Recent content by ohwilleke

The world's shortest published physics paper from 1951 counts, I think. The entire paper is as follows: The numerology didn't last. The current ratio of proton to electron mass is 1836.152673426(32)

Normally, we recognize this as an observed law of Nature and consider any "mechanism" beyond that to be unknowable. One alternative explanation is known as Mach's principle, which is the conjecture that inertia arises from the gravitational pull of everything in the Universe on everything else...

Even if QM were fundamentally deterministic, and I agree that there is experimental evidence suggesting that pre-collapse that the probabilistic description may be "real", it is necessarily at least "chaotic" in the mathematical sense that outcomes are sensitive to initial conditions so close to...

The new paper's predicted neutrino mass seems high. And, I'm not a huge fan of the indiscriminate brute force approach of considering every possible combination of parameters no matter how ill-motivated.

There are maybe a dozen or two preprints filed in the General Relativity and Cosmology category of arXiv on this subject every year (I review the new preprints in that category daily, but don't keep a rigorous count of these kinds of papers, so my estimate is pretty rough but still reality...

This year's Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the relatively uncontroversial first discovery in 2013 of high energy neutrinos from space at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory that Francis Halzen spearheaded. Aurelien Breeden, Katrina Miller, "Nobel Prize in Physics Is Awarded for the Advent...

|Vtd|2=|Vcb|3 and |Vub|2|Vus|=|Vcb|4 arXiv:2007.12695 Y. Grossman and J. T. Ruderman, “CKM substructure,” JHEP 01, 143 (2021) No PF discussion of which I am aware.

Vernon Barger, "Quark Mixing from a Lattice Flavon Model: A Four-Magnitude Parameterization" https://arxiv.org/html/2603.00810v2 (August 24, 2026) (the paper also contains many other relations). Not yet published.

R. Gatto, G. Sartori, and M. Tonin, “Weak self-masses, Cabibbo angle, and broken SU(2)×SU(2),” Phys. Lett. B 28, 128 (1968); R. J. Oakes, “SU(2)×SU(2) breaking and the Cabibbo angle,” Phys. Lett. B 29, 683 (1969). Full text (equations are handwritten and images of them are provided here) at...

I. Alikhanov, "Novel dependence between neutrino mass splittings strongly supported by initial JUNO results" arXiv:2610.06738 (October 5, 2026)). Not yet published. No prior PF discussion. This updates (with new higher precision data from JUNO): I. Alikhanov, "Another relation among the...

The abstract reads as follows: Some of the conclusions like "must be accompanied by at least one extra dimension significantly larger than Planck length" seem excessive and presumably are justified by the "reasonable assumptions" qualification which may not actually be as reasonable as they...

They aren't necessarily fundamental, but we have no real idea what kind of deeper physical structure could cause what we see and there are no experiments or observations that are likely to take place in the next few decades that can tell us. Generally, going as deep as we possibly can, we think...

Open AI spent $10M to solve a Millenium Prize related to the Navier-Stokes equation. Find someone willing to pony up that much money every year and you could probably double the number of LQG researchers. There are people who do help professors look for money to fund their research stuff for a...

Lefty is on the right track. The path to wisdom here is thinking about the problem from the top down rather than from the bottom up. (1) Start with the idea that thoughts and emotions are products primarily of the human body's nervous system. (2) Then, consider the neurons and biochemicals...

Theoretical physics (which is most of what supersymmetry is at this point from a funding perspective) is cheap. A theoretical physicist needs one mid-level professional salary, a laptop, a few journal subscriptions, some access time to a supercomputer, one or two research assistants, a white...