A Quantum Diaries Survivor

Just a note to post here the permanent link to the proceedings of a conference I attended in Corfu (Greece) three years ago. This is a long (32 pages) report on “High- Physics: from the Tevatron to the LHC“, now published in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series [Tommaso Dorigo 2006 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 53 163-194]. I think I did post a draft of the paper on this blog a couple of years ago, but then I forgot to post the final version as well.

The paper is a bit dated in some parts, where the most recent (back then) results from the Tevatron are discussed; however, some parts -especially a discussion of the usefulness of Tevatron data for LHC physics- are still readable IMHO. Also worth noting is the fact that the acknowledgments section mentions the late Riqie Arneberg, a friend who passed away last fall, who had accepted the offer I had made to all readers of this blog to proofread the manuscript, and contributed in several places to the clarity of the text.

The publisher has now made available online all its 100 open access volumes through the JPCS home page. Of course I salute this contribution to the free diffusion of science with enthusiasm.

About a month ago I received in my mail box a copy of a small, good-looking book, titled “God Does Play Dice With the Universe“. Author: Shan Gao, in his own words “an independent research scientist, or more accurately, a natural philosopher who aims at understanding the mysterious universe“. Shan is a reader of my site. He had previously contacted me to ask if I would be willing to review his new work.

Despite being a lazy reader and having no experience in reviewing books, I promised him I would: my curiosity won, as it usually does in such circumstances. So, as I unpacked the parcel that the British publisher Abramis had crafted for me, I had mixed feelings: the object I was unwrapping meant something new and potentially stimulating to write about - but it also meant work ahead.

The book turned out to consist in a bit over 100 pages neatly written in a pocket 9″x6″ size, cleanly printed
and illustrated, and featuring a starry background on the cover. Does God play dice with the universe ? I admit I started browsing the book with a definite bias - the way I had been contacted, the title of the book, and the very fact that somebody should select me as a reviewer made me lean toward the idea that the author was some sort of a crackpot.

Now, I have to say I have nothing against the “category” in itself. People who try to understand reality and build their own theories have my deep respect; that is, until they become arrogant and presumptuous. Shan had been kind and unassertive in his communication with me, so my bias was not putting me in a bad mood by itself.

However, after a first quick look, I was left wondering about the soundness of my pre-judgement. For one thing, the book contained no formulas at all. I mean none, not even a few. This did not quite fit the crackpot idea I had put together. Secondly, the descriptions of quantum phenomena I came across by random browsing appeared actually rather well put together, even if of course simplified and not rigorous, and I could detect no obvious flaw in their presentation. I have to warn the reader here: I am no theorist, and my studies of quantum mechanics date a century back; however, usually I can still smell a fallacious statement if I read one.

I decided I would really read the damn book. It took me a while despite its light weight, because my reading time is scarce these days, but today I finally got to the last page, and can present some considerations in a less handwaving form than I thought I would at the beginning.

“God Does Play Dice With the Universe” is a book which builds on a few general principles of quantum mechanics and their contrariness to common sense to propose a bold, even cunning explanation of motion at the microscopic level. One which, I must add, is not scientifically justified or proven in any way; but the author’s ultimate goal is philosophical rather than scientific. That, in essence, is the reason why one feels one can accept without question the multitude of unproven hypotheses, which are presented as unquestionable facts, in the discussion of random motion and the concept of a discrete fabric of space-time.

Shan Gao’s goal is to understand the universe in a philosophical way, and indeed the book describes several views of motion from past thinkers ranging from Zeno to Aristotle, from Al-Nazzam to Bergson (”Movement is composed of immobilities“) and Bertrand Russell (”Motion consists merely in the occupation of different places at different times“). And even if one feels nervous to be confronted with divine actions while reading about quantum-mechanical concepts, and the G word appears a bit too often in the text, in the end the author can be appreciated for having put together his own “theory” and a imaginative way of looking at space and time and the way objects move. Rather than trying to summarize his ideas, let me quote an extended passage:

In a word, even if no concrete cause exists, a change can still happen as long as the change is purely random. In order to further understand this conclusion, it is necessary to distinguish two kinds of causes. One is concrete causes that relate to time, and the other is universal causes that are irrelevant to time. The former is our familiar causes appearing in the principle of causality. Such a concrete cause will result in a lawful change at a concrete time. The latter is a new kind of causes, which are similar to Aristotle’s final causes. A universal cause can result in ceaseless random changes. As a consequence, both lawful changes and random changes have their causes.

So, the principle of causality and indeterminism can be unified in a generalized principle of causality. [...] To sum up, we find an appealing solution to the long-standing puzzle of indeterminism. The existence of uncaused events is actually logical. So it is comprehensible that God plays dice with the universe.

