be a mathematical relation between actual space and time. With the SFT formulation the observed ‘space’ and 'time' can be seen to include the internal motions of the photon where its motion can be written as a bispinor.      (1) where and …

Dear readers, your input is appreciated. Please read the following quotes and let me know what are your thoughts on the matter in the comments thread. You need not leave your name if you wish to remain anonymous, but I'd appreciate it if you mentioned your degree of education and whether you are/were/will be a scientist. Quote 1: "In my opinion, in experimental High-Energy Physics (HEP), scientific papers could well do without external review. HEP collaborations count dozens, and in a few cases thousands, of collaborators. Each of them is responsible for what gets published and is entitled…