Does the shape of the Higgs potential change if the energy of the vacuum changes?
According to Wikipedia,
If a more stable vacuum state were able to arise, then existing particles and forces would no longer arise as they presently do. Different particles or forces would arise from (and be...
Would the Higgs potential change shape if the vacuum changed to a lower energy state?
It's apparently because of the unusual shape of the Higgs potential, where the highest-symmetry spot is not the lowest energy, that the Higgs boson can generate mass.
So if the vacuum were in a lower...
Not knowing is totally different from knowing not.
IF the vacuum tunnelled to a lower energy state, could this result in the disappearance of rest mass?
That's not what they're saying more recently. Apparently with a more exact idea of the Higgs mass, the vacuum is metastable (could tunnel to a lower energy state).
Again, I'm not asking whether this is likely to happen anytime soon.
Even if it takes a googol of years to happen, I'm still...
I'm not worried about it, I hope that rest mass could go away, if the vacuum tunneled to a lower energy state.
The link you gave doesn't say what might happen to physics.
I read that the mass of the Higgs boson is such that we may be living in an unstable vacuum state, and if a region of the universe tunnels to a lower energy vacuum state, and eventually the whole universe would be in that lower energy state (ending life on earth).
Do physicists have guesses...
Here are a couple of references about effects on chemistry of changing the fine structure constant:
http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v81/i4/e042523
http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Hogan/Hogan3_1.html
at least so far it seems like consequences for everyday chemistry aren't huge unless...
Looking at the Schroedinger equation you can see that if \alpha is multiplied by F, then the potential V is multiplied by F^2; so if \Psi is a solution before changing the fine structure constant, then if you divide the length scale of \Psi by F, and divide the time scale of \Psi by F^2, you...
Good point that it would change nuclear physics, because the ratio of electromagnetic force to strong force would change.
Why would the periodic table change? Looking at the wavefunction for the 1s orbital of atomic hydrogen, it looks like if the fine structure constant is multiplied by a...
What would be the consequences of slightly changing the fine structure constant, i.e. changing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction - but not changing gravitation or the strong force? In the everyday world?
You might imagine that the strength of chemical forces etc. would change...
I had a mysterious illness that I ended up self-diagnosing. See http://camoo.freeshell.org/allergies.html
By googling and looking on Medline, I found there's a lot of evidence for local allergies, i.e. you can have an allergy to something even though allergy tests are negative. This could...
This motor is a universal motor, does a universal motor have inductance? I asked Sola about voltage regulators and they said with an inductive load, there are short-term current spikes that might overload the voltage regulator, causing it to go to 0 V. So they say, for a motor the voltage...
The line voltage is 120 V +/- about 5%, so it's already pretty good.
Could I get somewhere a voltage regulator that takes 120 V +/- 5% and outputs a voltage accurate to +/- 1%, either as 120 VAC or some amount that you specify?
Would the bench supply unit do that?
Laura
I get sick for several days when the turbine fails (allergies). But it's not life-threatening.
Is there a good speed sensor for a universal motor?
The utility voltage is pretty good - the engineer I talked to said it's usually between 120 and 124 V. Perhaps since the input voltage is...
Again, I'd probably do fine with a sensor for the line voltage, then something like a rheostat that would be adjusted based on the line voltage.
That's what I'm doing right now by hand. I have a voltmeter, and for a given line voltage, I know how the rheostat should be adjusted. It seems...
It's an airline respirator, it pumps clean air to a facemask that I wear. If the air speed is too slow, the mask leaks. If the air speed is too fast, the turbine gets very loud. It's an industrial safety device that I'm using for a different purpose. Usually people when they use it, would...
It would work well enough if I could tightly control the input voltage. However I don't know if there are voltage regulators that output voltage within +/- 1% that are reasonably priced. I asked about one, it costs ~$2700, which is too much. It likely has a lot of features I don't need...
Is it easier to tightly control DC voltage? It's a universal motor, it likely can run on DC just as well ...
The motor has a rheostat, so slow changes in the airflow/voltage ratio are OK. The variation I notice is from voltage changes.
It would be accurate enough to measure the airflow...
I have an air turbine, and it's critical that the motor speed be precisely regulated.
It's very voltage-sensitive, so the fluctuations in the line voltage between 120-126 A make the motor speed too variable.
How can it be regulated?
A UPS might work. But it would have to output voltage...
I wasn't claiming that it did, rather the opposite. I half-agree with the original point of view. Yes, I can see this view; but also, we live in a SEA of irrationality, and I prize real, honest, rational thought. Weird conspiracy theories, alien abductions, bizarre "medical" interventions are...
There are lots of people around who are somewhat schizophrenic but not in hospitals and functioning in the world more or less. Like having delusions about the CIA having broken into your apartment; airplanes are watching you; hallucinations, scrambled thinking and talk.
Like someone I knew a...
I saw papers online about the conjectured decay of the cosmological constant, i.e. tending to zero. If it can decay, it could grow also, I guess.
Sure, the Big Rip would involve new physics. But so do other theories, including inflation.
Laura
I put the following review of Penrose's new book Cycles of Time on Amazon as "Light Pebble".
Penrose puts forth an old idea, that the end of our universe is the start of a new one, in a beautiful new way. That is, eventually the universe will lose track of the scale of space and time. Then...
