Mass Ends Year on High

WordPress’s management software reports that this blog has steadily increased its readership this year, with each month better than the previous:

Happy New Year to the readers.
 My resolution is to be more professional about physics in 2008. And hopefully to retire.

The Painleve Equations of Motion

In the general theory of relativity, the orbits are given by geodesics. A geodesic is a path that extremizes the path length. The path length is defined as the integral of over the path, where is the metric. For the case of Painleve coordinates on the Schwarzschild metric, is given by:
. Let’s [...]

Painleve Coordinates

In the previous post, we took a tour through the literature and found that when general relativity is translated into the elegant mathematical language of the geometric algebra, the natural coordinates for a black hole turn out to be Painleve or Gullstrand-Painleve coordinates instead of the more common Schwarzschild coordinates. Our next post will derive [...]

General Relativity, Painleve and QFT

The first problem in writing gravitation as a particle interaction is the fact that QFT works best on flat space, while general relativity is almost always written in arbitrary coordinates. One of the underlying principles of general relativity is that coordinates shouldn’t matter (background independence), so this problem appears to be a deep one. The [...]

Kepler’s Symmetries and Newton’s DE

This is the first of a series of posts about gravity, and the java applet I wrote that simulates Newtonian and relativistic orbits around a (non rotating) black hole. We begin by discussing the relationship between Kepler’s observations and Newton’s universal law of gravitation.
Usually when you write a scientific applet, most of the effort is [...]

Regge Trajectories and Koide’s formula

As many of you know, I’m a proponent of the density operator formalism of quantum mechanics as opposed to the usual state vector / spinor formalism. The basic idea with density operator formalism is that quantum states should be represented by a density operator, or density matrix, rather than a state vector. This sort of [...]

Mass and the New Physics

The previous few posts showed how a density matrix formalism gives a variety of quantum mechanics that naturally supports an interpretation of quantum states as symmetry operators on the quantum states. The method for doing this required ignoring the gauge bosons in bound states. For example, beginning with a complicated Feynman diagram for a bound [...]