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.