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Enlightening the Blogosphere -- after seven long years.

I first started blogging in the summer of 2004, more than seven years ago. There were a few blogs then but the blogosphere wasn't certainly crowded as it is today. Then, I had some funny stories to tell -- mostly regarding the day-to-day struggles of graduate school. Few months into blogging I ran out of jokes and I stopped it. The original idea of the blog was to relate science to consciousness, spirituality and everything in between -- hoping to unravel the mysteries of the mind and the universe. But soon I had no idea about what I was talking nor could I initiate any meaningful effort even to get the conversation started.

Now, I have the experience of 7 more years and ready to give it a try. Here is a list of topics I wish to address in the coming weeks.

1. Why do we all ask the question, "What is the purpose of our existence?''
2. How tiny can small or how mighty can large get to be?
3. What is common between people with children and people with dogs?
4. Is there anything spiritual about Quantum Mechanics, given an appropriate definition of "spirituality"?
5. How can you tell a story without time?

Obviously, I'll be lying if I claim that I won't be making stuff up as we go along. But primarily, all my arguments will be based on the following equations.

Surely you are joking Mr. Augustine!

[Subjective paradoxes and phoney entanglements]

Let's get some facts straight baby! I thought it's a pretty good idea to start with the Einstein, podolsky, and Rosen or the EPR paradox. Very soon you'll get an insight of the problem which I wish to address eventually. I'll try to keep this very non - technical. Whether I can do a good job or not - well, right now my guess is as good as yours. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in Quantum Mechanics(QM) tells us that we cannot measure a particle's velocity and its exact location in space simultaneously. Instead, the best we can do is predict the probability that one of the particles is at any chosen location.But there are well - known physical processes whereby two particles emerge from a common location with properties that are related. For example, if an initial single particle should disintegrate into two particles of equal mass that fly off "back to back", something that is common in the realm of subatomic particle physics, the velocities of the two constituents will be equal and opposite. Moreover, the positions of the two constituent particles will also be closely related, and for simplicity the particles can be thought of as always being equidistant from their common origin. Thus while QM does not give definitive answers regarding particle speeds or positions, it does, in certain situations, give definitive statements regarding the relationships between the particle speeds and positions.

EPR sought to exploit these relationships to show that each of the particles actually has a definite position and a definite velocity at every given instant of time. Here's how: imagine you measure the position of the right moving particle and in this way learn, indirectly, the position of the left moving particle. EPR reasoned that nothing in your act of measuring the right moving particle could possibly have an effect on the left moving particle, because they are separate and distant entities. The left moving particle is totally oblivious to what you have done or could have done to the right moving particle. Note that the particles may be seperated by a distance of meters, kilometers or light - years apart when you carry out the measurements. Based on a similar logic EPR cleverly pointed out that you could have chosen instead to measure the velocity of the right moving particle. In that case you'd have determined the velocity of the left moving particle, albeit indirectly. Putting both together EPR concluded that the left moving particle has a definite position and a definite velocity at any given moment. Of course, this whole discussion could be carried out interchanging the roles of the left and right moving particles. This leads to the conclusion that both particles have definite positions and speeds. However there is still no conflict with the uncertainty principle. EPR realised that thay cannot identify both the location and velocity of any given particle. But, even without determining both the position and velocity of either particle, EPR's reasoning shows that each has a definite position and velocity.Reality, EPR maintained, was more than the readings on detectors. Thus, EPR concluded that QM is an incomplete description of reality. The core of the EPR argument is that an object over there does not care about what you do to an object over here.