The last chapter of the book is one I did enjoy, despite -or maybe because of- the lack of physics or pseudo-physics arguments. Here, Shan Gao takes his ideas of motion and confronts them with the philosophical views of Aquinas, Newton, Aristotle, and the concept of a First Mover:

In Newton’s physical world, God has a new position [...]. A moving object needs no mover. So there is no need for Aquinas’ First Mover. However, Newton’s First Mover still exists. [...] No object has the ability to move itself. Then who moved the first moving object ? How did it start off if no object can move itself ? So, as Newton thought, the universe still needs some original thing that set it all in motion [...] Indeed, Newton warned against using his mechanics to view the universe as a mere machine [...]: “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.”

He concludes:

According to the new picture of random motion, objects can move by themselves. What is the
position of God in the new universe then? [...] So God seems to have no position in the spontaneous universe. If God did exist, He would need to do nothing. In the profound words of the great Chinese sage Lao Tzu, “Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place“. This is the very Tao of the universe.

I liked this finish. After setting the stage with an almost mystical view of the universe, Shan Gao drops the curtain, and there is no God behind it. Or, if there is one, He is certainly not doing much for us.

Below is a picture of the surprising Holmes comet taken on November 5th by Bob Yen, a contributor to the comment threads of this and other physics blogs around (more of his photos here). As you can see, the comet has developed a faint, diffuse tail, and its coma is continuing to expand at a rate of about 2km/second. It is easy to detect the increase in size by comparing its appearance with that of just one week ago, even with no optical instrument. It now is a distinct “fuzzball” in Perseus, while earlier it looked much more star-like.

Comets are really among the coolest objects of our solar system… Unpredictable and always really beautiful objects. And they bring us some of the most spectacular meteor showers every now and then! I wonder if the outburst of Holmes will produce some meteor shower. It depends on the comet’s orbit… Hmmm I think I know where to look: Peter Jenniskens’ book. I will give it a try.

Carl Brannen is  an electronics engineer with a penchant for theoretical physics, and speculations on alternative theories to mainstream physics describing what our world is made of. He has a master’s degree in Math and in Physics, and is quite skilled with programming. He also owns  a blog where he discusses topics of his liking, especially physics. Let us see what Carl has to tell…

It’s quite an honor to be allowed to provide a guest post for Tommaso Dorigo. My working title for this post was “Four magnificent Papers by Authors Who Think I’m a Complete Idiot”. This was in preparation for my book, “A Complete Idiot’s Guide to Elementary Particle Physics.” The first was David Hestenes, of Geometric Algebra fame. The second was Lubos Motl, and his magnificent paper is the one that contains “tripled Pauli statistics”. The third was the somewhat obscure Mark Hadley, who has published a series of papers on a GR based theory of elementary particles. The fourth, David Bohm of Bohmian Mechanics, died too early to be provide an opinion on me, but one of his students says I’ve misunderstood Bohm’s easily understood opinions on relativity. I should link in an opinion of Lubos Motl, and a somewhat erroneous comment on Koide’s coincidences from Mark Hadley.

As if I were in a liferaft adrift on the ocean, I find myself wafting in the direction of the most recent wind. Louise Riofrio has kindly assembled together a series of posts, beginning with this one, discussing the evidence for a slow cosmological change in the speed of light, and promising a post for October, that is the direction I find that this post has written itself in.

The foundations of physics aren’t taught in grad school so much as picked up along the way, as one learns the techniques of calculation. Without classes devoted to the subject, it is easy to find that one has absorbed a certainty about the foundations which those who concentrate on the subject do not possess. This is a universal sociological fact pointed out by the author of Gravity’s Shadow. In bringing light to that peculiar form of blindness which is accompanied by belief that one already knows all that one can about the subject, one finds that the recipient has very little time, and less brain power available to analyze your effort. Accordingly, subjects that require time and effort to understand are off limits. Otherwise I’d be inclined to discuss Baylis’s paper on the problems that arise when one uses geometric algebra to geometrize spinors, and why I prefer density matrices.

So instead I am going to write a polemic against what I see as tendency of modern physics to misuse symmetry. To me, symmetry is a method that one uses to solve a set of equations. Symmetry cannot be an underlying principle in itself. Nor, as we show here, does a symmetry in observations necessarily imply the complete symmetry in the underlying physics.

While physics has been quite successful in abusing symmetry by worshipping it, that in itself is not evidence that symmetry is all there is to it. Nor is self-consistency and beauty proof against disproof. One remembers the elegant theory that the world is a flat plate, and rests on the back of a turtle. “And what is undernearth the turtle?” Another turtle of course. “And underneath that?” Yet another turtle. “And underneath the third turtle?” From there it’s turtles all the way down.