It has? On a quick web-search, I found something http://www.universetoday.com/36929/big-rip/" the likelihood of the Big Rip ever taking place is substantially diminished because evidence indicates dark energy isn't growing in strength.
This doesn't sound very definitive though, and I didn't...
If the cosmological constant were increasing in time, there could be a "Big Rip" where eventually all matter is torn apart, and perhaps the Higgs mechanism that creates rest mass would be destroyed.
I guess that wouldn't de Sitter space, it would have some other geometry.
Laura
Penrose says in “Cycles of Time” that rest mass isn't exactly a Casimir operator of the de Sitter group, so a very slow decay of rest mass isn't out of the question in our universe.
If rest mass is strictly conserved, should it be a Casimir operator of the de Sitter group?
Decay of rest...
Our universe apparently has a positive cosmological constant so it will look more and more like de Sitter spacetime, expanding at at exponentially increasing rate.
So eventually it seems that subatomic spacetime would be affected by this. Eventually even something a Planck distance away would...
If the universe were expanding very, very rapidly, would rest mass disappear?
I've been reading "Cycles of Time" by Roger Penrose, which is about his "conformal cyclic cosmology" theory. The gist of it is that in the VERY VERY distant future, like a googol of years from now, when all the...
I used to know somebody who told me he had schizophrenia as a child. I don't remember what his symptoms were.
I asked him what his parents were like, and he said dismissively that they were "nonentities".
I was abused horribly as a child, and I thought that was strange and alienating that...
I think leaving a large ship there as a memorial, with a museum built into it and all sorts of pictures of the disaster and tsunami devastation, would be rather beautiful.
Like this one: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01852/ships-620_1852083i.jpg
It needs to be fixed up a...
Geologists actually didn't expect that fault to have such a big earthquake. http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/71281/title/Japan_quake_location_a_surprise People were not prepared at all for the giant tsunami that resulted. A similarly huge tsunami happened in 869 and in 2001 researchers...
The Japanese earthquake wasn't just "rather strong", it was gigantic! Magnitude 9.
For comparison the "Big One" that's expected to strike Los Angeles soon would be about a magnitude 8. That's 1/32 as much energy as this earthquake! The San Andreas fault near Los Angeles is capable of about...
The book by Jeffrey Kargel "Mars A warmer wetter planet" has a long description of what's expected for Earth in the future, climate and evolution of life. And for Mars.
I doubt the part about what will happen to life in the future is very accurate because it's based on the past adaptations to...
Here's a http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0528.1987.tb03132.x/abstract" [Broken] If somebody can access the online content and tell us more about what's in the case report, please do.
And one unfortunate woman had teeth coming out of...
So a string theory with gravity in anti de Sitter space apparently resolves the black hole information paradox via the adS/CFT correspondence.
I'm wondering: is the anti de Sitter space somehow necessary to string theory with gravity? Or is it just because there's this adS/CFT correspondence...
I apparently can't edit that posting any more. But the link to the pdf with the other person's proof has changed, to http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/download/file.php?id=27177" [Broken]
Laura
Assign to each side b of a convex polygon P the maximum area of a triangle that has b as a side and is contained in P. Show that the sum of the areas assigned to the sides of P is at least twice the area of P.
This was a 2006 Math olympiad question. A beautiful proof is at...
Huh. I mentioned this idea in a job interview with Mattel or someplace like that, in the 80's. The interviewer just grimaced - apparently thought it was a nerdy idea. :frown: I got no job offer.
Shows that local stupidity doesn't imply global dryness :tongue:
I think it would be a great...
There are "quasicrystals" with fivefold symmetry in the crystal diffraction pattern. They're aperiodic in a systematic way, similar to Penrose tiles, which tile the plane in a five-ish way. The pattern doesn't have translational symmetry, but you can get the pattern to correspond as closely as...
I don't think that's true. Q_p[i] is a quadratic extension of the p-adics, and it has Cauchy-Riemann equations, but it doesn't have the nice theorems like Cauchy integral theorem, residue theorem, maximum modulus.
But \Omega_p, which is algebraically closed and contains the p-adics Q_p, does...
I looked into it some more -
Derivatives are used in the p-adics, although "strictly differentiable" is
a more useful concept than "differentiable". Strictly differentiable at a
point p means that as x and y approach p, then f(x)-f(y)/(x-y) approaches
f'(p), the derivative of f at p. If...
The p-adic numbers Qp don't have a square root of -1, if p=3 mod 4.
So would differentiable functions from Qp[i] -> Qp[i] satisfy the
Cauchy-Riemann equations? I don't know why not.
To what extent would analysis in Qp[i] have the familiar complex analysis
theorems? You couldn't prove that...
The Cauchy-Riemann equations are a consequence of the particular polynomial x^2+1=0 that i satisfies over R. If you were extending analysis in a field F to some other field G of finite index over F, where G=F[a] and a satisfies some other polynomial over F, then you'd have a different set of...
being real analytic does not give the strong results that being complex analytic does. So I'm wondering if that's related to the algebraic completeness of complex no's.
Complex analysis has a lot of nice theorems that real analysis doesn't have: if you can take the complex derivative once, you can take it \infty many times. Maximum modulus theorem; inside the radius of convergence the Taylor series of a function converges to the function.
So what I wonder is...