Recent content by ohwilleke

You don't actually need the structure of the theory to do that, and can get what you might call an "accidental" result of exactly three generations. For example, suppose that a mathematically consistent system requires that each generation of fundamental fermions be complete (i.e. that it has...

Probably not the final announcement, just the latest update. And, of course, this is really a limit driven by experimental measurement limits. The best upper limit on neutrino mass from KATRIN is far in excess of any reasonable estimate of that number.

More papers: arXiv:2603.28895 Plan 9: Detecting Atmospheric Deterrence Against Interstellar Monsters David R. Rice, Michael J. Radke Comments: 14 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Acta Prima Aprilia Exoplanet atmospheres are usually discussed as tracers of climate, chemistry, and habitability...

There is a robust tradition of posting physics papers preprints to arXiv that are actually April Fool's Jokes. This is a collection of them from this year. arXiv:2603.29212 (cross-list from physics.pop-ph) Lots of Shade on Satellite Constellations Michael B. Lund Comments: 8 pages and 2...

A year and a half later we've ruled out more possibilities, but still aren't close to a consensus. See, e.g., here. The emerging consensus is that the experimental value exactly matches the theoretically computed one (which is getting ever closer to the experimental value as the calculations...

I knew someone who did them from blimps once.

I saw the same paper this morning and was thinking along the same lines that you are.

Easier on the body, but it makes you more fragile, which could be a good local color plot point. You can. But in the sci-fi/fantasy/adventure genre, really all of the way back to Icarus, in Greek mythology, all of the way to Star Wars, much more than a majority of the time, the literary choice...

To be clear, you mean impact with the ground inside the asteroid, not the asteroid impacting something else. And, it seems that this question doesn't want to consider changes to human physiology that arise from living in space for prolonged period of time, but that probably isn't reasonable to...

It is also worth noting that the commonly quoted figure probably doesn't come from a single experiment, and it isn't necessarily the case that every measurement that goes into the final result comes from the same kind of experiment. Instead it is a weighted average of the best available...

Three plus decades later, I still have almost all of them (and even consult them now and then), over the objections of other members of my family. Indeed, I have a fair number of textbooks that I inherited from my father's college days and I use a couple of them (mostly statistics) on a regular...

The reason that I don't feel like that is very promising is that there are many examples of big differences between inclusive and exclusive measurements of quantities in particle physics that eventually get resolved. The prospect for systemic error is great.

Good catch.

Indeed. The idea that the Yukawa couplings of the Standard Model arise from a dynamical process which @arivero's Koide's waterfall imperfectly reflects is IMHO a very fruitful line of inquiry, and if true, would make the idea that some sort of dynamical process is also driving the values of the...