This Week’s Finds (1–50)

Take a copy of this!

• This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (1-50), 242 pages.

These are the first 50 issues of This Week’s Finds of Mathematical Physics. This series has sometimes been called the world’s first blog, though it was originally posted on a “usenet newsgroup” called sci.physics.research — a form of communication that predated the world-wide web. I began writing this series as a way to talk about papers I was reading and writing, and in the first 50 issues I stuck closely to this format. These issues focus rather tightly on quantum gravity, topological quantum field theory, knot theory, and applications of n-categories to these subjects. There are, however, digressions into elliptic curves, Lie algebras, linear logic and various other topics.

Tim Hosgood kindly typeset all 300 issues of This Week’s Finds in 2020. They will be released in six installments of 50 issues each, for a total of about 2610 pages. I have edited the issues here to make the style a bit more uniform and also to change some references to preprints, technical reports, etc. into more useful arXiv links. This accounts for some anachronisms where I discuss a paper that only appeared on the arXiv later.

The process of editing could have gone on much longer; there are undoubtedly many mistakes remaining. If you find some, please contact me and I will try to fix them.

By the way, sci.physics.research is still alive and well, and you can use it on Google. But I can’t find the first issue of This Week’s Finds there — if you can find it, I’ll be grateful. I can only get back to the sixth issue. Take a look if you’re curious about usenet newsgroups! They were low-tech compared to what we have now, but they felt futuristic at the time, and we had some good conversations.

CP Violation

Here are two more open questions about physics. I have a question of my own at the end!

Why are the laws of physics not symmetrical when we switch left and right, or future and past, or matter and antimatter? Why do the laws of nature even violate “CP symmetry”? That is: why are the laws not symmetrical under the operation where we simultaneously switch matter and antimatter and switch left and right?

Violation of P symmetry, meaning the symmetry between left and right, is strongly visible in the Standard Model: for example, all directly observed neutrinos are “left-handed”. But violation of CP symmetry is subtler: in the Standard Model it appears solely in interactions between the Higgs boson and quarks or leptons. Technically, it occurs because the numbers in the Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa matrix and Pontecorvo–Maki–Nakagawa–Sakata matrix (discussed in the previous question) are not all real numbers. Interestingly, this is only possible when there are 3 or more generations of quarks and/or leptons: with 2 or fewer generations the matrix can always be made real.

Does the strong force violate CP symmetry? In the Standard Model it would be very natural to add a CP-violating term to the equations describing the strong force, proportional to a constant called the “θ angle”. But experiments say the magnitude of the θ angle is less than 2 × 10^-10. Is this angle zero or not? Nobody knows. Why is it so small? This is called the “strong CP problem”. One possible solution, called the Peccei–Quinn mechanism, involves positing a new very light particle called the axion, which might also be a form of dark matter. But despite searches, nobody has found any axions.

• Wikipedia, CP Violation.

• Wikpedia, Strong CP Problem.

• Michael Beyer, editor, CP Violation in Particle, Nuclear, and Astrophysics, Springer, Berlin, 2008.

• I. Bigi, CP Violation — An Essential Mystery in Nature’s Grand Design.

It’s a theorem that quantum field theories are symmetrical under CPT: the combination of switching matter and antimatter, left and right, and future and past. Thus, a violation of CP implies a violation of time reversal symmetry. For more on this, see:

• R. G. Sachs, The Physics of Time Reversal, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987.

What are the electric dipole moments of the electron and the neutron?

As of 2020, experiments show the electric dipole moment of the electron is less than 1.1 × 10^-29 electron charge centimeters. According to the Standard Model it should have a very small nonzero value due to CP violation by virtual quarks, but various extensions of the Standard Model predict a larger dipole moment.

Also as of 2020, experiments show the neutron’s electric dipole is less than 1.8 × 10^-26 e·cm. The Standard Model predicts a moment of about 10^-31 e·cm, again due to CP violation by
virtual quarks, and again various other theories predict a larger moment.

Measuring these moments could give new information on physics beyond the Standard Model.

• Wikipedia, Electron Electric Dipole Moment.

• Wikipedia, Neutron Electric Dipole Moment.

• Maxim Pospelov and Adam Ritz, Electric Dipole Moments as Probes of New Physics.