We had to wait till the entry of John Bell (picture - right) into the picture to resolve the EPR paradox. The generalisation of which is known as the "Bell's Theorem". It is well known that calcium atom, as it returns to its less energetic state, will emit two photons, travelling back to back, whose spins are perfectly correlated. Bell found that there is a bona fide, testable consequence associated with a particle having definite spin values. QM tells us that we cannot simultaneously measure the spin of a particle with respect to more than a single axis. So we choose three axes oriented at three different angles in space. Then we want to measure the spins as detected by the detectors placed at these three locations - that is, up or down. Here's the experiment. Two detectors were placed 13 meters apart and a container of energetic calcium atoms was placed midway between them. Whenever the detector settings are the same, the two photons are measured to have spins that are perfectly aligned. If lights were hooked to the detectors to flash red in response to clockwise spin and blue in response to a counterclockwise spin, the incoming photons would cause the detectors to flash the same color. How will we make sense of the measurements now? Imagine I and Dr. have a box each with three doors. There's a kind of magic flash light inside the box which flashes only red and blue. Now I and Dr. try to open the doors of our respective boxes. Five (minimum) out of nine times we both agree on the flashes we observe if the respective doors are programmed blue, blue and red or red, red and blue - which is more than 50%. Every other combination of the program would give us a percentile more than the previous. This is the same situation we have at hand for the experiment. The experiment examined data from a large number of runs of the experiment - data in which the left and right detector settings were not always the same but, rather, were randomly and independently varied from run to run - the detectors did not agree more than 50% of the time!The EPR paradox required more than 50%. What went wrong with EPR? Their assumptions! The results of the experiment concludes that an object over there does care about what you do to another object over here. This is quite contrary to EPR assumption. QM shows that particles randomly acquire this or that property when measured, we learn that the randomness can be linked across space. Pairs of appropriately prepared particles called entangled particles - don't acquire their measured properties independently. in other words, the universe is not local. The outcome of what you do at one place can be linked with what happens at another place, even if nothing travels between the two locations. This unique correlation is called "entanglement".

Now I'll come clean. This week's colloquium at the Physics department had a speaker who redefined entanglement. That was real "spooky" and not to mention "nonsense". I don't know why people didn't ask any good questions. The one question we had was spookier than the talk itself. My criticisms are very often ruthless and impolite. That's the reason why I refrain from asking questions, more often totally avoiding the colloquiums. This was a very busy week though. I was treated to some good vegetarian south indian food by Lakshmi over the weekend. It's almost three years since I had more than three dishes during a single meal and what can I say - was elated. I am from Kerala, which is a state, down south of India. The dinner reminded me of Kerala, filled with palm groves and where every meal has some form of coconut in it. Not only that - Kerala has other feathers to its cap also; it's the first place in the world to have a democratically elected communist government way back in 1958; people committing suicide on antisuicide day; record number of people getting killed in road accidents during road safety week and the list goes on. Wellesley invited me for the party once again. I think I've written too much.

Monads and Moguls.

Another year's gone. September 10th was the day I was born 27 years ago. Till now, I couldn't decipher the reason for my existence. To this end I have an interesting thought. People are born, they live and then perish. Why isn't their lives not deterministic? Why the rules of physics not applicable to them? In other words why can't we predict people's future?
In physics also, we try to predict the future. The future of the very simple and fundamental. When we deal with simple objects, what we are essentially doing is - keeping track of information. For example, when we consider the motion of a planet the necessary information we need to predict its future in time is, its mass, radius, velocity and its initial position. When it comes to a star, then we need to consider it's internal composition, time of its birth etc. - adding more information. Physics deals with the rudiments of the material world. From here on whatever I write - they are only my personal views.

Let's come to the fundamental question? How do you distinguish between an entity which has life and object which is lifeless? According to me its all about information density. If we add more and more information to an object then there should be a point in space-time where the lifeless object should transform to a life form (a subject!). As the information density increases the subject can even go to the extent of seeing objects which doesn't have any objective reality! I know this is a crazy idea. I tried to go through some of the holy books to see what they had to say. Unfortunately and as expected every scripture and holy book skirts the point but doesn't narrow down to the point. The point is why, what and who determines this cutoff? Is there a scope of any God here? Any assumed logical argument which concludes with the existence of a God is called Cosmological argument by philosophers. Leibniz had his Monodology in place. God is Great!

I was in Fayettville, AR last week to meet some of my friends. As usual, first I went to the bar, then to the strip bar. The former for entertainment and the later for enlightenment. Finally I am back here doing what I like the most - Cosmology.

Court Marshalled!

I thought of making this a combined blog for the previous week and this week because I forsee a weekend trip to Fayetteville, Arkansas coming sunday.

