On the Third Road
Sometimes when children squabble, the few who are uninterested in the argument will move quietly away to enjoy a happier game. They will be undisturbed by the others, fighting as they are over a great prize. And so the Third Road, after a long lonely stretch through the hills, comes upon a crossroad.
The lone travellers find others on the road, all with stories to tell. I want to thank Matti Pitkanen, Louise Riofrio, Carl Brannen, Michael Rios, Mahndisa Rigmaiden and our other friends (like Tommaso), for all the fun we've had, and will keep on having, even if the scenery changes.
And it will change.
The lone travellers find others on the road, all with stories to tell. I want to thank Matti Pitkanen, Louise Riofrio, Carl Brannen, Michael Rios, Mahndisa Rigmaiden and our other friends (like Tommaso), for all the fun we've had, and will keep on having, even if the scenery changes.
And it will change.
posted by Kea | 9:22 AM
7 Comments:
03 14 07
Kea:
Thanks for the shout out! I find your blog to be a breath of fresh air away from the other bs that mires physics blogs. As I have said before, it is because they focus on ego before science. My ego is secondary to scientific research I perform because I think we are vessels of information that can transmit and receive, not to mention that we have souls.
I have come to realize that it isn't about WHO but HOW and WHY! Knowledge is eternal; but our interpretations of it are fleeting and should improve with time.
I have little interest in fighting with anyone about physics or math. My CONCERN is that what work is done is CONSISTENT and JUSTIFIABLE. I thank you for the opportunity to post some thoughts here, but also all the the links you supply to such tasty tidbits as Batanins operads or Satyan Devadoss and the polytope family heheheheheheh I haven't forgotten and I won't. Please stick around:)
Knowledge is eternal; but our interpretations of it are fleeting and should improve with time.
Thanks for the great words, Mahndisa. In thinking about Time, they remind me of one of my best inspirations - the philosophy of Hegel, who said: The same evolution of thought which is exhibited in the history of philosophy is presented in the System of Philosophy itself. Here, instead of surveying the process, as we do in history, from the outside, we see the movement of thought clearly defined in its native medium. The thought, which is genuine and self-supporting, must be intrinsically concrete; it must be an Idea; and when it is viewed in the whole of its universality, it is the Idea, or the Absolute.
When we take two objects that are weakly bound, the mass of the bound state is pretty close to the sum of the two masses. But Koide's formula uses square roots of mass. What gives?
Okay, here's a way of putting these things together. Instead of thinking of mass as a scalar, let's think of it as the squared length of a vector. When two objects are loosely bound, the vectors that represent them are perpendicular, and so their squared length is the sum of their squared lengths.
But when they are very closely coupled, their vectors can interfere, and in computing mass we must be careful to account for the cancellation.
In either case, the fundamental object is a thing with the units of square root of mass. The apparent additivity for mass in the loosely bound case is just a consequnce of the wave functions of the two objects having little overlap.
The scenery photo on your blog is great. You really don't need to change it, if that's what you were thinking about!
Kea, did I ever tell you that selfAdjoint originally introduced me to Witten's twistor string paper?
kneemo, yes I knew that. I think selfAdjoint mentioned it. It is quite upsetting that selfAdjoint has disappeared.
SelfAdjoint was not young, I am also worried. And I should mention that kneemo contributed the idea of treating mass as a vector. I can hardly wait till I've got time to apply this to more PDG stuff.
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