Here’s my question. Do you know papers that actually calculate what the Standard Model predicts for the electric dipole moments of the electron and neutron?

Cosmic Censorship

I seem to be getting pulled into the project of updating this FAQ:

• Open questions in physics.

The more I look at it, the bigger the job gets. I started out rewriting the section on neutrinos, and now I’m doing the part on cosmic censorship. There are even bigger jobs to come. But it’s fun as long as I don’t try to do it all in one go!

Here’s the new section on cosmic censorship. If you have any questions or have other good resources to suggest, let me know.

Does Cosmic Censorship hold?  Roughly, is general relativity a deterministic theory—and when an object collapses under its own gravity, are the singularities that might develop guaranteed to be hidden behind an event horizon?

Proving a version of Cosmic Censorship is a matter of mathematical physics rather than physics per se, but doing so would increase our understanding of general relativity. There are actually at least two versions: Penrose formulated the “Strong Cosmic Censorship Conjecture” in 1986 and the “Weak Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis” in 1988. Very roughly, strong cosmic censorship asserts that under reasonable conditions general relativity is a deterministic theory, while weak cosmic censorship asserts that that any singularity produced by gravitational collapse is hidden behind an event horizon. Despite their names, strong cosmic censorship does not imply weak cosmic censorship.

In 1991, Preskill and Thorne made a bet against Hawking in which they claimed that weak cosmic censorship was false. Hawking conceded this bet in 1997 when a counterexample was found by Matthew Choptuik. This features finely-tuned infalling matter poised right on the brink of forming a black hole. It almost creates a region from which light cannot escape—but not quite. Instead, it creates a naked singularity!

Given the delicate nature of this construction, Hawking did not give up. Instead he made a new bet, which says that weak cosmic censorship holds “generically”—that is, except for very unusual conditions that require infinitely careful fine-tuning to set up. For an overview see:

• Robert Wald, Gravitational Collapse and Cosmic Censorship.

In 1999, Christodoulou proved that for spherically symmetric solutions of Einstein’s equation coupled to a massless scalar field, weak cosmic censorship holds generically. For a review of this and also Choptuik’s work, see:

• Carsten Gundlach, Critical Phenomena in Gravitational Collapse.

While spherical symmetry is a very restrictive assumption, this result is a good example of how, with plenty of work, we can make progress in rigorously settling the questions raised by general relativity.

What about strong cosmic censorship? In general relativity, for each choice of initial data—that is, each choice of the gravitational field and other fields at “time zero”—there is a region of spacetime whose properties are completely determined by this choice. The question is whether this region is always the whole universe. That is: does the present determine the whole future?

The answer is: not always! By carefully choosing the fields at time zero you can manufacture counterexamples. But Penrose, knowing this, claimed only that generically the fields at time zero determine the whole future of the universe.

In 2017, Mihalis Dafermos and Jonathan Luk showed that even this is false if you don’t demand that the fields stay smooth. But perhaps the conjecture can be saved if we require that:

• Kevin Hartnett, Mathematicians Disprove Conjecture Made to Save Black Holes.

• Oscar J.C. Dias, Harvey S. Reall and Jorge E. Santos, Strong Cosmic Censorship: Taking the Rough with the Smooth.

Solar Neutrinos

Over on the Category Theory Community Server, John van de Wetering asked me how many times a typical solar neutrino oscillates on its flight from the Sun to the Earth. I didn’t know, and I thought it would be fun to estimate this.

So let’s do it! Let’s do a rough calculation, and worry about details later. For those too lazy to even jump to the end, here are the results:

• A neutrino takes about 500 seconds to travel from the Sun to the Earth.

• Because a typical solar neutrino moving is moving close to the speed of light, time dilation affects it dramatically, and the time of travel from the Sun to the Earth experienced by the neutrino is much less: very roughly, 1/6 of a millisecond.

• There are different kinds of oscillation. If we keep track only of its slower oscillations, a typical solar neutrino oscillates roughly once for each 1250 meters of its flight through space.

• As it travels from Sun to Earth, this typical neutrino does about 120 million oscillations.

Let’s start at the beginning.

The Sun emits a lot of electron neutrinos. Most are produced from a reaction where two protons collide and one turns into a neutron, emitting a positron and an electron neutrino. The proton and neutron then stick together forming a ‘deuteron’, but let’s not worry about that.

