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!