Recent content by ohwilleke

The reason that this particular example is so hard is not because it is, fundamentally, a huge many body problem, but because the underlying deterministic Newtonian physics equations (the Navier-Stokes equations) are inherently "chaotic" in the mathematical sense that large scale behavior is...

One of the rather surprising observational facts about dark matter distributions in galaxies is that they show surprising similarities to each other without much regard to the history of mass assembly in that galaxy, rather than great diversity based upon their varied histories of mass assembly...

After giving it some more thought, the reason that I think that the simulation rather than the astronomy observations are the main problem is that the precision and bias issues in the astronomy observations, while very real, are also well understood. In contrast, the kinds of dark matter...

This is definitely a possibility. When you are comparing simulations to astronomy observations, I focused on the issues with the simulation. But the astronomy observations have their own issues. One of the great things about a simulation is that, subject to its limitation of being coarse...

Astronomy/cosmology simulations do two main things: 1. They rely on a set of assumptions about the physics involved, which are physics informed, but generally never fully reproduce the known laws of physics and the actual distribution of matter in a galaxy. In part, galaxy scale simulations...

Theoretical physicist C.N. Yang died at the age of 103 years on October 18, 2025. He is the Yang in Yang-Mills theory, which he and his collaborators devised in 1953, which is a generic quantum field theory that is used by scientists to study amplitudes (i.e. vector probabilities) that are...

A gravi-GUT could be a TOE but wouldn't necessarily be, in the strict sense. A GUT is a unified theory of the three SM forces. A TOE is a unified theory of the three SM forces plus gravity. A gravi-GUT could be a GUT paired to a quantum gravity theory in which the quantum gravity theory and...

Crude order of magnitude, back of napkin estimates are still probably good enough to rule out EMP as a serious risk of the proposal. I would think that the bigger risk would be that if the asteroid was on a path to the moon, but was diverted by a nuke, that some big chunk of it that was going...

The main discussion, after a lot of background for readers unfamiliar with the topic (the language in bold is the core substance of the matter, the language is italics is charming language): A new heavy Higgs boson is very unlikely IMHO. This doesn't mean that it is truly a bound state, but if...

I'm not aware of any such claims before March of 2025.

The CMS paper was published last week, with some modest revisions from the original preprint in March. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd guess that the ATLAS paper will be published more or less simultaneously with the release of its preprint in the very near future. As far as "exciting" goes...

Toponium is a hadron which is the bound state of a valance top quark and a valance antitop quark. Oversimplified presentations often state that top quarks don't form hadrons, because they decay to bottom quarks extremely rapidly after they are created, leaving no time to form a hadron. And...

Found unattributed on Facebook:

For the most part, the problem is that string theory and GUTs and other BSM models simply don't make predictions about parameters at all, even though they should be able to do so in principle. Attempts to fix parameters in the supersymmetry paradigm have a long history of making predictions...

I added IC, ACT, GRAND, XRISM and CGM.