More importantly, the energy of the neutrinos produced from these so-called pp reaction is at most 400 keV. That means 400,000 eV, where an eV or ‘electron volt’ is the energy an electron picks up as it falls through a potential of one volt. If you look at this chart:

you’ll see most solar neutrinos have a somewhat lower energy. Let’s say 300 keV.

By comparison to the rest mass of a neutrino, this is huge. Nobody knows neutrino masses very accurately—as we’ll see, people know more about differences of squares of the three neutrino masses. But a very rough estimate for the rest mass of the lightest neutrino might be 0.1 eV/c². Here like particle physicists I’m measuring mass in units of energy divided by the speed of light squared. An eV, or electron volt, is the change in energy of an electron as it undergoes a one-volt change in potential.

This mass could be way off, say by a factor of 10 or more. But it’s good enough to show this: solar neutrinos are moving very close to the speed of light!

Remember, the energy of a moving particle, divided by its ‘mass energy’, the energy due to its mass, is

Our solar neutrino, using our very rough guess about its mass, has

It has an energy 3 million times its rest energy! That gives

or

or using a Taylor series trick

or if I didn’t push the wrong button on my calculator

This is ridiculously close to the speed of light.

It’s more useful to remember that our neutrino’s energy is roughly 3 million times what it would be at rest. And relativity says that due to time dilation, the passage of time experienced by this neutrino is slowed down by the same factor!

It takes 500 seconds for light to go from the Sun to the Earth. Our neutrino will take a tiny bit longer—the difference is not worth worrying about. But because of time dilation, the travel time ‘experienced by the neutrino’ will be

This figure is very rough, due to how poorly we know the neutrino’s mass, but it’s about a 1/6 of a millisecond.

Now let’s think about how the neutrino oscillates.

To keep things simple, let’s assume our electron neutrino gets out of the Sun without anything happening to it. What happens next?

There are three flavors of neutrino—and as it shoots through space, what started as an electron neutrino will ‘oscillate’ between all three flavors, like this:

Here black means electron neutrino, blue means muon neutrino and red means tau neutrino.

You’ll notice that both high-frequency and low-frequency oscillations are going on. This is because the three flavors of neutrino are nontrivial linear combinations of three ‘mass eigenstates’, each of which has a phase that oscillates at a different rate. Two of the mass eigenstates are very close in mass, and this small mass difference causes a small energy difference which causes the slower oscillation. The third mass eigenstate is farther away from the other two, so we also get a more rapid oscillation. As you can see, this is especially noticeable in how the neutrino flickers back and forth between being a muon and a tau neutrino.

But all this is a bit complicated, so let’s just focus on the slower oscillations. How many of those oscillations happen as our friend the neutrino wings its way from Sun to Earth?

To estimate this, let’s pretend there are only the two mass eigenstates that are very close in mass, and ignore the third. The two masses and are not actually known very accurately. What we know is

The reason we know these differences in squares of mass is actually by doing measurements of neutrino oscillations: these differences actually determine the frequency of the neutrino oscillations! Let’s see why.

If something has energy quantum mechanics says its phase will oscillate over time like this:

where is Planck’s constant and the minus sign is just an unfortunate convention. But all we detect is the absolute value of this, which is just 1: that doesn’t change. So to actually see oscillations we should think about something that can have two different energies and . Then we need to think about things like

or other linear combinations of these two functions. But their difference illustrates the point nicely: we have

and the absolute value of this changes with time! It’s

and the takeaway message here is that it oscillates at a frequency depending on the energy difference,

So, if we have two kinds of neutrino, it’s the energy difference of the two mass eigenstates that determines how fast a superposition of these two will oscillate. It’s very similar to how when two piano strings are oscillating at almost but not quite the same frequency, you’ll hear ‘beats’ as they go in and out of phase—and the frequency of these beats depends on the difference of their piano strings’ frequencies.

So energy differences are what we care about. But how is energy related to mass? In units where the speed of light is 1, special relativity tells us this:

where is mass and is momentum. One of the mind-blowing moments of my early physics education was watching someone do a Taylor expansion for low momenta and getting this:

It looks more impressive if you don’t set the speed of light equal to 1:

So we see that at low momenta the energy is Einstein’s famous plus the kinetic energy famous from classical mechanics before relativity!

