Physics

If on occasions you dream about owning the world's largest particle smasher, I have good news for you. The Superconducting Super Collider is for sale "at a significant discount". However, to stand a chance in beating the LHC in the race for the Higgs, you better act quickly. And uhh... did I tell you the sale is a 'BYOB' (bring your own beam) deal? It is almost 20 years since Congress decided to send 450 tons of metal in low earth orbit rather than completing the ultimate particle smasher and entering the hunt for the Higgs. After sinking two billion dollars of tax money into 14 miles of…

So much action happens with with interaction term of a Lagrangian, it is easy for those not initiated into the refined arts of field theory to skip over issues. In this blog I will dive into the details of a vector current coupling which should indicate why a spin 1 field must be associated with the interaction. The next blog will follow a similar road for a set of symmetric rank 2 tensors that requires a spin 2 field. The final blog examines how charges attract or repel for either spin. Hopefully I will include critical caveats for these subjects. If not, the comments may have a pearl or…

Susskind and other usual suspects try hard to convince the world that they are the ones who finally understood 'Many Worlds' and that such is a success of string theory and all that. A media spectacle is going on right now, see here at the New Scientist’s “Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse”, Brian Greene chipping in with the Multiverse episode of the “Fabric of the Cosmos” series on PBS, and many others. Some, such as Lee Smolin and Peter Woit claim to criticize, but apparently were also successfully made to believe that Many Worlds is part of Tegmark/Susskind personality cult and string…

The text below was graciously written for this blog by Alejandro Rivero (below),  a friend who has contributed to this blog other times in the past. His theoretical ideas are off the mainstream, but in a way which makes them interesting to me. I hope some of you will appreciate reading about the whole thing in summary here - Alejandro has a few papers out which you may want to read if you are specifically interested in the matter.During the last year there has been some news on theoretical hints that I have usually discussed online, in some forums and even in old incarnations of this…

Astronomers do find massive compact objects in the X-ray Binaries, in the Quasars, in the center of many galaxies. In most of the cases, the radius of such objects could be few Schwarzschild Radii  (Rs = 2 GM/c2 ) or even close to Rs. On the other hand we know that Neutron Stars, White Dwarfs, or other COLD objects cannot have masses more than ~3 solar masses. And thus, astronomers usually call such massive compact objects as ``Black Holes'' (BHs). Indeed, in General Relativity (GR),  there are beautiful exact solutions which suggest likely existence of  BHs. However, the…

Update: I am keeping out of this, but you may well be interested in reading what Gibbs, Woit, and Motl have to say about recent leaks on the ATLAS and CMS results. So I hope I won't be crucified for three general links now! Update 2: And it is now public that a seminar at CERN will be given by ATLAS and CMS on December 13th. So the wait is almost over, officially... I have not written in a while - a full week. This is uncharacteristic enough that I owe you some sort of explanation. I spent the week in Geneva, where I attended a very intense and tremendously interesting CMS week. CMS weeks…

Space is three dimensional: Length, Depth and Height, or X, Y, and Z, that makes three. Since any modest agnostic holds a Multiverse extremely likely though, and moreover also our own universe likely has hidden extra dimensions, nerds keep wondering what life in four dimensional space looks like. I remember sketching four dimensional watermelon slices as a kid and considering whether one would need three eyes in order to view “stereoscopically”, I mean 4D instead of 3D in four dimensional space. The answer to this is easy: Two eyes are enough, but the retinas of the eyes must be three…

Most people, including physicists, do not like Many World and Multiverse concepts, especially if they come with Extra Dimensions. But these concepts were always self-evident to me, even before knowing physics (UPDATE: Here two more recent versions, not mentioning "agnostics", of the self evident arguments). Many Worlds and the Multiverse are obvious because nothing else can make sense (read: be formally meaningful). The expectation of there being probably extra dimensions necessary in better theories is similar. I remember sketching four dimensional water melon slices in order to start seeing…

Oct 25, Gravity is a Mystery (in words, no equations)Snarky puzzle:  Is there a handedness to getting older? Is there a handedness to communication? If there is a handedness to either, how would that effect the arrow of spacetime? The Back Story:Clocks tick on. The universal march of time has no handedness. Put me in an isolation chamber and I will get older at the same rate as having Thanksgiving with the family. [clarification: as noted in the comments, there is no such thing as a complete isolation chamber, it is one of those unreachable ideals.] Space is filled with arrows: this over…

If we can produce neutrinos at the same time as photons,then detect which arrives first the question of neutrino speed vs light speed would be settled.    CERN – OPERA measured neutrinos arriving faster than light would have, astronomers have measured neutrinos and light arriving at about the same time from supernovae.  How can we verify the CERN – Opera experiment,reproduce the supernova result, and settle this question once and for all?  We can do this by repurposing one of the most destructive things ever created by the hands of man, a atomic bomb. Complication is…