First let me briefly, mention what happened during the court trial. The defendent was me and the prosecution the county of Florence, Wisconsin. First the alderman takes up the case for hearing. All the concerned parties were present including me. The district attorney called the deputy who issued the ticket to the witness stand. Questions were asked left and right. Since I had'nt any lawyer representing me I was arguing for myself. The deputy drew a diagram of the vehicles on the chalk board as asked by the prosecution. To me it appeared as a free body diagram of PH2100 course. Next to come on to the witness stand was Mr. John who was driving the truck on that day. He answered to my questions as well as the prosecution's questions. Next was my turn. I was asked to raise my hand and swear something which I hardly understood because I felt that the beautiful young lady who administered the oath was trying to disprove special relativity. I just looked at her and said "Yes I do" - whatever that meant.

Then the district attorney questioned me followed by the Hon. Judge. I explained my version of the story with some elaborations on angular and linear momenta which I believe may have caused relativistic vaccua in the minds of the prosecution and the judge. I thought I did a pretty good job till then. But after that, to a question where I had to ascertain the speed of my vehicle, I guess I couldn't come up with the right explanation.I just said "I don't know" because that was the truth. On that basis the judge concluded (that's what he said in his verdict) that I may have been actually travelling at a greater speed than what I thought and hence guilty of the charges. At the same time he ruled that the truck driver didn't adhere to state laws concerned with the transportation of hazardous materials. I accepted the verdict( I had to or else they'd charge me for contempt of court!) but I couldn't agree with it because the conclusions violated the principle of general covariance and active diffeomorphism.
In summary - Got screwed up bombastically!

Alright. Next on the agenda was the search for alternatives for our form of the potential. I managed to make some progress on that front when I found some stringy scenarios. I had to formulate the Hidden Higgs paper using the equations of motion for a scalar field. I am sure it satisfies - but just in case for extra credit and also to satisfy the wants of a sex starved referee who's in love with the equations of motion and keeps sending in criticisms one after the other withstanding our hard found explanations, still keeps on saying "hit me baby one more time"!. I ordered books worth $300 this week which I needed urgently and eagerly waiting for the same. Here are the titles:
The future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology edited by Gibbons et. al
Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology (Contemporary Concepts in Physics Series) by Andrei Linde.
A First Course in String Theory [Hardcover] by Barton Zwiebach.
Cosmological Physics by John A. Peacock.
Early Universe by Kolbe and Turner.

Since our JRVP library is so cool and awesome that they have got NONE of these books!

The classes for the fall semester began on monday 30th August. I am assigned PH2200 supplemental learning. Part of which is attending Dr. Agin's lectures. As usual, hundreds of students have signed up for the course, some already started whining about Physics, some will start soon and the rest will drop the course! That's how the student psychology works and it's not that hard to know because this is the seventh time I am assisting such a course. That's all for this week. Blog bonkers will be back the sunday after next week. Adieus .

Dead Man Walking!

Last blog ended with, a rather anticipatory note. Well, the answer, (intended to be subtle !) was there at the end. [To be continued tomorrow....]. Because this is a weekly blog and sorry for the bad pun! Still that's exactly where we are today.It's my pleasure to let the world know that our "Hidden Higgs " paper was respectfully rejected by PRL. I'll come to it later. Now its time to discuss some extented blunders.

Some time ago Dr. forwarded me a mail which had to do, about some ideas pertaining to simultaneity and causality (or atleast purported to be so). I tried to make some sense out of that and as asked I sent in my comments. All the while my feeling was that this was something written by a High school kid. So I had scribbled down a lot of criticisms and some suggestions. Later on I got a reply from him, which gave me an impession that he might not have relished my tone. It was then Dr. told me that he was not a kid and that he was one his colleagues during their post doc days. I felt I should have read Bertrand Russell before!

