This week I have been in the Mithical Land of Sandy Eggo for the “Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear physics theory” conference.   Since the Internets have trained us all to skip anything not condensed into a bulleted list, here are the highlights of the conference in handy bulleted form.  Apologies for the digressions into physics theory-ese!

• My favorite quote of the conference so far: “Somebody’s wrong, and statistics doesn’t handle wrong very well.”  I am definitely using that in the future.
• The central theme of the conference seems to be “we have no signal, but are really hopeful we’ll have one soon.”
• I finally got to publicly present the results of my thesis research!
• Some theorists talked through the whole damn thing (my presentation, that is).
• The public lectures were possibly the most interesting and informative of the whole conference, which either says something bad about me or the talks aimed at physicists.  Maybe both.
• Fermi (a space-based gamma ray telescope) have turned their data into some very cool movies.
• The hot word in the CKM/Heavy Flavor talks was “tension”.  You don’t say disagreement or agreement anymore — you say tension.  As in “there is a 1 sigma tension between theory and experiment”.  Which actually means that theory and experiment agree very well!
• One theorist began his plenary talk by stating that he would explain the origin of all mass in the universe.  This is a kind of an inflammatory thing to say, just before the 10 billion dollar machine designed to understand the origin of mass begins to take data.  It turns out he was only explaining the portion of mass that comes from binding energies, which he claimed to be 95% of the mass in the universe, by some definition of “mass in the universe”.
• Apparently, the organizers of this conference have been getting hate mail.  It does seem to be kinda poorly organized.  It’s in San Diego, but is walking distance from nothing, so those of us who did not rent a car are stuck eating the scandalously expensive hotel food and without much non-physics theory entertainment.  I’ve been to the gym about zillion times.
• The talk entitled “flavor theory” turned out to be a talk on warped extra-dimensions.
• We still don’t know what dark matter is.  Some people still think that an excess in the low-energy cosmic positron spectrum is evidence of dark matter annihilation, but one speaker here said he hoped that “they will be able to overcome their irrational delusion and rejoin the ranks of productive people.”

Overall, it has been interesting and I’m glad I came, but the conference is now in its 6th day and I’m ready to go home.  Howard has renegged on his promise to post cute pet pictures on his blog while I’m away, so I’m doing it instead:

I sure do miss those guys!

According to me, the following 5 questions highlight the greatest mysteries of all time that we humans ever confronted:

1. How did the universe begin?

How?

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2. Does God exist?

God

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3. Is time travel possible?

Time Travel physics theory

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4. Do ghosts exist?

Ghosts Illustration

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5. Is there any extra-terrestrial life?

Aliens exist?

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Which mysteries do you think are the greatest of all time? Do you have any thoughts on any of the mysteries mentioned above, or any other?

Today has been a bit slow, I’ve been sick since my return from Canada but my mind has been given a mental workout while I rest my physical state in this couch.

It started off with me having a couragous dogfight in the infinite beauty of space, only the stylus and the Nintendo DS in my hands being the flaming sword to smite all opposers. Pontificating to deaf ears about the duties of being a true Star Fox pilot (which I advice anyone that reads this to go to your local game store and purchase this game immediately), I calmly shut the game off and turn on the TV.

Comedy central, it seems, is playing Dogma.

I hate Kevin Smith but this was a great movie.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some truly good news for the world and Iraq. A 16-year-old immigrant (or refugee) from Iraq to Sweden has discovered a formula that explains and simplifies the Bernoulli numbers.

His high school teachers didn’t believe it, but after he took his work to be reviewed by university professors, they confirmed his discovery.

Congratulations Mohamed  Altoumaimi! I’m sure your accomplishment will lift up the hearts of your countrymen.

Read the full story

If anyone finds the actual calculations on the net, please share the link …

What makes a certified astrophysicist spread clichés like supposed neoliberal quote of the free lunch? At the Origins symposium a few weeks ago, a interesting panel was put together with Steven Davies as its chair discussing shitty things like the uniqueness of our universe and a few other things. One of the participants Professor of physics theory Andrei Linde correctly purports that is strange that the multiverse theory is coming into prominence now, when it has been around for some thirty years. He quotes the panelist Alan Guth who talked about the creation of a universe is the ultimate free lunch. This is part of the multiverse theory where one universes inflates another, and so on, connected to contemporary string theory.

Recall creationist William Dembski’s book No Free Lunch – Why Specified Complexity Cannot be Purchased without Intelligence. In the book Dembski No Free Lunch he shows claims that Michael Behe’s notion of irreducible complexity is an indication that there is a designer involved in creation of the world.
Well, the most dangerous notion put forward by Dembski is one he seldom admits; the search for glitches in our common scientific strata, instead of meaning and congruity. It turns every little creationist to a science critic and evolution-doubter. If God shows herself himself in the small inconsequences of science, everyone will do their best in trying to never be convinced by basic or complex scientific theories. It is dangerous and spooky and should be rebutted. See the discussion from the symposium as a start.

