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.