My simple physics ideas have become hot despite their heretical source. These last few days I’ve discovered that I’d missed three more citations of my stuff in the paper hard copy published peer-reviewed physics literature ( “so-there” to snobs who say that “anything” can be published on arXiv). This gives me a total of five [...]
Entries from June 2007
June 25, 2007
Just One Heresy is Never Enough.
Physics is an unusual science. In most of the rest of science, one is exposed to explanations that make intuitive sense to the initiate. In contrast, understanding the foundations of physics requires a certain suspension of disbelief. Most of the standard heresies of physics come, one way or another, from refusing to suspend disbelief.
June 24, 2007
AGASA, Yakutsk and UHECR anomalies.
The name of this blog is “Mass”, but I really haven’t made many posts on the subject of physics. The reason is that I do not yet understand mass, and don’t have a great desire to explain pieces of things that I think I know but that are not well motivated to the reader. But [...]
June 23, 2007
Book Review: The Search for Eldorado, John Hemming
I’ve wanted to get back to the topic of the history of San Antonio, but the next step was the conquistadors. I put off writing anything up because I had an unread book on my shelf, The Search for Eldorado”, by John Hemming. This originally came out in 1978, but I have the $21.95 paperback [...]
June 21, 2007
Book review: 五輪書, “The Book of Five Rings”, Miyamoto Musashi
Miyamoto Musashi, or Shinmen Musashi no Kami Fujiwara no Genshin was a famous swordsman in Japan in the 1600s, the Edo or Tokugawa era. He was born in 1584 when the samurai were the elite of society. At age 13 he killed his first man, the renowned samurai Arima Kihei, a practioner of Shinto Ryu.
June 13, 2007
Why does DNA only use 4 nucleotides?
A few days ago Kea wrote post #66 in her long and fascinating series of M-theory posts. Seems like she’s giving away the text to a book here. She wrote:
I was quite intrigued when a mathematical biologist at a conference told me recently that no one really knew why DNA had four bases rather than [...]
June 3, 2007
Spontaneous and Stimulated Emission of Gravitons
Recently, Stefan on Backreaction put together a beautiful and informative post on some experiments involving Schroedinger’s equation for neutrons in a situation where the gravitational field could be modeled as in Newton’s equations, that is, as mgz where z is height, and g is the acceleration of gravity at earth’s surface.
June 1, 2007
A reply to Motl’s post on Variable Speed of Light (VSL) theories.
Motl wrote a blog post calling the idea of a variable speed of light stupid.
Any flat space gravity theory must involve a variable speed of light. While
the Cambridge geometry group’s Gauge Gravity is not normally described as
a VSL theory, I’ve nevertheless written a defense of the idea of VSL and
put it on my gauge gravity [...]
