Monthly Archives: February 2008
Book Review: West With the Night, Beryl Markham
West With the Night is the autobiography of Beryl Markham, a pioneering aviator of pre WW2 Africa. This remarkable autobiography dates to 1942 and is so beautifully written that if you know someone who loves flying you should pick them … Continue reading
Filed under book review, History
Berry ( or Pancharatnam-Berry or quantum ) phase.
Classically, if a vector is parallel transported around a closed circuit on a curved space, it returns with its orientation altered. A drawing modified from the one at the a review of Berry’s Geometric Phase on the web page of … Continue reading
Filed under physics
Koide formulas and Qubit / Qutrit MUBs
Recently we’ve been discussing Mutually Unbiased Bases or MUBs on this blog. This has not been for any particular interest in pure mathematics, but instead in their application to a preon theory of the elementary particles, and the E8 quantum … Continue reading
Filed under physics
Jay Yablon on Tensors and Symmetry
My approach to elementary particles is to try to build them up from a Clifford algebra assumed to have something to do with spacetime. This is inherently geometric, but it is not the only way to do geometry. A similarity … Continue reading
MUBs, Preons, and Lisi’s E8 model
If a Hilbert space is d-dimensional, we expect that the number of elementary particles we can describe with it is d. For example, a Pauli spinor is 2-dimensional and electrons come in two states, spin-up and spin-down. The Dirac spinors … Continue reading
Filed under physics
Love = Negative Energy
Perhaps due to a lack of details regarding his or their martyrdom, the Catholic Church pulled Saint Valentine from its liturgical veneration in 1969. Since that time, the holiday has expanded world-wide to areas that have never heard of early … Continue reading
MUBs and Symmetry Breaking
One can obtain a Hilbert space from a wide variety of physical situations. Suppose we are to use a Hilbert space to model elementary particles, for instance. One the one hand, we’d like to have our model cover as many … Continue reading
Qutrit Mutually Unbiased Bases (MUBs)
Mutually Unbiased Bases are sets of bases for a Hilbert space that are “unbiased:” the transition probabilities between any two states from different bases are equal. For a Hilbert space of dimension 3 (i.e. qutrits), the transition probability is 1/3. … Continue reading
The Generalized Pauli Group
I’ve been watching Perimeter Institute lectures again, and one that dips into the stuff I’m working came up. In addition to the lecture, there is an acrobat file that contains the slides and photos of the blackboard. This is 124 … Continue reading
Filed under physics
Contemporaneity and Density Matrices
I’m continuing to watch the Perimeter Institute lectures and watching the latest one, Dynamic Time: The “Missing Link” in the Search for a Unified Theory? by Avshalom Elitzur, has influenced me to type up my version of the ontology of … Continue reading
Filed under Bohmian Mechanics, physics
Fundamental Bohmian Density Matrices
I’ve been listening to Perimeter Institute lectures and came upon one by Roderich Tumulka that was interesting enough that I looked up his papers. They are voluminous. One that applies more or less directly to the area I play in … Continue reading
Filed under Bohmian Mechanics, physics
