Physics

The blog run by Sascha Vongehr is unscholarly and unprofessional.  It vilifies and attempts to belittle anyone whose ideas about the foundations of quantum mechanics differ from his.  When I voiced support for Joy Christian as a comment to his blog, I also took issue with Vongehr for calling Christian dishonest.  He deleted my comment with the explanation: “Yes, I just deleted your "comment" below. Stop posting insults, thinly veiled threads (sic), and links to pseudo science. For the last time: I will not give you yet another stage to spread nonsense.”  The “pseudo…

Georges Metanomski posted this as a comment to my Quantum Crackpot Counter Challenge but it is a bit long.  After discussing this with George and with several people in support of this, I am posting his comments here as his entry================ INTUITIVE VIEW OF BELL AND ASPECT Einstein considered intuition as 90% of physics, maths making thevague intuition more precise. If you have an intuitive grasp ofa model, you know it, vaguely perhaps, but you do. If you mastermodel's mathematics, but don't grasp it intuitively, you don't knowanything. Intuition without mathematics may be…

Quantum physics has proven that the world cannot be described by local realism. Therefore, Many-Worlds Interpretations (MWI) are now in vogue. This is already wrong: Everett's is a relative state description, not necessarily a multiple worlds interpretation. Below is my “cut a Wiener sausage from both ends” model that illustrates the concept as applied to the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. A correct quantum version of this model is possible. The MWI in its modal realistic many-minds versions [see also Nonlocality versus Antirealism] is the mature way to understand modern physics.…

New results from the T2K collaboration have been presented at a KEK Physics Seminar today, and they are really interesting stuff. In a nutshell, six electron neutrino events have been seen by their far detector, illuminated by a pure and intense beam of muon neutrinos. The estimated backgrounds from non-oscillating-neutrino sources are estimated to amount to 1.5+-0.3 events, and the observed counts thus constitute a 2.5-standard-deviation effect, hopefully a first hint of direct detection of nu_mu -> nu_e oscillations. If you are a veteran in particle physics, you seldom get excited by 2.5…

For discussion we’ll take an EPR pair as two spin 1/2 particles anti-correlated in a singlet state at the source. ·       How does an EPR pair maintain conservation of total angular momentum over space-like separations? That is, if Alice’s spin is flipped, how does Bob’s spin flop? or ·       Using physical logic, explain non-locality as suggestedby Bell’s Theorem. or ·       What are “quantum channels”? Since to date, no one has been able to explain the above within quantum theory…

The LHC has been running very well in the last few weeks, and I can announce, with some anticipation, that the 1-inverse-femtobarn line will be crossed in the next few days. Check it out in the figure below, which shows, together with the delivered luminosity (red line), the one acquired by the CMS experiment (that is, the part acquired with CMS fully operational).The total bounty available before the next shutdown (end of June) is probably going to amount to 1.3-1.4/fb. Expect exciting new results by ATLAS and CMS for the summer 2011 conferences!

CMS has recently produced an updated search for black hole production in the 7 TeV proton-proton collisions delivered by the LHC. The data sample now consists of 190 inverse picobarns of collisions collected in 2011, and the limits set on black hole production are more stringent. The search uses a variable called "S_T", which is the sum of transverse energies of all energetic objects detected in the final state: jets, but also, when present, electrons and muons, as well as photons and missing transverse energy. This variable would be sensitive to the production of black holes, which would…

I got counter snarked. At the end of my blogs, I include what I call a snarky puzzle. If you can follow along with the technical parts of my blogs, a snarky puzzle is  suppose to be a playful but snide problem with a straightforward answer. David Halliday asked a question of his own which I will present after setting up the context.click or skip this reading of the blog My (retitled) post “Gotta Get 11 Dirac Gamma Girls, plus 5 Doing an Imaginary Twist”... stop, retitled? Actually, the software here doesn’t like retitling... [correction: the software did work the second time I tried]. I…

The British have their Copley medals, the French the CNRS Gold medals, the Germans have Leibniz awards, and the Dutch... they have their Spinoza prizes. Each year three to four Spinoza laureates split a total of ten million euros (14.3 mln US$). In the Netherlands the prize, named after the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, is often referred to as the 'Dutch Nobel Prize'. No other Dutch science prize comes close, neither in monetary amount nor in prestige.  Amongst the three winners of this year's Spinoza prize is theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde.* A well-known name for readers of…

And here they come. Much awaited (and anticipated), today the DZERO collaboration presents their findings in the search of the same dijet resonance which made it to the New York Times as well as to several physics blogs around the web, and which brought frantic theorists back to the blackboard to try and figure out a model that could allocate the cumbersome new find. You need to have been sleeping for the last four months in order to have missed the news about the CDF signal (I don't even link my own posts on this except the last one -please dig in the last months of stuff if you feel the…