occasional meanderings in physics' brave new world

Name:
Location: New Zealand

Marni D. Sheppeard

## Friday, March 07, 2008

### Quote of the Week

From Dynamics of Cats, regarding the WMAP release: If you're a cosmologist, you need to rewrite your proposal. Now.

Aside: according to Mottle (oh, wait, it's in the abstract) the 5 year data strongly suggests 3 (or 4) neutrino species, of mass sum $\leq 0.61 eV$, in agreement with Carl Brannen's prediction of $\Sigma m = 0.0600(40) eV$.

Update: Louise Riofrio has an informative post on the results.

L. Riofrio said...

Thank you for the supportive comments in Dynamics of Cats. I think he is discreetly supporting us too.

March 07, 2008 6:23 PM
Matti Pitkanen said...

A comment about neutrino mass sum. In TGD Universe, and as various anomalies suggest also in the real universe, the neutrino mass scales can vary coming as multiples of sqrt(2).

p-Adic mass calculations predict the neutrino masses when one uses the known mixing pattern as input. For p=about 2^k, k=169, the masses are .22 eV, .40 eV, and .87 eV. This gives mass sum 1.47 eV breaking the bound.

For k=173 (prime), the masses are scaled down by a factor of 1/4 and mass sum is about .37 eV and satisfies the upper bound.

What is interesting is that electron neutrino has mass .055 eV. This happens to correspond to the energy scale assignable the critical neuron membrane potential at which nerve pulse is initiated. Compton wavelength is about 20 micrometers and size of large neuron. Pure accident? Perhaps.

In any case, scaled possibly dark variants of weak and color interactions for which weak bosons are effectively massless and quarks and gluons unconfined below some biologically relevant length scale are important in TGD based quantum biology, and I have considered the possibility that neutrinos could relate to hearing.

An interesting question is
how the variability of p-adic length scale of neutrino affects the estimate for the number of neutrino families.

March 07, 2008 9:45 PM