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 movements of objects. A simple analysis of phenomenology of these disturbances shows that they might have a [...]

Quarks, leptons and generations!

I’ve finally just now figured out how to combine the quark / lepton weak hypercharge and weak isospin quantum numbers with the generation numbers. This should allow the Koide mass formula to be extended to the quarks!
The weak hypercharge and weak isospin quantum numbers for the elementary fermions are:
, with the quantum numbers for the [...]

Test post. Ignore.

Is this coming from the future???

PI Lecture on Density Matrices

Kea kindly pointed out to me that the Perimeter Institute just put on the web a lecture on density matrices and the foundations of quantum mechanics. The lecturer is Christopher Fuchs, and the duration is an hour and a quarter. As a promoter of density matrix theory, I thought I would discuss it here.
The lecture [...]

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.

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 [...]

Long Lived Snuark Bound States

In the previous post we showed how we can take the left to right snuark mass interaction, and combine it with the right to left interaction, to make a left to right to left interaction, which we will somewhat abusively call a “LRL propagator”. The reason for calling it a propagator is because we are [...]

Precolor and Primitive Idempotents

An idempotent is an element of an algebra that is unchanged when it is squared, . In an algebra, the “primitive” idempotents are those that cannot be written as sums of nonzero idempotents. In a sense, these are like primes. In the density matrix formulation of quantum mechanics, the particle states are primitive idempotents.

Texas Folklore Society gets a new Fellow

My aunt, Frances Vick was honored by the Texas Folklore Society this past week in San Antonio, largely for publishing many Texas folklore books over the years.

Ticks

When I was a boy, an inevitable consequence of tramping around in the East Texas pasture and woods was that one would end up with ticks. Ticks are small blood sucking insects that tend to pick out the most sensitive parts of ones body, stick a barbed thingy in and glue themselves on for a [...]