But all this is useless for our solar neutrino, which is ‘ultra-relativistic’: it’s moving almost at the speed of light! Now is much bigger than not smaller, in units where So we should do a different Taylor expansion, where we treat as the small perturbation:

Cute, eh? Everything is backwards from what I learned in school: we just switch and

This shows us that if we have a neutrino with some large momentum and it’s a linear combination of two different mass eigenstates with masses and it’ll be a blend of two energies:

and

So, the energy difference is

and this is what determines the rate at which the neutrino oscillates.

If we stop working in units where we get

So, the frequency of oscillations is

This frequency says how the relative phase rotates around in radians per second. But it’s more useful to think about radians per distance traveled; let’s call that Since our neutrino is moving at almost the speed of light, to get this we just divide by

And because the neutrino is ultra-relativistic, its momentum almost obeys Here could be either or they’re so close the difference doesn’t matter here. So we get

This is why people doing experiments with neutrino oscillations measure differences of squares of neutrino masses, not neutrino masses.

For our solar neutrino we’re assuming

and remember

Plugging these in we get

Now it gets annoying, and this is where I usually make mistakes. We use

and get

It’s funny how multiplying and dividing all these large and tiny numbers leaves us with something at the human scale!

But actually my computation was sloppy at one point. I warned you! I think it’s actually off by a factor of two. Wikipedia says right answer is

and this gives

So, the neutrino oscillates at a rate of about one radian every 3200 meters! And to get the wavelength of the oscillation we need to multiply by So our solar neutrino makes a complete oscillation about once every 20 kilometers!

And the distance from the Earth to the Sun is 150 million kilometers. So, our neutrino oscillates about 7.5 million times on its trip here.

You should take all this with a grain of salt since I easily could have made some mistakes. If you find errors please let me know! I leave you with a puzzle:

Puzzle. Where does the missing factor of 2 come from?

I don’t think you need to know fancy physics to solve this. I think the mistake is visible in my calculations.

Neutrino Puzzles (Part 2)

Okay, I’ve drafted an update to my list of open questions in physics.

I eliminated a bunch of questions that seem to have been answered. It’s really remarkable how accelerator experiments in the last decade or so have settled questions in particle physics without discovering any new mysterious phenomena. The really big mysteries remain.

I have not gotten around to adding the new questions about black holes raised by LIGO. I have not gotten around to updating the sections on ultra-high energy cosmic rays or gamma ray bursters, both of which sorely need it. But I have updated the section on neutrinos!

Here’s the new version. I still need some more good new general reviews of neutrino experiments and theoretical questions. Do you know some?

What’s going on with neutrinos?  Why are all the 3 flavors of neutrino—called the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino—so much lighter than their partners, the electron, muon, and tau?  Why are the 3 flavors of neutrino so different from the 3 neutrino states that have a definite mass?  Could any of the observed neutrinos be their own antiparticles?  Do there exist right-handed neutrinos—that is, neutrinos that spin counterclockwise along their axis of motion even when moving very near the speed of light?  Do there exist other kinds of neutrinos, such as “sterile” neutrinos—that is, neutrinos that don’t interact directly with other particles via the weak (or electromagnetic or strong) force?

Starting in the 1990s, our understanding of neutrinos has dramatically improved, and the puzzle of why we see about 1/3 as many electron neutrinos coming from the sun as naively expected has pretty much been answered: the three different flavors of neutrino—electron, muon and tau—turn into each other, because these flavors are not the same as the three “mass eigenstates”, which have a definite mass.  But the wide variety of neutrino experiments over the last thirty years have opened up other puzzles.

For example, we don’t know the origin of neutrinos’ masses.  Do the observed left-handed neutrinos get their mass by coupling to the Higgs and a right-handed partner, the way the other quarks and leptons do?  This would require the existence of so-far-unseen right-handed neutrinos.  Do they get their mass by coupling to themselves?  This could happen if they are “Majorana fermions“: that is, their own antiparticles.  They could also get a mass in other, even more exciting ways, like the “seesaw mechanism“. This requires them to couple to a very massive right-handed particle, and could explain their very light masses.