Death penalty is a serious issue. Recently a person convicted of rape and murder of a fourteen year old child was hanged to death in India. There is not a second thought about this crime that it's heinous. The question is - Does death penalty serve the purpose of eradicating such a crime from society ? I was confident that his mercy petition before the president of India would be accepted and the death penalty commuted to life imprisonment. The current president of India was a former scientist and also the former head of the organisation, to which I was once associated. I had expected more from him. Being a scientist he over looked facts, vital facts. He not only undermined the study conducted by various human rights organisations including the UN, but also sacrileged commonsense and logic. I always believed that death penalty kills the criminal and not the crime. State sponsored murder should not be encouraged under the pretext of setting examples. You cannot use mathematical reasoning when it comes to human beings. Moreover there is always a slight possibility that he could be innocent. What if future investigation proves that he is not guilty ? It has happened in the past and people's sentence commuted in many places around the world. Moreover this fella was hanged because he was poor. There was not a single case in India where a rich or powerful guy is convicted of rape and murder and faced the same fate. One should be a fool to believe that rape and murder is rare in India. I am surprised that taking people's life has come down to a level of peeling bananas.I am also surprised when people say that when it comes to the ultimate crime then there shouldn't be a second thought about ultimate punishment and that is - death. People who believe this are in fool's paradise. Death is not the ultimate punishment! It's our ancestors who were ignorant and uncivilised enough to come to such a conclusion. Not only that, they didn't have the most powerful weapon - Science. Killing a person for any reason other than to save another person's life is despicable.

I am Biju R. Patla and I approve this message!!(You won't know what this is if you don't watch T.V occasionally)

Now it's time to go to Court. At 9.30am I am to stand in front of a judge for trial, pleading not guilty- in the Florence county circuit court. I had mentioned the reason in my 4th of July blog. I'll let you know the detailed proceedings in the next blog.

Coming back to the paper, I don't what to do about it. I'll have to discuss it with Dr. sometime tomorrow. I figured out a funny thing in Cosmological research. In GR things happen according to Einstein's theory, whereas in supersymmetric field theories things happen according to people who write papers (or people's theory). Here are some practical rules:
Rule 1 - SUSY is broken left and right however you decide and whenever you want! Rule 2- You can make or break symmetry, no matter how but others can't!
Rule 3- IF the above rules may appear funny, do not worry think that you are playing and call them Toy Models.

Of Russell and Wrestle!

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.
.............. Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell was a very smart man and that was what he had to say on people's instincts. I had the taste of it last week. This week's blog is going to be a very long one. The week before the last I was in Chicago to pick up my old friend George. He flew from UC Santa Barbara and we were meeting after a span of almost four years. George was one of my friends who was very instrumental in encouraging me to take up Cosmology, even when we were doing our undergraduate program in Mechanical engineering. We had great debates during our weekend meetings at the bar. So it was a pleasure to meet him once again after such a long time.

My research, for those of you who are not familiar with, is to find an explanation to the existence of dark energy which constitutes 75% of the observed energy density of the universe. This is the most challenging problem in Cosmology today. Apparently it's also the most sought after, area even pursued by theoretical physicists who are not cosmologists. In Science it always happens that when we have more than one problem at hand, people tend to relate all of them. Particle physicists are trying to find a fundamental theory(of everything) for a long time now. So its no wonder why all these particle theorists have entered cosmology by now. The other aspect of which is, cosmologists have also trespassed into the standard model and beyond. So I am struck in between now. The net result of all of these things is we've got a lot of new things to learn and as many to unlearn also. The relevance of the quotation by Bertrand Russell is very apt, or atleast I feel so, when we confront the particle physicist. This is when I feel that the marriage of Particle physics and Cosmology gets controversial as gay marriage if not more so (Pun unintended). This wedlock seems to be a painful deadlock at times.
I've tried my level best to explain what we meant in our "Hidden Higgs" paper. But all my efforts seem to sink now, as I'am less hopeful about, the PRL paper seeing the light of the day. My last efforts to update the paper is underway. Within a day or two we should be able to post it somewhere.

Cosmology is a direct offshoot of General Relativity(GR), which is a classical theory, as opposed to Quantum field theory. The question is whether dark energy is a classical entity or quantum mechanical? Straight forward analysis points out that in the early universe, comparable to Planckian regime everything is quantum. Obviously, then everything has a quantum origin. So we assume that the universe was full of fields. What are fields now? As I understand, it is something which carries energy and information. Where did these fields come from? Now I am about to trespass into God's domain because theoretical physicists are suddenly forced to become law abiding citizens because they see a "NO TRESPASSING" sign, technically called "Singularity". Singularity is God's way of posting a no trespassing sign! What may have happened?
[To be continued tomorrow..............]

