Recent content by no-ir

The paper seems very interesting to me as well, but, like you, I am not an expert in this field and so can't really comment on the specifics. I would have thought there would be more excitement from the expert community, though, as it seems *to me* (as a non-expert) that this is finally a Theory...

After the list of problems of the free electron gas picture in Chapter 3 you have the section entitled "Review of basic assumptions" where the authors list the assumptions that produced these problems: that the ions are treated as only maintaining charge neutrality and nothing else (the effects...

Yes, I do. In particular, the boundary term is only sensitive to the normal component of the bulk ##l## at the boundary (the scalar ##n_\mu l^\mu##, where ##n## is the boundary normal), so adding to the action any bulk term with ##n_\mu l^\mu = 0## at the boundary (e.g. a bulk term with a...

True. We should be more precise: you can make the total action gauge invariant by adding to it a boundary term that precisely cancels the gauge noninvariant contribution of the bulk theory at the boundary. Then your total action is composed of the bulk action, which would be gauge invariant if...

Not my specific area of expertise (I study quantum spin liquids), but from what I understand the model of a Chern-Simons theory with a boundary that Urs Schreiber is referring to (if I understand correctly) is directly applicable at least to the quantum Hall effect. In the integer case an...

See: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/noether-theorem-cp-violation-energy-is-not-conserved.303056/. Basically, T is the discrete time-inversion symmetry ##t \rightarrow -t##, whereas Noether's theorem applies only to continuous symmetries, like the time-translation symmetry ##t \rightarrow...

Clever formalization of one's intuition, indeed. :) However, it contains a slight error. Namely, if we want ##\log_{10}x## to follow a normal (Gaussian) distribution, then ##x## itself should follow a log-normal distribution, not a normal distribution. The probability densities of...

LIGO proved that black holes exist (and even merge) beyond any doubt. It was not just a discovery of gravitational waves it was also first direct experimental evidence for the existence of black holes as described by General relativity (at least outside the horizon).

I know things are more complicated than this, but symmetry breaking is not something which is avoided at all costs in other parts of physics. Why would gauge anomalies be undesirable? Perhaps the broken-symmetry theory just is the true quantized theory, or perhaps you started from the wrong...

I (really) am not an expert on this, but to hear that the representation theory of SUSY spacetime is underdeveloped does not a priori surprise me as - from my limited understanding - this probably involves non-compact groups, and the representation theory for e.g. general non-compact Lie groups...

Flatness is supposedly solved in the varying-speed-of-light model as well. From the concluding paragraph of the article:

Well, according to the article, inflation was introduced to alleviate the horizon problem: why do cosmological structures in regions which should have been out of causal contact in the early universe (=outside their respective "horizons" which shrink as you roll back time towards the Big Bang)...

Hm, do you know of any experimental evidence that dark energy density is constant in time, or is this just an assumption? Specifically, do you have any reason to believe that the average dark energy density is not inversely proportional to the "total volume"; i.e. that the "total dark energy...

p-brane: Are you saying that making testable predictions is not necessary for a theory of physics? How does such a theory then differ from (mathematically sophisticated) philosophy?

What about leptoquarks (see this)? They could contribute an additional distance-dependent coupling between the quarks in the proton and the electron/muon. As the electron has a different Bohr radius than the muon this would provide a shift in the total energy that would be unaccounted for by the...