The most successful symmetry theory of physics is the special theory of relativity, from which we know that there can be no preferred reference frame. Newton out, Einstein in. Accordingly, let us derive the special theory of relativity from the very pracitical Newtonian engineering theory of Wave Motion in Elastic Solids, pp 274-281, by Karl F. Graff and kindly printed by Dover at a bargain price of $21.95.

We will assume that space-time is an isotropic elastic solid in 3 classical Newtonian dimensions. Such a media has a definite preferred reference frame, the media itself, and is the last thing one might suppose might lead to Lorentz symmetry, especially given the extreme efforts used to obtain Poincare invariance in the recent literature.

Let u(x,y,z;t) be the strain, that is, the deformation of the point (x,y,z) at time t. A strain in a material sets up a stress, that is, a force that reacts to undo the strain. For an elastic isotropic infinite solid media undergoing small linear deformations, there are two degrees of freedom available to characterize the media. We will use the Lamé parameters, lambda and mu. We will also assume a constant density, rho. Practical engineers need to apply external forces to media, but for our purposes we will leave these off and look only at waves propagating in the media itself. Then, from equation (5.1.3) of the above reference, we have the elastic equations of motion:

A very useful method of simplifying equations is to rewrite them in terms of a potential. For an arbitrary vector field like u, one requires a combination of scalar and vector potentials, the Helmholtz resolution. We write:

The scalar(vector) potential function is arbitrary in that one can add a constant (constant vector) to it without changing u. Of the two, the vector potential is even more arbitrary. Speaking in the physics language, we can make various gauge assumptions about it. The text assumes that the divergence of the vector potential is zero.

Substituting our potentials into the elastic equations of motion, we find that they are satisfied if:

The above equations are massless examples of the Klein Gordon equation, the relativistic generalization of Schroedinger’s equation. In a source-free region, the components of Maxwell’s equation satisfy the Klein Gordon equation, as do the components of the Dirac equation. A slight difference is that the wave speeds depend on the Lamé parameters and the density, rather than being the speed of light. Moreover, the wave speeds for the two wave types are different.

The upper, scalar potential, wave equation corresponds to longitudinal waves and has the faster wave speed. The lower, vector potential, wave equation has the slower wave speed and corresponds to transverse waves.

Suppose elastic creatures made of such a media wish to determine the preferred reference frame. They can find it by looking at the speed difference between the two types of elastic waves; the preferred reference frame is the only one where space appears isotropic. If, however, the creatures in the media are restricted to only measure one of the two types of waves, there will be only one wave speed, and, as with the situation with Maxwell’s equations, they will be unable to distinguish a preferred reference frame. An elastic creature might notice this, and become the elastic Einstein by promoting the idea that contrary to intuition, there can be no preferred reference frame.

The other day at the Crossroads Shopping Center chess club, a friend told me that he had great difficulty understanding how it could be that matter could have so much energy built into it that one could manipulate it into a nuclear explosion. I thought about it for a move or two. I told him that from the point of view of elementary particle physics it was not at all surprising. What was surprising is not that hydrogen bombs are so hot, but instead that the world as we see it, is so cold.

Our experiments in physics are restricted to particles with energies many orders of magnitude less than the Planck energy. The Planck energy is about the amount that a citizen of a developed country uses in electrical power in two weeks. In particle physics, it is difficult to explain why most particles don’t have this much energy. That’s right all that energy in just one electron. Maybe one explanation for the cold temperature of the world as we see it is that the energy per particle dropped due to inflation.

Among the particles that we CAN experiment with, it seems that Lorentz symmetry is exact. Is this because Lorentz symmetry is an exact principle of nature? Or is it because we do not have the resources to excite the higher velocity elastic deformations of space-time?

As far as a unified field theory goes, the elastic equations of motion discussed above are missing a few key details. The most obvious one is that elastic deformations are not quantized. They can come in any size and any energy. In quantizing them, it would be natural to find that the minimum excitation energy for a quanta is on the order of the Planck mass. In our very cold condition, we are interested only in excitations that have energies far far below the Planck mass. Among the elastic deformations, we can eliminate one of the two branches, say the faster one, by assuming that its quantum excitations are all of the order of the Planck energy, and hence are not observed in the cold universe that we see. The remaining excitations will all satisfy the same Klein Gordon equation, and so will satisfy Lorentz symmetry.