Hidden Higgs and more!

First some trivia. A fortnight ago after reading my blog, Dr. reacted by asking me to seek some counselling from the university counselling services. I remembered this now because last week one of the graduate student here was sent home packing, apparently after having some psychiatric or perhaps depression related ailments. This coincided with my reading of a book titled "The beat of a different drum". It's a biographical sketch of the person, who I admire the most - Richard Feynman. In Feynman's own words - "A person who seeks counselling should first get his/her head tested". Nature is wily. If you are not crazy at times then you don't have a beautiful mind. How crazy ? That's debatable!

This article , I thought was something very interesting. It speculates the existence of dark energy, due to the interaction of neutrinos with hitherto unknown particles called accelerons. Everything sounds perfect, including the nomenclature. All the new particles should necessarily end with the suffix "ons"! However, I should remind the reader not to get worried too much after reading the article, with the nomenclature. If you think "decelerons" would have been an equally good alternative choice, then - welcome to the club. Others may seek counselling! Neutrinos were first conceived theoretically by Wolfgang Pauli in 1931, in a last attempt to save energy and momentum conservation principles being violated in certain forms of radioactive decay. However it was Enrico Fermi who coined the term "neutrino" in 1934, using Pauli's hypothetical particle to explain beta decay in radio-active elements and thereby developing a comprehensive theory for the first time. But the mass of the neutrino was assumed to be zero or very very small till recently. The importance of neutrinos in the context of Cosmology is due to the enormous value(10[9]) of the ratio of the number density of neutrinos(includes all the three varieties - the electron neutrino, the tau neutrino and the muon neutrino) to that of Baryons(protons and neutrons together). That means even a tiny mass of the neutrino can correspond to a substantial contribution to the closure density(the Omega term corresponding to neutrinos) of the universe. It was previously assumed that this could somehow contribute to the dark matter(both or either of the two, non-relativistic cold dark matter and the fast moving hot dark matter) in the universe.
Why in the first place the neutrinos should have mass? Because of oscillations. That is, one kind of neutrino can transform into the other kinds(one or both subsequently) and back. This is not possible if they have a zero mass or same mass. Hence the conclusion - neutrinos have non degenerate masses corresponding to the non degenerate eigen-states. People have performed various experiments to put an upper bound to the neutrino mass and that turns out to be 1.0 eV. Since it's a very small mass, measurement is difficult, making it very inaccurate. However experiments are underway, using tritium decay, promising to yield fairly accurate numbers. Now let me break the ice. A very recent paper authored by Dr. and myself, tries to explain dark energy using the Hidden Higgs Conjecture .

The idea is fairly simple. We assume a minimally coupled scalar field called the cosmological Higg's field interacting with itself and decaying quickly, giving rise to a constant dark energy from a fairly early period of time. A straight forward extension of this idea will give an effective mass of the neutrino to the order 10[-10] eV. This is much smaller than 1.0 eV. But you should remember that this is an effective mass which will be lot lesser than the rest mass of a free neutrino. The pdf file of the detailed calculation will be posted here as soon as I finish typing it. So any decaying scalar field (you may call it accelerons or Cosmological Higgs) is sufficient to achieve an acceleration. The only difference being, that when you consider neutrino interaction as the accleration is accomplished, the neutrino density is diluted. As a result the coupling gets weaker and so the expansion may eventually slow down. On the contrary if you do not consider the neutrino factor you always end up getting a constant acceleration.
My only reservations about the whole idea is about the choice of coupling constants. Should we take two Lambda terms corresponding to the particle-particle and field-particle interactions. The worry aspect in this scenario would be that there can be a large number of unknown terms in the Lagrangian. Still it won't be a bad idea to asume multiple coupling terms and redo the analysis with some good guesses(experimentally motivated). In brief the whole point was to incorporate the neutrinos into the "Hidden Higg's conjecture".
Lack of motivation and extreme heat(particularly in my office) were the causes I was concerned with last week. I don't know why sometimes it's like that. So I turned my attention to drumming. I feel that drumming is a good exercise for improving your concentration. The conga drum is basically a Helmholtz resonator (physics wise). Towards the end of the week, I think it was on saturday I helped a physics graduate student shift his apartment. After which I couldn't move my arms and the upper body for nearly two days. That's why the blogging got delayed. So this week it's a Monday blog!