     Another one of my favorite professors from UCSD (University of California, San Diego), Herb York, just died.

The photo run with Herb's obituary

     He co-taught a class, The World Space Program, along with Hannes Alfven (who never told us during his introduction of himself that he won a Nobel Prize for physics theory!!) that I thought was going to be a big bust, but turned out to be one of my favorite classes at UCSD.

     When I came to San Diego in December of 1976 to pre-register for the classes of my first Quarter everything was closed already and I picked this class because it was one of the few left. After getting most of the General Education classes out of the way in Colorado I was ready to jump into my major of Communications. Uh-un, not so fast…the rest of the students, who had already registered, leave mostly useless crap for transfer students, like me. Or so I thought.

     Herb (he insisted on us calling him that) and Dr. Alfven (he insisted on us calling him that too) were two of the most experienced and interesting profs I ever had. A lot of the class was War Stories 101 (or in this case Cold War Stories 101), but I learned a tremendous amount of space history and politics from these two guys, who lived a lot of it because they were part of it.

     I remember I busted my ass writing one of the best research papers I ever did in college- on a “still on the drawing board” satellite called HEAO-1. They gave me an A on the paper and even made note of it in class because of the fact that UCSD had a part of the research time on the bird. Little did I know then that Herb probably had a major part in it coming into being. It was launched in August of 1977 and I felt like I had a small part of ownership by writing about it.

How Herb looked when I got to hear him 2 times a week

     I learned more about Herb from this obit than he ever told us, too. I had no idea he was the first Chancellor of UCSD OR the first (28 year old!!!) director of Lawrence Livermore Labs. He mostly liked to talk about his days as an Assistant Secretary of Defense back in the Kennedy administration. Imagine that!

     He spoke fluent Russian and told us that the famous Kruschev line “we will bury you” was a mis-translation; that it was an idiom in Russian that meant, literally, “we will dance on your grave,” which just meant that their system of Communism would outlast Capitalism. Mis-translation, my ass. It had the desired effect on us.

     Funny and fascinating guy. I’ll miss him.

In a recent post of mine (see here) I have pointed out to you a beautiful paper by Dan Pirjol and Carlos Schat. This paper is now appeared on Physical Review Letters (see here) but you can find also the preprint on arxiv (see here). I think its content is really important as it gives a serious clue toward our understanding of low-energy QCD. Dan agreed to publish here a contribution about his work and I am glad to post it.

We find that, within experimental errors on the hadron masses, the
so-called gluon-exchange model (OGE) is disfavored by data. This is probably not very  surprising, since at low energies the real degrees of freedom of QCD should include, in addition to the  gluons, also pions (the Goldstone bosons of the spontaneously broken  chiral symmetry). The OGE model does not include the pion exchange effects; an alternative to the OGE model  which includes their effects is the so-called GBE (Goldstone boson exchange) model.

There has been a long-standing debate about the most appropriate model
of quark forces in the framework of the constituent quark model, in  particular about their spin-flavor dependence. The main candidates are
the OGE and GBE models (see e.g. the second paper in Ref.[3] for a
discussion of this controversy). Our letter attempts to resolve this controversy using only minimal assumptions about the orbital dependence
of the hadronic wave mechanics functions. More precisely, we assume only isospin
symmetry, but no other assumption is made about the form of the wave mechanics
functions. The novel mathematical tool which makes our analysis possible is the application of the permutation group , which allows one to study the implications of the most general spin-flavor structure of the quark forces.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1337466

So I just got done watching the movie Angels & Demons, and I thought it was great. When I first saw the commercials for the movie I thought,”Huh, maybe I should go watch that.” but I was not to excited about it. Well that all changed when I was editing a post on Portal to the Universe. It said, “Particle physics theory and the Large Hadron Collider star alongside Tom Hanks in the upcoming movie Angels & Demons.” and some other stuff. Now that I read that the LHC is going to be in there I though wow maybe there will be some “real” science in the movie, not like the DaVinci Code (I am not saying the DaVinci code is bad, it was just not factual). So I decided I will go see it when I have some time. Well I didn’t “have any time” for about 2 weeks but finally I had some time to see a movie. Now when I first walked in the theatre to see the movie there were not so many people, so I thought one of two things: Either nobody wanted to see thee movie or everybody has already seen the movie. I most likely think people have already seen the movie. Now I took my seat and watched the 20min previews! (uhhh) Finally the movie came on. The beginning music was great and the movie was terrific in all ways. There were a whole bunch of great scenes and the end was a total twist. Without ruining the end of the movie I just want to say I did not think that that person did that thing. If that makes any sense, it probably will to those that have seen it. So now what in the world does this have to do with Astronomy or Space? Well nothing really except it was a great movie with the LHC and Anti-Matter in it.