Doctor Who?
At my age the years just flow by and sometimes very little seems to happen, but today I must fear that even Pioneer One may blacklist me, because I am now officially fudded. Actually, the graduation isn't until December 21, but whatever. Given how much paperwork seems to occur behind the brief email exchanges that I get, I've given up trying to interpret the technical meanings of terms like conferment or transcript. Meanwhile, the number of interesting links around here continues to grow and Garrett Lisi's paper has mysteriously reappeared on the hep-th arxiv. Wonders never cease.
posted by Kea | 10:54 AM
11 Comments:
Nice, back on hep-th. Maybe it was all the trackbacks. ;)
Who knows?
Hey, Garrett has friends inside the empire.
AND congratulations!
So do you, Carl!
Kea, by "friends inside the empire", do you mean a certain freshly minted PhD in a small but not unimportant English speaking country below the equator?
I'm still working on a foundation for the Garrett Lisi E8 model baed on preons. It's going rather well. What he calls "symmetry breaking" I call assuming the different Clifford algebra blades have different characteristic energies.
For my calculations, I've used energy as the 0-blade, or scalar part of the algebra. That's where my version of the Koide formula comes from.
In electromagnetism, the electric field is represented by a vector, which is a 1-blade. Magnetism is represented by a bivector, or psuedo-vector, which is a 2-blade.
The characteristic minimum energy of the electric field is the mass of the electron. This is larger than the minimum mass of pure energy which is apparently zero, and smaller than the minimum mass for a magnetic monopole.
To get the E8 symmetry, you manipulate the various blades as if they had a hierarchical scale of energies (so that the highest blade gets cancelled first), but you ignore the hierarchical scale.
In the electromagnetic analogy, this amounts to pretending that the mass of the electron is the same as that of the magnetic monopole.
Excellent! And no, I didn't mean me.
Congratulations! And lots of success with your research.
Congratulations! I hope to congratulate you in person sometime. You deserve all the rewards of a happy career in science.
For carl and others: You might be interested in "Crisis in Cosmology," a conference in Port Angeles, WA Sep 7-11, 2008. Right in the neighbourhood! www.cosmology.info
Louise, I will contribute a paper and see if they will have me. It will be on the subject of flat space coordinates for spacetime, graviton flux, and Painleve coordinates.
"At my age the years just flow by and sometimes very little seems to happen, but today I must fear that even Pioneer One may blacklist me, because I am now officially fudded. Actually, the graduation isn't until December 21, but whatever...."
Congratulations, Dr Kea.
PS- Remember that 21 December is the Winter Solstice, the ideal day for the ritual of receiving a doctorate of philosophy. Hope you will get some nice pics modelling the graduation gown!
I join Louise both in congratulating and in hoping I will be able to do it in person one day. Just before xmas, sweet!
Cheers,
T.
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