Physics

Looking at the list of snarky puzzles, games with simple groups was a recurring theme. March 20, A Toy Model For Q8 Snarky puzzle What is required so that a system undergoing change can be described just as accurately by the group Z4 as by Q8? BackgroundThe funny thing I realized by building a pipe cleaner model of Q8 is that is too complicated.  There must be a simplifying principle out there... AnswerThere are 6 planes that cut along the diagonals of the faces of the cube.  Choose any one plane.  Now delete the other four cubes not in the chosen plane along with their pipe…

We seem to not be able to “explain” certain aspects like the nature of time, and not for lack of trying. Especially: We cannot explain a single subjective feeling in ways that satisfy many – not subjective sounding of sound, not the redness of the color red, not why pain “really” hurts. In spite of all the science we threw at them, something unexplained seems left about how feeling feels. Do we simply commit another ‘regress-error’ here? Regress Error versus Recursion Many so called “deep questions” are based on regress errors, pseudo-issues hanging from misconstrued recursions. The useless…

For once I allow myself some self-advertising... I just published on the Cornell arXiv the preprint of a proceedings paper I wrote for the Bormio 2012 conference on Nuclear Physics, where I presented the most recent results from the CMS experiment in a review talk. The paper is titled "Recent Results of the CMS Experiment". The paper is 33-pages long, and thus configures as a general review of the results that CMS produced from the analysis of data collected during 2011, the 5 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collisions, which among other things granted a first feeble but trustworthy…

Last week the Large Hadron Collider has started producing collisions at the record high 8-TeV centre-of-mass energy to the ATLAS and CMS detectors. In the course of the first week of run almost 200 inverse picobarns have been delivered to CMS, which is absolutely satisfactory. The integrated luminosity versus time is shown below. And here is the peak instantaneous luminosity reached during these first few days of running: (NB: I believe the above figure lacks a "s^-1" units). Of course at this rate one could not expect to reach the 15 inverse femtobarns of data that has been set as a (…

I don't have a proposal right now which makes writing a research driven blog a bit awkward.  I will only say I have a proposal when I have an action, and the action has been put into the Mathematica notebook I devised in the fall of last year as part of the process that led to my retraction of GEM (the notebook tested about ten different properties of the action). The history of physics since the 1900's has a pattern: only full time, professional physicists propose and sometimes, get confirmed a new theoretical structure.  It is a tangled team effort. Einstein leaned on Grossman to…

Matter annihilates antimatter, mostly resulting in light (no, not “pure energy”, whatever that is supposed to be). Matter and antimatter can also come into existence together via a process that is the reverse of annihilation. Yet our universe has almost no antimatter. How can such be if they come into existence in exactly equal amounts, each particle together with its antiparticle? Science writers at times promise to reveal how the oh-so-mysterious matter surplus originated, every time pushing back the question one more iteration without coming clean. Recently, Ethan Siegel did it yet…

In my late teenage years I grew fond of Scientific American. Although language caused a barrier, and while I could digest and understand only some of the articles, the popscience presented opened my eyes to exciting developments and invited me to study further the subjects presented. These days, many years later, I still glance through the magazine, but generally with less enthusiasm. Today's editions seem packed with rather superficial information, and the articles tend to be less inviting towards further studies. Yet, once in a while, a hidden jewel attracts my attention. Such is the case…

“Drivers license and proof of insurance, please,” is the way it often begins. Specular glints of sunlight carom from mirrored sunglasses. Busted for speeding, think it can’t happen to you? It supposedly happened to muon neutrinos, proceeding from Switzerland to Italy. In my Italian travels, speed-demons seemed to be of little interest to authorities. But the cognoscenti recognized that never before had the implications of the exhibition of speed — superluminal speed — been so profound. Alas, last week heads rolled, OPERA collaboration heads. Antonio Ereditato stepped down as chief of the…

This blog is a salvage job. I have towed my t-shirts with the GEM Lagrange density and field equations to the retraction dump, crashing global sales numbers.  I have spent time picking through the rubble, trying to understand causes for the crash.  While there are multiple reasons, I will focus exclusively on one issue: gauge symmetry. The GEM proposal was based on a 4-vector potential. A 4-vector can be added, subtracted, or multiplied by a scalar. I then used the 4-vector in two distinct ways. One way employed the quaternion product rule (the group Q8 over the real numbers) and…

Fresh from ironing out the mechanical difficulties in the faster-than-light neutrino, CERN and OPERA have licensed the technology to soda giant Pepsi, which will use neutrinos instead of dissolved carbon dioxide to create the drink's iconic fizz. "This truly is the choice of a new generation," says Pepsi CEO, Indra Nooyi. The partnership comes on the heels of a difficult month for OPERA during which the faster-than-light particle made headlines, then appeared to be the product of loose fiber-optic cables connecting a GPS unit to a computer. The apparent gaff resulted in the resignation of…