Recent content by ohwilleke

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.

Good to know. I hadn't been aware of that.

You can derive the speed of light from Maxwell's equations, and when you do so, you get a result that is independent of the motion of the observer (which seemed like a bug instead of a feature for the roughly quarter of a century until we knew better). While it takes an ah-ha moment and some...

A new paper looks at fundamental fermion mass ratios from the perspective of something similar to an extended Koide's rule approach (and discusses Koide's rule in the body text at pages 38-39 within the context of their approach). Its 90 pages are not easy reading, however, and it is more...

Our intuitions are absolutely wrong, because our hard wired intuitions are based upon classical physics and classical physics are inconsistent with quantum physics. It doesn't imply that. It implies that the true nature of, for example, electromagnetism is QED and not Maxwell's equations. The...

You aren't wrong. But the point that is being made can be easily misunderstood if you aren't living it on a daily basis. Since the word "interpretation" is slippery, it is useful to be specific and concrete about what it means in this context by demonstrating that "shut up and calculate" isn't...

Shut up and calculate, of course, isn't truly just a math theory. In real life, scientists have to deal with what we called "story problems" in grade school, not bare equations and numbers. To do quantum physics, one still has to make the part of the math that relates to real world observables...

I'm not disagreeing that entanglement swapping works. I'm disagreeing with the concept that entanglement swapping doesn't involve a common light-cone (which goes both forward and backward from a point in space-time), albeit, more elaborately than most. Wikipedia explains what entanglement...