Energetic Monkeys!

This week I could possibly write a lot. I am not claiming to have done any ground breaking research nor did I do anything like reading "My pet goat". But still pretty interesting thoughts. Of late I am having this huge mental block, which I can possibly define as, the phenomena by virtue of which a person cannot think. The referees' silence is nothing but a space -time singularity. The idea is about the "Law of conservation of Energy". Nobody knows why energy has to be conserved, albeit being a very commonly observed fact. Naive thinking is the cause, for taking something profound as energy, for granted. I remember my high school physics teacher Mr. Naik, when he was teaching Newton's second law, followed by the definition of force. After writing the equation, F = ma on the chalk board, he said "my dear students force is ma, the mama, the mother of physics". Sure, force is very important but more important is how a force comes into picture. Mr. Naik was a smart man and he knew when to stop talking. I am an idiot and so I am taking it further. Everybody now knows that the Lagrangian is the progenitor of force, and the energy enters through the Lagrangian. Why the hell is it like that ? This was the same question Lagrange asked to himself and kept on asking until he was dead! People had to wait till the advent of Quantum Mechanics to get a fairly satisfactory answer through the path integral formalism dealing with the Feynman sum over histories.

You might have read or heard something about number theory, groups and stuff like that. There is something called "Closure property " when we deal with Abelian groups. The property states that, any operation on the elements of the group will result in an element belonging to the same group. Law of conservation of Energy is one such property. It is one fact which make us believe that the Law of Physics is the same universally. In other words Physics is like a group. That makes people think of the possibility of unifying the seemingly different forces. So now everything is simple. Just find that group and we are done! In order to formulate the theory we need to solve the problem, for which we have to ask questions. More important, what kind of questions? Well some people who are very smart realized this and started asking. For a single reason or for singularity reasons they started with the black holes. One such intetelligent fella who took up the cause thirty years ago and successfully solved some of the mysteries surrounding black holes is Prof. Stephan Hawking. July 21, 2004 Hawking had something to say, which was quite contrary to what he had said before. This is what I want to elaborate.
Here is Prof. Hawking's Dublin speech.

The problem is called "The blackhole information Loss Paradox" . The black hole emits Hawking radiation obervable by an observer at infinity. But not all the mass that falls into it will be out in the form of Hawking radiation(No 100% efficient process in the universe!). The black hole, over a very long period of time evaporates, leaving part of the information of the swallowed mass missing. Now since the black hole is not there (eventually), in order to account for the missing information people conjectured various possibilities. One among them is the idea of parallel universes(to account for he missing loss of information). Now Hawking comes up with an idea, almost taking a U turn from his previous stance. No information is lost, because the missing information is coming out from the black hole to our universe itself, but in a mangled form. So no parallel universe anymore. Potential project of Wachowski brothers doomed! Hawking's 1974 original paper was simple enough for even idiots like me to understand. I am expecting troubles(mangled proof) with the paper which is going to be published next month. Mangling is consistent with the notion of second law of thermodynamics. But it takes its toll to convince the critics(karmodynamics?). There are too many people out there who are very sceptical of this whole idea of black holes, expanding universe and stuff like that. These kinds of developments in science will atleast temporarily fuel their hidden agenda. Recently my landlord had a yard sale, after which he gave me the books which were left over. One of the books titled American History or something like that starts with Adam and Eve!
My car seems to have a problem every summer. Some thing is wrong with the alternator. Battery won't charge. So it's there in the Walmart parking lot. Result: I have to walk from Hancock to Houghton, which takes exactly 45 minutes. Who is that two by two joker Physics grad who says walking is fun?
Adam and Eve, that reminds me of people agitating against gay marriages. They argue that its not a natural union. Well they are wrong. Here is why. So! there are lesbian monkeys in Japan. Can there be anything more natural to human beings than monkeys?

