BenTheMan

Yeah sorry--- They say "calculations have been preformed using the quenched calculation..." which I took to mean that THEY used that approximation. Sverian, PM me and I'll send you a copy of the article.

Absolutely. The New Scientist article says something like "Until recently, lattice QCD calculations concentrated on the virtual gluons, and ignored another important component of the vacuum: pairs of virtual quarks and antiquarks."...not that I trust whatever journalist who wrote this knows what they're talking about. But this doesn't seem to mesh with the "quenched" approximation. I probably looked too quickly at the article

No---I skimmed through the article the other day, and I seem to recall that they were working in that approximation, but I could be wrong. Like I said, it is confusing because they make some claim in the New Scientist article about vacuum fluctuations, which is what the quenched calculation does away with.

Yeah I don't know why they published in AAAS. I read the paper, and I didn't see anything about a proton mass, and I can't recall all of the lattice terminology---I do recall that they're using the quenched approximation, which seems a bit odd. In this approximation, you turn off the quark-anti-quark virtual pairs (I seem to recall), but the New Scientist article makes a big deal about the fact that this is what they were calculating.

I think you guys are on different planets entirely

That's what you're saying when you say "bosons and fermions are the same".

AB-BA and AB+BA are the same?

Well, I don't know if "making the theory fit the data" is always a bad thing I'm sure if you could explain electroweak symmetry breaking without a higgs, in a similarly economical fashion (i.e. not "extended walking technicolor"), then you'd be invited many places to give many talks. The situation with the higgs mass is a bit intricate---the ONLY way we know how to break symmetries is to give scalar particles VEVs. Naturally, scalar particles are heavy, but we have a spontaneously broken symmetry at a low scale. So what can we do? Similarly, you could ask why the electron should have such a small mass and the top quark such a large one. Or why all three neutrinos have more or less the same mass, but none of the quarks and leptons do. PS Sverian---do you know a good review of the precision electroweak observables/data? I have this Phys Rept article by Heinemeyer, Hollik and Weiglein.

I agree. I've never really met anyone who votes for Dirac neutrinos, except possibly Paul Langacker.

What is your opinion on this, Sverian?

Maybe there's not much discussion because people don't understand what "tuning" is. This has been my experience, at least---most non-physicists don't see a real problem with it because they don't understand the problem. The example I use is this: A + B - C = D Suppose I tell you that A, B, and C are all real numbers that are between 0 and 10. What do you expect D to be? Or, conversely, given all real numbers between 0 and 10, what would a random selection of A,B, and C produce for D?

There was a rumor that he was going to move to the Perimeter Institute.

Most?

I think, if you're willing to accept a fine tuned higgs mass, then you have a real problem model building. If you're willing to throw out "naturalness" as a criteria, then publishing hep-ph papers should be easy So how do you build models, if you only have to satisfy the LEP data and the WMAP bound?

http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/docs/rhicreport.pdf See page 11 and following.

Agreed. One has the TeVeS (Tensor, Vector, Scalar) theories, Modified Newtonian Dynamics, etc etc. I wouldn't so much call these theories "competitors" as most people don't take these theories too seriously. Sure they're possible, but they don't have a lot of support in the community, as far as I can tell.

Does it always? IF you have simple harmonic motion, then yeah, all you get is a long series of sines and cosines. But what if you have some other function? Presumably you'd reach a point where you had something like [math]\frac{d^n v(t)}{dt^n} = const[/math]. You're saying there's no physical significance in this? Edit: I thought tex tags worked here?

There are a uniquie (?) set of predictions which follow from SR/GR, NONE of which has ever been falsified. In essence, you are saying that GR is wrong because you don't like it. Very scientific. PS---I don't know that the predictions of GR are unique, and in fact, I know they aren't. You can build a sufficiently complicated theory of gravity a la Newton by adding epicycles or something, probably.

Please point to a an experiment which contradicts the predictions of Special/General Relativity.

Your math isn't wrong, however, your fizix leaves much to be desired. The first postulate of special relativity (which you've invoked by writing down your formulae) says that no object can travel faster than the speed of light.

This question has been turning over in my mind for a few days. I guess unparticle fermions would enter the path integral in the same manner, but I don't know---I've never seen someone write an un-path integral.

Hi ajb. See the paper by Terning. I THINK he works it out there.

Heh...yeah...wise. I studied unparticles for a while. Basically, it's a kind of neat idea that doesn't really solve any problems or anything. You have to be famous like Georgi to propose these sorts of things. I don't have nearly as deep an understanding of these things as you would give me credit for. It has been a while since I've read any unparticle papers, so I will have to go back and spend some time going over notes.

I would also point out that most of the literature on unparticles likely contains wrong assumptions. In particular, I think it was Terning and some others who showed that the scaling dimension of an operator in a theory with a conformal symmetry has to be greater than 3, I think. It might also have been in the paper by Galloway, Martin, and Stancato. Either way, I think that there is a lot of the literature that should be viewed with suspicion.

But he also doesn't attempt to fix the fact that gravity is not renormalizale.