Even what we’ve actually observed raises puzzles.  With many experiments going on, there are often “anomalies”, but many of these go away after more careful study.  Here’s a challenge that won’t just go away with better data: the 3×3 matrix relating the 3 flavors of neutrino to the 3 neutrino mass eigenstates, called the Pontecorvo–Maki–Nakagawa–Sakata matrix, is much further from the identity matrix than the analogous matrix for quarks, called the Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa matrix.  In simple terms, this means that each of the three flavors of neutrino is a big mix of different masses.  Nobody knows why these matrices take the values they do, or why they’re so different from each other.

For details, try:

• The Neutrino Oscillation Industry.

• John Baez, Neutrinos and the Mysterious Pontevorco–Maki–Nakagawa–Sakata Matrix.

• Paul Langacker, Implications of Neutrino Mass.

• A. Baha Balantekin and Boris Kayser, On the Properties of Neutrinos.

• Salvador Centelles Chuliá, Rahul Srivastava and José W. F. Valle, Seesaw Roadmap to Neutrino Mass and Dark Matter.

The first of these has lots of links to the web pages of research groups doing experiments on neutrinos.  It’s indeed a big industry!

Neutrino Puzzles (Part 1)

Merry Xmas, Ymas, and Zmas—and a variable New Year!

For a long time I’ve been meaning to update this list of open questions on the Physics FAQ:

• Open questions in physics, Physics FAQ.

Here’s what it said about neutrinos as of 2012:

• What is the correct theory of neutrinos?  Why are they almost but not quite massless?  Do all three known neutrinos—electron, muon, and tau—all have a mass?  Could any neutrinos be Majorana spinors?  Is there a fourth kind of neutrino, such as a “sterile” neutrino?

Starting in the 1990s, our understanding of neutrinos has dramatically improved, and the puzzle of why we see about 1/3 as many electron neutrinos coming from the sun as naively expected has pretty much been answered: the different neutrinos can turn into each other via a process called “oscillation”. But, there are still lots of loose ends.

It’s held up fairly well: all of those questions are still things people wonder about. But I should add a question like this, because it’s nice and concrete, and physicists are fascinated by it:

• Is the tau neutrino heavier than the mu and electron neutrinos, or lighter?

This is a bit sloppy because the neutrinos of definite mass are linear combinations of the neutrinos of definite flavor (the electron, mu and tau neutrinos). The neutrinos of definite mass are called mass eigenstates and the neutrinos of definite flavor are called flavor eigenstates. This picture by Xavier Sarazin makes the two competing scenarios clearer:

In the normal hierarchy the mass eigenstate that’s mainly made of tau neutrino is the heaviest. In the inverted hierarchy it’s the lightest.

We don’t know which of these scenarios is correct. The problem is that we can’t easily measure neutrino masses! The rate at which neutrinos oscillate from flavor to flavor gives us information about absolute values of differences of squared masses! Currently we’re pretty sure the three masses obey

and

So, and are close and is farther, but we don’t know if is bigger than the other two (normal hierarchy) or smaller (inverted hierarchy).

We also don’t know which is bigger, or And as the FAQ points out, we’re not even sure all three masses are nonzero!

By the way, I will bet that we’ve got the normal hierarchy, with My reason is just that this seems to match the behavior of the other leptons. The electron is lighter than the muon which is lighter than the tau. So it seems to vaguely make sense that the electron neutrino should be lighter than the mu neutrino which in turn is lighter than the tau neutrino. But this ‘seems to vaguely make sense’ is not based on any theoretical reason! We haven’t the foggiest clue why any of these masses are what they are—and that’s another question on the list.

I also want to change this question to something less technical, so people realize what a big deal it is:

Could any neutrinos be Majorana spinors?

A less technical formulation would be:

• Is any kind of neutrino its own antiparticle?

On the one hand it’s amazing that we don’t know if neutrinos are their own antiparticles! But on the other hand, it’s really hard to tell if a particle is its own antiparticle if its very hard to detect and when you make them they’re almost always whizzing along near the speed of light.

We’d know at least some neutrinos are their own antiparticles if we saw neutrinoless double beta decay. That’s a not-yet-seen form of radioactive decay where two neutrons turn into two protons and two electrons without emitting two antineutrinos, basically because the antineutrinos annihilate each other:

Physicists have looked for neutrinoless double beta decay. If it happens, it’s quite rare.