Paper paradigms and more!

A semiproductive week, still very busy though. Dr. John was out of town this week. I was substituting for his lectures. Lecturing an introductory physics course can be very boring, especially if it's not a calculus based course. The PRL referees still elusive as they were till now. However there was an update of reminders on the status. I had this idea, which still appear very amazing to me. Essentially everything boils down to a simple question whether the smallness of dark energy has anything to do with the Planck's constant h. When I did a simple calculation, putting in the numbers, I am forced to believe that there may be some connections. Apart from that, I made some, strides in learning QFT. One thing I worked on a bit was to arrive at something short of constraining the mass of the field and the dimensional coupling constant (lambda). Theoretically its possible. But nothing makes sense right now because the SUSY breaking is theory ependent. However I feel that, some sense can be made out of it if we fix the electro weak SUSY breaking time from some other closely resembling theories. Moreover the solutions for the Decaying Higgs is an attractor. This means that the Decaying function depends on the initial value and there can be a family of solution with different initial values. That makes the whole procedure of fixing the time very tedious. The last and important reason to be extra cautious is the experimental constraint.

The vaccum expectation value of the higgs according to the standard model of particle physics is the sum of the effective masses of the W+, W- and the Zo vector bosons. People have bounds established for the SM Higgs already at over 200 GeV. The coupling constant has a value range from 0.1 to less than 1. Establishing the value of the coupling constant is not a good way of doing science, because we have no idea of it and its only measured experimentally in collider experiments. But I am curious to know the pattern, may be right or wrong. Within a couple of days I am hopeful of some progress. This is again Dr.'s idea. I see him all the time busy with his computer and then sometimes he comes up with these ideas. So I feel I have completed the required ground work.

I was browsing slowly and steadily over some comprehensive/qualifying test material. I figured out that I don't know much physics at all. I am very much keeping an eye on that stuff. I don't know why I feel that I have to keep studying always for doing research and actually I do. But I don't see other graduate students studying at all. They always do their research. May be they are smarter than I am. Actually they are. All right, I don't know the reasons nor do I want to. This is more fun. The other thought I had over the weekend, was something to do with my old idea of entropy itself. Somehow I feel that entropy and time are related. May be like the chicken and egg situation. Because time has no relevance physically without entropy, though not a psycological kind. But as we all know, physical law has nothing to do with the mind. In other words entropy is something which connects with the physical and spiritual.

Then on sunday Wellesley invited me for dinner at his place. Playing with babies is always fun. That's exactly what I was doing with Wellesley's son Christian. I thought he is a very smart kid for his age. Cynthia served us an italian dinner, which was awesome. This wasn't for the first time I was there. Wellesley invites me occasionally if not too often!

Failure is a temporary phenomenon. Giving up makes it permanent.

Finally got a response from Chris. The culprit being the confusion caused by the Cosmological Higgs confronting the Standard Model Higgs. A very weak coupling constant can cause the component of the Higgs (which we refer to as the cosmological Higgs field) to hit the bottom of the potential well, way before the electro weak component because it decays faster then the roll down of the electroweak higgs component. The result, after the electroweak symmetry breaking, the corresponding field can provide the energy to push the cosmological higgs component and throw in a metastable vaccum state along coinciding with the hadronic particle generation. As a result the cosmological higgs is trapped in the metastable vaccum and symmetry breaking will assure the electroweak higgs to oscillate around the stable position. Once this is accomplished then there is no disturbance whatsoever to the trapped cosmological higgs. This scheme shall throw the higgs into atleast two different sectors, the visible(electroweak) and our "hidden". Note that this whole process takes approximately seconds from the Big Bang. Since the whole process doesn't affect the visible sector the hadron masses will remain unaffected. Or essentially the cosmological higgs theory is an effective field theory. A very interesting observation, this is approximately the same time needed for inflation. Meaning, from that point of time onwards, just after inflation there is a constant term corresponding to the dark energy. Let me shed some more light, on exactly what I am zeroing down to.