Of course there are several other defects in the elastic proposal. The number of deformations is far too few, so the known elementary particles would have to be composites. Accordingly, researchers pursuing these sorts of ideas work on preon theories. But that is another story. What we intend to point out by this post is that Lorentz symmetry is a very slippery rock to stand on, if one’s highest energy experimental measurements for its exactness are 10 orders of magnitude below the natural energy scale. One should not be too surprised if advances in physics are made by people who do not cripple themselves with a slavish devotion to symmetry principles “all the way down”.

Light is a vector, or transverse wave rather than a scalar, or longitudinal wave. In the Standard Model of elementary particles, only the Higgs is a scalar particle, but the Higgs has never been observed. All the observed elementary particles are, like light, vector particles. Well, technically the fermions, such as an electron or quark, are Dirac spinors. A spinor is more or less the square root of a vector. I reject Dirac spinors, preferring the density matrix form. The density matrix squares the spinors, again returning them, more or less, to vector form.

In addition to scalar particles being absent from the experimenter’s observations, research on the interaction between black holes and elementary particles suggest that scalar particles would be rather stranger than is currently expected. See the section on “tripled Pauli statistics” in the above linked paper by Lubos Motl.

The elastic equations of motion were defined under the assumption that the density of the media, rho, is constant. For the usual engineering problems, this is a good approximation for both longitudinal and transverse waves. But of the two types of waves, it is only the longitudinal (scalar) deformations that change the density of the media, the transverse waves preserve density to first order.

Let’s get back to the subject of the constancy of the speed of light. Since the big bang, the universe has considerably thinned out. If we were to naively model space-time as a classical isotropic media, this will result in a decrease in the density. But the spreading of an elastic media is also accompanied by changes to its elastic parameters. The speeds of the longitudinal and transverse (scalar and vector) wave speeds depend on these parameters as follows:

As the universe expands, presumably its lambda, mu, and rho change. And this returns us to Louise Riofrio’s equations for the changing speed of light.

Just a couple of things you might like to be made aware of:

• David Orban, long time ago a colleague of mine and now CEO of a software firm, is attending the Singularity Summit in San Francisco as we speak. He is blogging from the site and I am enjoying his reports a lot - he is concise and straight to the point, something which is totally alien to my own prose. He also posts tons of nice pictures of the main characters and the place. Please read his reports here: Day one (morning), Day one (afternoon), Day two (morning), Day two (afternoon). Of course, more to come.
• Marni Dee Sheppeard, aka Kea, aka The Arcadian Functor, has now reached the hundredth installment of her serial on M-theory. Congratulations Kea, well done and good luck for the next 100! Her latest effort is bordering philosophical issues.
• Gerard ‘t Hooft has translated his lecture notes on Lie groups in English. These are excellent study material!  Thanks Peter for pointing to them!

After polling my twentyfive readers (a wink to A.Manzoni’s “I promessi sposi”, cap.I, par.31) on whether I should play the game of cyclostyling proceeding papers or not, I decided that politeness comes first - I had been asked to produce a writeup of my talk, and I did it.

So, as usual, before submitting the manuscript to my editor and to the ArXiV, I ask here for your benevolent help. If you have time to read my five pages summarizing the status of precision measurements of electroweak observables at the Tevatron, please download my paper (in postscript[1.2Mb], or in pdf format[0.4Mb]) and provide any feedback you see fit. If you provide helpful comments, I will acknowledge your input in the paper, as I did already three times in the recent past.

Here is an instance of a question that is best asked in a blog. I know this site is read by a few academics who frequently publish their work and attend to conferences, and I thus expect to hear from them what they think of the following practice.

Imagine you give a talk at a conference, on some subject, and a few months later you give a very similar talk at another conference. You have changed your slides only to accommodate new results, some new considerations, added some material and subtracted some. It is legal to do that: in fact, you are sometimes even expected - or asked - to give the same seminar in different places.

However, when you later have to write the proceedings for the second conference, you are assailed by a doubt: should you start writing your proceedings article anew, or make heavy use of the one you published just a few months back ?

Proceedings are printed matter, and as the old adage teaches - verba volant, scripta manent - you know somebody could one day confront you with the question: “What advancement to the field did you grant with this second paper?”. None at all, of course: a writeup of a conference talk is not meant for that purpose. Still, if you cut and paste large portions of stuff that is already published elsewhere, you feel guilty.That is, I do.

