Comments on: PANICking in Santa Fe and Antiprotons in San Francisco

By: Daniel | Cosmic Variance

Daniel | Cosmic Variance — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 19:18:49 +0000

[...] Continuing our recent servings of fresh blogging meat, I am delighted to announce the addition of another new member of the Cosmic Variance team. Daniel Holz is a Richard Feynman Fellow in the theoretical astrophysics and particle physics groups at Los Alamos National Laboratory, working on the interplay between general relativity, astrophysics, and cosmology. Dan is a particular expert on gravitational lensing and gravitational waves, but his interests are wonderfully broad and I know he’s going to bring a great new perspective here. As a good friend of some of us already, he’s already been mentioned in at least one of our posts. [...]

By: New Views of the Universe | Cosmic Variance

New Views of the Universe | Cosmic Variance — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 05:15:26 +0000

[...] I took some time on Monday to have lunch with Sean and Iggy to make some progress on our joint project, and then later had a nice dinner and some drinks with Sean, Dan Holz (who I’ve mentioned before), Isobel Hook (who I met for the first time at this conference), Ruth Gregory and Ed Copeland. I don’t get to see Ruth and Ed very often, so it was particularly nice to spend some time with them. [...]

By: Got PANIC? | Cosmic Variance

Got PANIC? | Cosmic Variance — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 06:00:21 +0000

[...] Mark has already mentioned the Particles and Nuclei International Conference held in Santa Fe 24-28 October, 2005. This is a major international conference held approximately every 3 years. And it was my first time to attend. By now, I am used to seeing the same familiar faces at conferences, and this one was refreshingly different in that regard. 500 physicists were in attendance, including 80 students. [...]

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 01:13:32 +0000

Ah yes, I used to walk by that plaque myself. There’s a little mock-up of the Michelson-Morley experiment on the 1st floor of Rockefeller (the Physics Department) and Bill Fickinger, an Emeritus Professor there, has written an interesting history of it.

By: Colin Slater

Colin Slater — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:42:03 +0000

Interesting that a physicist at Case is working on measuring the effect of the earth flying through space. I happen to remember another well known experiment that took place at Case involving the effect of the earth’s motion, attempted by none other than Michelson and Morely. I know, I walk by the plaque every day to class.

By: G Bruno

G Bruno — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 23:13:43 +0000

Hi cvj,
found this blog via NYTimes.
There is a need & a demand for non-mathematical physics expositions.
I was fairly good at Math, but just cant get Tensors, Group theory etc, so I and most people, need a ‘conversational’ approach. It can be done.
eg the previous comment by Uncle Al has just enough ‘jargon’, not too much.
- enough to look serious, although I couldnt really say.

By: Uncle Al

Uncle Al — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 16:21:46 +0000

Why would there be new foreground symmetries discovered but not broken assumed background symmetries? Physics assumes an even-parity universe and repeatedly discovers the contrary (Yang and Lee, New Years Day 1957.) Biology is homochiral – protein L-amino acids and D-sugars. It has a source.

Galileo’s 1638 universality of free fall, Newton’s 1687 invariant proportionality of mass and weight, and Einstein’s 1907 elevator Gedankenexperiment embodied the Weak Equivalence Principle (EP). Local centers of mass are postulated to vacuum free fall identically, independent of test mass composition or internal structure. Gravitation is modeled as parity-even math. Is it?

There is no empirical constraint of gravitation exhibiting a parity anomaly at the 10^(-11) difference/average level or smaller. Given: three compositionally and macroscopically identical solid spheres. One is amorphous fused silica, SiO_2. The other two are carved from single crystal quartz, SiO_2. One quartz sphere is crystallographic parity space group P3(1)21 (right-handed helices of atoms), the other quartz sphere is P3(2)21 (left-handed helices of atoms). Locally vacuum free fall all three spheres. (Actually, use an Eotvos balance to examine the three pairings to 10^(-13) difference/average; and oppose the single crystal spheres first!)

Will the three centers of mass pursue parallel trajectories, or will one parity mass distribution of quartz diastereotopically interact with chiral vacuum and pursue a divergent minimum action path? One cannot test for a left foot with a sock or a left shoe. Only a right shoe is diagnostic. Spacetime geometry has never been challenged with test mass geometry. It is the only remaining untried class of EP test, a parity Eotvos experiment.

Static chirality is an emergent phenomenon. It is volumetric, requiring at least four non-coplanar points in 3-space. Particle physics does not impose constraints. That a parity EP violation could occur through anisotropic mass distribution at atomic lattice scales interacting with the parity-broken symmetry of spatial chiral anisotropy has never been considered. Absence of theory does not enforce absence of discovery. Observation dictates what theory must predict.

Gravitation gets interesting within a 10 A-diameter sphere, /astro-ph/0508572. That would contain 49 atoms of silicon-centered quartz lattice and exhibit powerful geometric parity divergence: 0.933755 of a possible normalized 1.0 exactly. Shouldn’t somebody look – in existing apparatus, by unchanged protocols, with unbiased academic personnel? Risking success after 420 years of null results is not so bad. Heterotic string theory is already in place. Where are physics’ cajones?