Most of the physical theories that we have are some effective theories -- limiting form of a larger and more encompassing theory. Then there are assumptions -- if we want to predict the dynamics of, say, an electron then we have to input the mass of the electron and also we are tacitly assuming the existence of the electron. QED, which is an effective theory is very successful in describing the dynamics thereafter. But we do not have any theory which predicts the existence of an electron. So we need a fundamental theory, which can predict the very existence of different particles and their interactions. In the Big Bang scenario, we believe that the universe has an infinite number of fields. At the time of the Bang, the fields start evolving. All the fields are assumed to be frozen till, just before the Big-Bang. The answer to the question why this has to be the case is no different than that of the existence of the electron. The argument sounds cosmetic, but it's better than the infamous "Cosmological Argument", and also helps to make progress without a fundamental theory. It has to be true if we want to derive an effective theory which can make some sense. These fields are considered weekly interacting among themselves, meaning their evolution is independent of one another and hence their dynamics closely resembles that of very simple point like scalar particles. The advantage of the whole exercise is that the theory of scalar fields is very simple. There cannot be anything simpler than the simplest.

May be the underlying principle is some kind of new physics , which I don't know , but sure we can guess its behaviour from our scenario. May be if this is the case then I can for sure say that we cannot detect the higgs boson in the near future. The energies have to be pushed further and far up. Remember, atleast one of the criteria for any fundamental(unified) theory of nature, should be, given the number of fields, able to predict the precedence of their evolution.(which should evolve faster?) This is an explanation I could come up, based on the "Hidden Higgs Conjecture". Now, how real this scenario is and how near are we on stumbling the truth or is it a surreal and inconspicuous attempt to evade the truth ? Only time will tell.
Right now my guess is no better than yours!

First Sunday Blog

Time to relieve myself from the week's mess. There's no better day to start writing a blog like this one than independence day. Research wise it's been horrible. I heard from a friend of mine at UCSB that Ed. Witten and David Gross are talking about abandoning String theory -- I am not sure though. No word from the referees and the editors for our Decaying Higgs paper; hope it hasn't decayed! I couldn't find any flaw in the idea for the third consecutive week. Bob had an idea of constraining the mass of the Higg's boson. All my exitement got flushed when I realised that I couldn't fix the value of the week coupling constant. It turned out that the equation I had at hand has two variables. The quartic potential that we considered was the most simple case. It's kind of strange in the sense that our plots for the bounded potential started off from a negative value initially and at later times got positive. Classically, the nature of the force at play should get reversed. That would be nice because we can very well get kind of repulsive gravity. The small positive value of the potential at late times should correspond to some measure of the positive cosmological constant.

But then I was reading some of my favourite QFT notes online. My idea was to get some standard value of the coupling constant, atleast corresponding to the weaker cut-off for any existing theory. It now seems to me that people haven't put any logically consistent numbers on it. That was initially part of the whole problem. The reason why the electroweak bosons have mass and the photons do not -- is a proof of broken symmetry. I thought Chris may know something more about it, which I don't. I'll remember to write to him on Tuesday. By the way a sigh of relief was updating the web page. I thought this format would be most useful to me and also others. I hope Tuesday somebody will respond, regarding the paper. I'd also talked to Grant the other day regarding this matter. I spent most of the week learning things I forgot or lost. It's disheartening at times when I think of that laptop which some pitifully insane fella stole from my office. There was a whole lot of stuff in it, including all of my theoretical physics notest.

This week was particularly hopeless. I got a ticket for $194 and four points citation. That does'nt make any sense because, in my opinion, I saved people's lives by being alert and averted a potential major accident. Well the citation says "Driving too fast under conditions". Not to mention the truck with the mobile home was on my side without any blinkers at midnight and the cops didn't think I was at fault then, only to send me a ticket via post after three weeks. So I am going to contest it in court. Marlon Brando is dead. I'd seen his movie "On the waterfront" a couple of times, because that was one movie of his which I liked a lot. That chap also stood up against discriminatory practices going on around this country during the 60's. This is the third consecutive week I didn't have any alcoholic beverages.