What questions are you interested on?

[arivero]

In order to understand the reach of the forum, we could list here what topics are we interested about, what specific research lines (yes, specific) we keep looking at, and generically what questions of physics we want to pursue. And to complement it, a poll asking you to tell how many time of your life are you giving to it. Is it a priority, or do you consider it is better "to have a life", whatever it could be?

 

[g33kski11z]

I have no "physics" training except for what I have read. I've taken a few astronomy classes in college, but I'm not a physics major so I cannot take the GR courses. I "self study" cosmology mostly.

.. but to answer your question, I enjoy reading {and then researching to understand what I just read} several sub-forums here. But honestly, some of the stuff that people talk about here makes my head hurt. :)

 

[mormonator_rm]

I am not "employed" in a BSM physics theory field, but I do some work as a physicist and outreach coordinator/liaison for an experimental collaboration that studies UHECR phenomenon... maybe that could be counted as BSM in an experimentalistic sense?

I do dabble in some of my BSM interests in my spare time; generally trying to re-invent Rishon Theory into a modified form that is more compatible with certain SM physics processes. My spare time is a bit large, as I technically only work 26 hours a week as a library director and only 3 to 6 a week with MARIACHI-CPS, so I would say I do get in a good 15 to 20 hours in on the modified Rishon stuff alone, among other hobbies...

Before all this I worked exclusively in meson spectroscopy, with a tight focus on scalar mesons and the scalar glueball. In fact, I am in the lecture circuit locally, speaking about the history and development of the quark model at local high schools, AAPT meetings, public libraries, and an occassional talk at a local university.

The library occupies the bulk of my work time now, but I may soon be starting as an adjunct instructor of physics at the NAWCC's School of Horology a couple mornings a week to teach Special Relativity and applications in Atomic Clocks and GPS-mediated timing. That would add another 8 hours a week to my workload, which would be ideal. I wouldn't be too busy yet (not quite a full time job between all three employment places), but not bored, either.

 

[Coin]

I'm myself a software programmer with something of a math background and I've been reading a bunch of stuff about physics over the last couple of years in hopes of understanding the LHC results once they come out. The things that interest me most in physics are quantum computing, and loop quantum gravity. I in general tend to have a bias toward anything that I can in some loose way link back to my home territory of computer science.

Other than that I have basically no idea what I'm doing

 

[Bob3141592]

I'm a software engineer. Hoped for a degree in physics but couldn't understand my quantum course and ended up with a BS in Math from Stevens Tech in '76. They didn't tell me nobody understands QM. Anyway, I just want to know how things work. No matter what it is or at whatever level, I just want to know how it works. usually it's more than I'm up for, but I try.

 

[Chronos]

2-3 hours everyday, mostly arxiv

 

[Fra]

I have a formal standard physics university background in physics, math and some comp sci but with focus on physics. During the end up my undergraduate period I started to evaluate what to do next, I originally wanted to keep researching my intersts and answer my questions. But I soon realized that the downsides of mixing business/politics and pleasure was not acceptable. Part of this decisions was influenced by my supervisor who tried to advovate that future of physics as string theory and that if I don't like string theory then perhaps I should better do something else besides physics.

Since then I spent some time trying to understand biological life, something that I neglected previously. I studied some biochemistry, molecular biology and I complemented that with trying to model yeast cells in beer fermentations. It was very enlightning, and what I learned most from was not the biology itself, it was the process of trying to model something, and I was stuck by the similarity between this and the life of the cell itself.

Then inspired by the foundations of life itself, I reconnected to the ideas of foundations of physics, on which I recently picked up the thread. My interest in quite broad. I have interest in the scientific method itself, and the methodology of research, and how that relates to self-organisation in nature, ranging from the laws of physics to higher life as we know it. I don't care much about classifying my interests. I focus where I think I can learn the most.

Currently my interest in physics is in the foundations. I am not just interested in theories. I am interested in the life of the theories and the context where the theories live. From that angle I'm trying to probe and understand QM and Gravity.

I'm doing my own modelling in parallell to trying to read up on some of the current ideas of others. Penrose, rovelli and others. It looks like what I want is some kind of synthesis of several ideas.

This is my hobby and hence progress is slow.

My most recent key focus is to try to understand the emergence of superposition as a result of self organisation in the observers microstructure. I think an observers that can "handle superposition" is more "fit" than a classical observer. But I want to prove it, and understand what it's implications are. It's become clear that one way or the other this is related to the emergence of intertia of structural changes. This is why I got very curious on Penrose's gravitational induces state collapse. I'm starting to think tht Penrose outline is not they way I want to see it, but I still he is at least loosely onto something. But I think the HUP gravitational-self-energy stuff is too simplistic, but it serves the purposes of illustrating an idea.

/Fredrik