Why in the world should we suspect that neutrinos are their own antiparticles? The main reason is that this would provide another mechanism for them to have a mass—a so-called ‘Majorana mass’, as opposed to the more conventional ‘Dirac mass’ that explains the mass of the electron (for example) in the Standard Model.

I will bet against the observed neutrinos being their own antiparticles, because this would violate conservation of lepton number and an even more sacred conservation law: conservation of baryon number minus lepton number. On the other hand, if some so-far-unobserved right-handed neutrinos are very heavy and have a Majorana mass, we could explain the very light masses of the observed neutrinos using a trick called the seesaw mechanism. And by the way: even the more conventional ‘Dirac mass’ requires that the observed left-handed neutrinos have right-handed partners, which have so far not been seen! So here’s another interesting open question:

• Are there right-handed neutrinos: that is, neutrinos that spin counterclockwise along their direction of motion when moving at high speeds?

So many unanswered questions about neutrinos!

My list of references hasn’t held up as well:

For details, try:

• The Neutrino Oscillation Industry.

• John Baez, Neutrinos and the nysterious Maki-Nakagawa-Sakata Matrix.

• Paul Langacker, Implications of neutrino mass.

• Boris Kayser, Neutrino mass: where do we stand, and where are we going?.

The first of these has lots of links to the web pages of research groups doing experiments on neutrinos. It’s indeed a big industry!

In fact the first page is now full of silly random posts, but oddly still titled NeutrinoOscillation.org. Paul Langacker’s page is missing. Boris Kayser’s review uses an old link to the arXiv, back when it was at xxx.lanl.gov. His review is still on the arXiv, and it’s nice—but it dates to 1998, so I should find something newer!

What are the best places to read a lot of clearly explained information about neutrino puzzles? Are there other big neutrino puzzles I should include?

Theoretical Physics in the 21st Century

In 2021, March 8–13 will be “Sustainability Week” in Switzerland. During this week, students at all Swiss universities will come together to present their current work, promote a sustainable lifestyle and draw extra attention to changes that must be made at the institutional level. Anna Knörr, a third year Physics Bachelor student at ETH Zürich, is president of the Student Sustainability Commission. She and Professor Niklas Beisert invited me to give the Zurich Theoretical Physics Colloquium on Monday the 8th of March.

She proposed the modest title “Theoretical Physics in the 21st Century”. I like this idea because it would give me a chance to think about the ways in which theoretical physics is stuck, the ways it’s not, and the ways theoretical physics can help us adapt to the Anthropocene. So, I could blend ideas from these two talks:

• Unsolved mysteries in fundamental physics, Cambridge University Physics Society, October 3, 2018.

• Energy and the environment—what physicists can do, Perimeter Institute, April 17, 2013.

but update and improve the second one. I think it’ll be pretty easy for me to explain that the Anthropocene is about much more than global warming. The hard part is giving suggestions for “what physicists can do”.

Of course we can all resolve to fly less, etc.—but none of those suggestions take advantage of special skills that physicists have. Anna Knörr correctly noted that many theoretical physicists have trouble seeing what they can do to help our civilization adapt to the Anthropocene, since many of them are not good at designing better batteries, solar cells, fission or fusion reactors comes easily. To the extent that I’m a theoretical physicist I fit into this unhappy class. But I think there are more theoretical activities that can still be helpful! And I have more to say about this now than in 2013.

One lesson I may offer is this:

If something is not working, try something different.

This applies to the Anthropocene as a whole, all the social problems that afflict us, and also fundamental physics. I just ran into a talk that the famous particle physicist Sheldon Glashow gave 40 years ago, called “The New Frontier”. He said:

Important discoveries await the next generation of accelerators. QCD and the electroweak theory need further confirmation. We need to know how b quarks decay. The weak interaction intermediaries must be seen to be believed. The top quark (or the perversions needed by topless theories) lurks just out of range. Higgs may wait to be found. There could well be a fourth family of quarks and leptons. There may even be unanticipated surprises. We need the new machines.

That was in 1980. The ‘weak interaction intermediaries’—the W and Z—were found three years later, in 1982. The top quark was found in 1995. The Higgs boson was found in 2012. No fourth generation of quarks and leptons, and we now have good evidence that none exists. To the great sorrow of all physcists, particle accelerators have found no unanticipated surprises!

