<Moderator's note: twitter link removed: too much advertising and inappropriate source.>
I didn't know that Twitter links were categorically forbidden, even top flight newspapers use them now and a lot of worthwhile discussion among experts in the field also occurs by Twitter before it ends up being published if it is published at all. Surely there must be some appropriate way to note where other people are discussing an idea. The link isn't being used as a source of authority in this case, it is being used as a link to a discussion elsewhere, in much the same way that someone might link to another Physics Forum thread or a link to leaked information about an imminent announcement.
A skeptical lot. I don't think they give sufficient credit to the fact that Koide's rule was proposed in 1981 when it was a poor fit to the tau mass which has consistently improved for 37 years of increased precision in measurement (even from 2012 to 2018), or to the fact that the number of significant digits of match is high and consistent to MOE with data when it wasn't built to match existing data.
But, credit to them for getting to a lot of the key related articles quickly (Descarte's circle and quark mass relations) and hitting on some key points quickly.
-1 for the guy saying that 0.999999... is not equal to 1.
Is there merit to the analytic expression they reference? How accurate is it? How old is it?
Also, the other bit of numerology with the analytical expressions of the lepton masses in terms of the fine structure constant and pi was interesting.
<Moderator's note: twitter link removed: too much advertising and inappropriate source.>
If I knew Twitter links were forbidden across the board, I would have included a more direct sourcing by clicking through to the references therein and the references within the referenced material. It is a bit irksome not to know that in advance and have to recreate a reference. I would also urge the Mods to reconsider a category ban on Twitter links as a matter of moderation policy, and to make it more clear if it is to be a policy. Mostly I was simply trying to save myself the tedium of trying to type it a formula accurately using LaTeX.
The interesting series of formulas are for the ratio of the muon mass to the electron mass, of the tau mass to the muon mass, and of the tau mass to the electron mass which are compared using 1998 CODATA and PDG sources.
There are three expressions shared by the three formulas:
A = 1-4pi(alpha^2)
B = 1 + (alpha/2)
C = 1 + 2pi*(alpha/2) = 1+ pi*alpha
The muon mass/electron mass formula is (1/(2*pi*alpha
2))
2/3*(C/B)
It purports to have a difference of 1 in the 7th significant digit from the PDG value.
The tau mass/muon mass formula is (1/2*alpha)
2/3*(B/A)
It purports to match a 5 significant digit PDG value.
The tau mass/electron mass formula is (1/4pi*alpha
3)
2/3*(C/A)
It purports to have a difference of 1 in the 5th significant digit from the PDG value.
For what it is worth, I haven't confirmed the calculations or the referenced CODATA and PDG constants.
PDG for the tau mass is 1776.82 +/ 0.12 MeV
Koide's prediction for the tau mass is 1776.968921 +/- 0.000158 MeV
This formula predicts a tau mass of 1776.896635 MeV, which is about 0.07 MeV less than the Koide prediction, although there might be some rounding error issues and I don't have a MOE for the formula number. I used the five significant digit estimate of the tau mass to electron mass ratio in the illustration, so a difference in the sixth significant digit could be simply rounding error.
What to make of Dirac's 1937 Conjecture?
Dirac's conjecture on the electron radius v. size of the universe being roughly the same as the fine structure constant v. Newton's constant is also intriguing.
<Moderator's note: twitter link removed: too much advertising and inappropriate source.>
The conjecture called the Dirac Large Numbers Hypothesis is discussed at Wikipedia here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_large_numbers_hypothesis
An analysis that explores the same thing with a bit more clear language is here:
http://www.jgiesen.de/astro/stars/diracnumber.htm
A 2017 preprint with eight citations discusses it here:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.07563.pdf
A 2013 paper revised in 2015 analyzes it here:
http://pragtec.com/physique/download/Large_Numbers_Hypothesis_of_Dirac_de.php
A 2003 paper touches on it at https://www.jstor.org/stable/41134170?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
I didn't know that twitter links were categorically forbidden and would purge the ads if I knew how. It seemed a convenient way to link to an academically explored idea. Also, without the link the latest insights of very notable commentator, and mathematical physicist Baez are harder to present. If the latest commentary of leading scientists on scientific issues isn't acceptable to reference, it should be. Is it permissible to cut and paste a post from a Twitter thread by someone like Baez?
Baez notes that even though this coincidence holds at the moment, that we have enough data to know that the magnitude of Newton's constant has not changed that dramatically over the history of the universe.
Neutrino Mass and Koide?
By the way - do you have links to any of the Koide-ish neutrino mass papers? The mass measurements are quite a bit more constrained that they were then (with normal hierarchy strongly favored, some sense of the CP violating phase, pretty accurate relative mass differences and a fairly tight sum of three neutrino masses cap) so it would be interesting to compare. Plugging in all of those constraints you get:
Mv1 0-7.6 meV
Mv2 8.42-16.1 meV
Mv3 56.92-66.2 meV
The CP violating phase seems to be centered around -pi.
Which is more information than it seems because most of the Mv2 an Mv3 mass ranges are perfectly correlated with the Mv1 mass range.
One ought to be able to look at the Koide-ish neutrino mass papers (which flip a +/- sign IIRC) and numerically run through the allowed range for Mv1 to see what the best fit is and use that to make a prediction for all three absolute neutrino masses.
Never mind, found it:
http://brannenworks.com/MASSES.pdf It puts a negative sign in front of the square root of Mv1 in the denominator and comes up with:
m1 = 0.000383462480(38) eV
m2 = 0.00891348724(79) eV
m3 = 0.0507118044(45) eV (I think this maybe an error in the original as it doesn't seem to be consistent with the Mv3 squared - Mv2 squared value predicted, I think it should be 0.05962528 . . .).
m
22 − m
12 = 7.930321129(141) × 10
−5 eV
2 ------ PDG Value 7.53±0.18 (a 2.22 sigma difference - i.e. a modest tension)
m
32 − m
2 2= 2.49223685(44) × 10
−3 eV
2 ------ PDG Value 2.51±0.05 (less than 1 sigma different)
There is no value of Mv1 which can make the Koide formula without a sign flip work. I tried to reproduce his calculation and came up with Mv1 of 0.31 meV using current PDG numbers for the M1-M2 and M2-M3 mass gaps, which isn't far off from Brannen's estimate.