Monthly Archives: April 2008
Carl’s new blog, “Ethanol Fuel”
During the past 24 hours, I heard, I swear!, 6 commentators blame biofuels for one of the world’s pains or another. What bothers me about this is that the complaints are, by and large, misguided in one way or another. … Continue reading
Filed under engineering
RIOFRIO Crushes CMB Anomalies!
Louise Riofrio recently pointed out that the inflation is in a bit of trouble due to the fact that it predicts a different curve than the one seen for the angular correlation of anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). … Continue reading
David Hestenes’ electron model
John R Ramsden, as a comment on Motl’s blog, points us to an article by David Hestenes, Reading the Electron Clock, 0802.3227. There are two good reasons for looking at this paper, and the experiment that inspired it. First, we … Continue reading
Filed under physics
Lorentz Violation and Feynman’s Checkerboard Model
Lubos Motl brings to our attention a paper by Ted Jacobson and Aron C. Wall on black hole theremodynamics and Lorentz invariance, hep-ph/0804.2720 and claims that theories that violate Lorentz invariance are ruled out because they will also violate the … Continue reading
What is Intrinsic Quantum Spin?
In a sci.physics.foundations post, Jay Yablon has brought to light an obscure article by Hans C. Ohanian on the nature of the intrinsic spin of quantum objects and kindly loaded it onto the web: What is Spin? Am J. Phys. … Continue reading
Filed under physics
Icosahedral Symmetry as a Decorative Knot
The decorative knots to be discussed here are those which are tied with one or more cords that may be repeated through several plies. These sorts of knots can be represented by self-intersecting loops on the plane, set up so … Continue reading
Filed under knots
The Quantum Zeno Paradox or Effect
Kea recently brought up the subject of Zeno of Elea and his now long lost book of 40 paradoxes dealing with the continuum. His nominal 2500th birthday should be celebrated relatively soon. Let me paraphrase an example paradox is the … Continue reading
A new way to tie an old knot
The tying diagram Ashley gives for ABOK #2217 has a 4-fold axis of symmetry: Tying a knot according to a diagram like this is quite time consuming. One must redraw the diagram by photocopying to the size needed. And in … Continue reading
Filed under knots
Ashley knots; ABOK #2217 covering knot
For those of you who aren’t familiar with blue collar knots, “ABOK” means “The Ashley Book of Knots,” an ecyclopedic book on knots written in 1944 that has since become the reference for knot identification. I think it was my … Continue reading
Filed under knots
Quantum Bound States: the Hydrogen Atom
In quantum mechanics, bound states can be put together by choosing a potential energy and solving the a wave equation. The first non toy example that students learn is the hydrogen atom (or any other single electron atom) studied using … Continue reading
Filed under physics
Physical Laws and Heretical Theories
The equations of physics are derived from general theories. The odd situation of the moment is that the equations are quite well supported by experiment. One would logically conclude that the theories are as well supported, but this is not … Continue reading
Physics Explains Poltergeist Phenomenon
Today on arXiv, a paper appeared, modestly titled Some conjectures about the mechanism of poltergeist phenomenon, /abs/0801.0382: Poltergeist accounts concern at least four kinds of strange spontaneous manifestations, such as burning of materials, failures of electric equipments, rapping noises and … Continue reading
Filed under Uncategorized
