Bill Zajc sent me a link to the following fresh CERN talk by my (former) PhD adviser Tom Banks:The Unruh Effect, the S-matrix and the Absence of FirewallsIt's the same kind, unimitable style I have known for years. Tom also uses (or approves of) many assumptions I consider right or even dear and he reaches various conclusions I agree with. In particular, there are no black hole firewalls. See his and Willy Fischler's paper about firewalls.But otherwise the results are presented as corollaries of some much deeper wisdom that I've been exposed to...
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Do you know which number would be the next one?Six weeks ago, Sam Ting claimed that not too uninteresting results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer would arrive in two or three weeks.It didn't quite work; it's plausible that they were waiting for reviewers to say OK, something they may have expected to be just a painless or painful formality back in February. Now we're told that it's at least 6.5 weeks but this timing should work. Why?As tweeted...
Friday, March 29, 2013
Just a neutrino link: Two weeks ago, MiniBooNE reported some results that seem to conflict with the standard model of 3-flavor neutrino oscillations. Hat tip: Joseph S.In January 2013, the ATRAP Collaboration that includes e.g. Gerry Gabrielse – an ex-colleague of mine who also led the most accurate measurement of the electron's magnetic moment, the most accurately verified prediction in all of science – published the preprintOne-Particle Measurement...
Almost exactly 10 years ago, in March 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq. I had mixed feelings about that decision and I still have mixed feelings. At any rate, Iraq (#2) used to belong to the Axis of Evil, as defined by George W. Bush, along with Iran (#1) and North Korea (#3). Quite certainly, one original member of this axis is no longer a member.Note that John Bolton has defined the "Beyond the Axis of Evil Group" composed of Cuba, Libya, and Syria. Cuba has softened somewhat and Raul Castro is planning to retire; the Libyan regime has been overthrown...
Thursday, March 28, 2013
When people aren't understanding certain issues in physics and when they're asking questions, e.g. at the Physics Stack Exchange, they understandably seem unhappy about something. When something seems strange or something doesn't make sense, it's sensible for people to feel somewhat disturbed or unhappy. All of us know the feeling.In some cases, the dissatisfaction depends on a technical result and there are many of them to be learned. However, I would say that way too often, people are dissatisfied because of reasons that are utterly non-technical...
As an enthusiastic proponent of fracking, Gene sent me a link to this NBC articlePower shift: Energy boom dawning in Americathat argues, among other things, that due to fracking, the U.S. will leapfrog Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the #1 fossil fuel producer by 2020. Already today, we see amazingly dropping prices of natural gas and many other things will follow. The technologies are getting better all the time. You get the point but you may...
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
...sort of...Two years ago, I was a staunch defender of the retirement of the Tevatron, the collider near Chicago, Illinois. The reason was that it just wasn't competitive anymore. The lower energy and amount of collisions relatively to the LHC translated to a much smaller probability of a legitimate discovery per unit time – which also means a much lower expected number of discoveries per dollar.The actual shape of the Wilson Hall differs from the...
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Technet, a Czech sci-tech server, published an interview with Vyacheslav Pershukov today, the deputy CEO and the director of the scientific-technological complex at Rosatom, the state-owned Russian nuclear corporation that is managing all Russian reactors that are in operation.He says many things I should have noticed half a year ago because as Russia Beyond the Headlines mentioned in November (see also an echo in The Telegraph), there was a nuclear...
Monday, March 25, 2013
Francis the Emule (Spanish) diplomatically agrees with me...If you open Google Science News at this very moment, the #1 story is saying things likenew research shows that the speed of light is variable in real space.The only problem is that the "research" is pure crackpottery. Those stories build upon the following two papers in a journal called European Physical Journal D I have never heard of in the context of fundamental physics:A sum rule for charged elementary particles by Gerd Leuchs, Luis L. Sánchez-Soto (free: arXiv)The quantum vacuum as...
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Ronald Reagan gave the following 30-minute talk on March 23rd, 1983, i.e. 30 years ago:Most of the talk is about the motivation and the situation. The very SDI comments begin at 25:00 or so.The visionary SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) speech was arguably the most consequential presidential speech in the modern U.S. history. I am somewhat impressed by the depth of the technical arguments that Reagan offered.In July 1979, Reagan would visit some defense folks in Colorado and they showed him that the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine was the...
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Today, we celebrate the birthday of three mathematicians who have heavily influenced physics: Pierre-Simon Laplace, Amalie Emmy Noether, and Ludvig Faddeev. But because I posted the biographies four years ago (click at the previous sentence), I won't do so again.Instead, let me mention that six years ago, set theorist Paul Cohen died. He is the man who proved that the axiom of choice can neither be proved nor disproved using the Zermelo-Fraenkel...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
