Recent content by ohwilleke

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...

In popular non-fiction articles, word count is king. The number of words you'd need to explain the concept of a virtual particle properly would probably use a good share of the words available for the story. Book length popular non-fiction, where the word count imperative is less intense and...

And, while it isn't a very accurate description, in this "lies told to children" example, the way in which it is inaccurate doesn't seriously hinder an approximately correct intuition and understanding of what is going on. It is heuristically more helpful than harmful. Virtual photons are...

MOND astrophysicist Stacy McGaugh blogs about the experimental result. He initially thinks that this is more fairly considered a 1 sigma result, not a 2.6 sigma result, but later walks that back in an addendum to his post. In the addendum he does, however, make the point that I made earlier...

I generally agree with your analysis, but I also think that the look elsewhere effect has been underestimated and really ought to include essentially all of the direct detection experiments and not just LZ.

The differences between an extended Koide waterfall with a zero mass up quark and the observed masses is well approximated by adjusting the waterfall masses by the mass of the down-like quark that is not part of an up-like quark's Koide triple in the waterfall times the CKM matrix squared of the...

Another issue is that even if the event is some non-SM particle, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is a significant component of DM. Direct DM experiments are based upon the assumptions that the total DM mass flux and DM particle momentum can be pretty well determined from Milky Way...

Not sure, does the paper say what statistical significance this event has? UPDATED: The paper estimates the global statistical significance at 2.6 sigma, with a local statistical significance of up to 3.4 sigma. But the number of events probably isn't sufficient to determine the significance...

Or some novel fifth force that has a cross-section of interaction much weaker (by factors of millions or billions or so) than the SM weak force. The DM cross-section of interaction of atomic nuclei (and hence the weak force charge of DM particles) would have to be profoundly weaker than that of...

The paragraph that I'm referring to is:

The second to last paragraph of the most recent article linked in the linked source notes that the biggest discrepancy drops from 4.1 sigma to 0.2 sigma when the bin closest to the charm loops is removed from the analysis, and the charm loops aren't properly considered in this analysis...

A frequently meaning of "using natural units" is to omit c=h=1 from the notation entirely.

Strong disagree on this point. A novice should be meticulous about fully displaying all units and continue to do so until the person intuitively knows the units of everything in the equations being used. As a math and science tutor when I was in college (and afterwards), one of the most common...