I am less interested of the legal side of the question, but there is one. I signed a transfer of copyright agreement with AIP (the American Institute of Physics) when I submitted my manuscript last September. Now, that very document explains that I have “The nonexclusive right, after publication by AIP, to give permission to third parties to republish print versions of the Article or a translation thereof, or excerpts therefrom, without obtaining permission from AIP, provided the AIP-prepared version is not used for this purpose, the Article is not published in another conference proceedings or journal, and the third party does not charge a fee. If the AIP version is used, or the third party republishes in a publication or product charging a fee for use, permission from AIP must be obtained.” So, since the PASCOS conference will also use AIP as a publisher of their proceedings,  it looks as if I will have to ask AIP to use excerpts of the first proceedings for the second one, of which they will still be the publishers!

Hmmm… I am more interested in the moral issue. Any ideas ? What do you do in similar cases ? Try to reinvent the wheel ? 

Ivan, his wife Barbara, and their son Sebastiano are spending a week with us in Padola, in the italian Alps. They arrived this morning and Ivan brought me his first book, “Un Cavallino come logo” (A little horse as a symbol) as a present. Ivan is a researcher in contemporary art and is my dearest friend - our parents have been friends since the fifties, and we have known each other since I don’t even remember when. He was recently asked to write an history of the publishing firm “Il Cavallino”, that published art catalogs, books about art, foreign literature, and music since the Thirties.

I am really pleased to browse through this nice new book, which is ultimately a history of contemporary art as seen from the narrow but intriguing perspective of the publications printed through the last seventy years by the firm. I know Ivan spent several months writing the book, and I look forward to spending the next few days reading it. This new publication will not bring fame and fortune to him, but it is an accomplishment which means a step in the right direction for him to get a tenured position in Academia. Ivan and I have been joking about the matter for a long time now: who is going to be a professor first ? I appear to be in a better position now, having already gotten a tenured position as researcher with INFN. But one never knows, and odds are still pretty much even… Good luck Ivan!

While my spine was shivering for the amount of disturbing information I read today in Magdi Allam’s article “Islam, in regalo ai prof il libro che nega Darwin” (Islam, the book negating Darwin offered for free to school teachers) on Il Corriere della Sera , I could not help feeling the sort of reassurance that only old-fashioned Hollywood movies can give - the feeling that the division of good and bad can sometimes be perfect even in real life, that the bad ones are not just mean but also obtuse, and that I find myself, for once, rooting for the good.

The facts: A book called “Atlante della creazione” (Atlas of Creation) has been distributed for free in thousands of copies across Italy, but formerly in Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain,  the Netherlands, to secondary schools and science and religion teachers, to libraries, scientific institutes, newspapers. It is a hefty book, 800 pages for 13 pounds, which is ordinarily sold with the price of 75 euros (about 100 US$). The author is the turkish writer and islamic theologist Adnan Oktar, and the publisher is the turkish Global Publishing, which only prints Oktar’s books. As to who pays for the thousands of volumes distributed throughout Europe: Who has interest to plagiarize our children ? That remains a mystery.

So what’s in the book ? Quoting Magdi, “A total dismissal without appeal of Darwinian theories on evolutionism, which is identified as the root of all the evils of our contemporary history: fascism, nazism, and terrorism”. And in the appendix the author maintains that “Islam is not the source of terrorism but its solution”. Oktar wrote many books, where he clearly shows to be either under the influence or deranged. A book called “The lie of the Holocaust”, of 1996, reads “what has been presented as Holocaust is the death of some jews due to the epidemic of typhus because of the war and of famine in the final phase of the germans’ defeat”.

In his insightful article Magdi Allam notes that in Turkey, 75% of high school students do not believe in the theory of evolution. So Oktar may be leaving a mark somewhere. Allam ends by noting that nowadays Europe appears to be conquering ground for creationists of christian inspiration from one side (coming from the US) and creationists of islamic roots from the other. Good lord. I think I’ll move to New Zealand. Kea , do you know of any opening for a HEP physicist down there ?  

I feel compelled to paste here a link to a short series of funny clips, based on the theme “stories that would have turned out different if the characters had had cell phones”. I think it is a brilliant idea, and I am kicking myself for being unable to give my own contribution. But maybe I will come up with something later… The nights here in the CDF Control room are longggg!

Update: ok, here is my contribution.

Scene: Marathon plains, 490BC. Corpses of Persian soldiers everywhere. A few ships in the background. Bodies afloat in the water. Greek soldiers looking for survivors. The general of the Athenian army Miltiades creeps in Pheidippides’ tent, where the latter is resting after his mission to Sparta to ask for help.

MILTIADES: “My faithful Pheidippides, Darius is defeated! Hurry, run to Athens as fast as you can, and announce that we finally kicked their butt here in Marathon!”

PHEIDIPPIDES: “General, I am just back from Sparta. It was a 150 miles run, I have a sore ankle and bleeding feet. I know Telepantheon charges a lot for roaming, but for this time only just give them a call, ok ?”