On the other hand, we have for the first time an apparently correct theory of elementary particle physics. It may be, in a sense, phenomenologically complete. It suggests the possibility that there are no more surprises at higher energies, at least at energies that are remotely accessible.

He’s proved right on this, so far.

Proton decay, if it is found, will reinforce belief in the great desert extending from 100 GeV to the unification mass of 10¹⁴ GeV. Perhaps the desert is a blessing in disguise. Ever larger and more costly machines conflict with dwindling finances and energy reserves. All frontiers come to an end.

You may like this scenario or not; it may be true or false. But, it is neither impossible, implausible, nor unlikely. And, do not despair nor prematurely lament the death of particle physics. We have a ways to go to reach the desert, with exotic fauna along the way, and even the desolation of a desert can be interesting.

Proton decay has not been found despite a huge amount of effort. So, that piece of evidence for grand unified theories is missing, and with it a strong piece of evidence that there should be a “desert” of new phenomena between the electroweak unification energy scale and the GUT energy scale.

But, we’re not seeing anything beyond the Standard Model: no “exotic fauna”.

Glashow’s “new frontier” was the “passive frontier”: non-accelerator experiments like neutrino measurements, and this is indeed where the progress came since 1980: we now know neutrinos are massive and oscillate, and there is still some mystery here and room for surprises—though frankly I suspect that neutrino masses will work very much like quark masses, via coupling to the Higgs. (This is in a sense the most conservative, least truly exciting scenario.)

So, very little dramatic progress has happened in particle physics since 1980—except for a profusion of new theories that haven’t made any verified predictions. I’ll argue that physicists should turn elsewhere! There are other things for them to do, that are much more exciting.

Theories of Aether and Electricity (Part 1)

I’ve been reading an amazing book, a little bit every night in bed:

• Edmund Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, Two Volumes Bound As One. Volume I: The Classical Theories. Vol. II: The Modern Theories, 1900-1926. Dover, 1989, 753 pages.

How in the world did our species figure out the laws governing the electric field, magnetic field, and charged particles? A lot started with pure luck. Two unusual stones played a key role: amber and lodestone.

The first, really fossilized tree sap, easily acquires an electric charge if you rub it against wool or silk. This was one of human’s introductions to the electric field, and electrons. Indeed, the ancient Greek word for amber was ēlektron. The second, called magnetite, is naturally magnetic.

How odd that of all the minerals in nature, there were two with peculiar abilities to attract and repel! This duality foreshadowed the duality between electric and magnetic fields, now understood mathematically using the Hodge star operator. Who could have guessed that a pair of stones would eventually lead to such deep discoveries?

Isaac Newton caught a glimpse of it. In the early 1700s he commented about both amber and lodestones in the third book of his Opticks, called simply The Queries. He was imagining challenging someone skeptical of the existence of aether:

Let him also tell me, how an electrick Body can by Friction emit an Exhalation so rare and subtile, and yet so potent, as by its Emission to cause no sensible Diminution of the weight of the electrick Body, and to be expanded through a Sphere, whose Diameter is above two Feet, and yet to be able to agitate and carry up Leaf Copper, or Leaf Gold, at the distance of above a Foot from the electrick Body? And how the Effluvia of a Magnet can be so rare and subtile, as to pass through a Plate of Glass without any Resistance or Diminution of their Force, and yet so potent as to turn a magnetick Needle beyond the Glass?

While these are brilliant questions, he and some later thinkers had to struggle for a long time to sort out the relation between what we’d later call electrons and the electric field. It’s easy to see why, since they’re so intimately related.

As it turns out, electrons are not emitted but absorbed by amber when it rubs against wool. Later there were long arguments about whether there were two kinds of ‘electrical fluid’, positively and negatively charged, or just one. But maybe the ‘exhalation’ he mentions is really the electric field, just as the ‘effluvia’ of a magnet are the magnetic field.

There is a lot more to say about all this, but I think I’ll do it in short bits, to avoid writing a 753-page tome like Whittaker’s.

Octonions and the Standard Model

I avoid talking about fundamental physics or pure math here—I do that on the n-Category Café. I also avoid talking about category theory, except for its applications to electrical circuits, chemical reaction networks and the like. I discuss more ‘pure’ aspects of category theory on the n-Category Café and the Category Theory Community Server.

I’ve been fascinated by the octonions for a long time now: they’re an enigmatic link between many ‘exceptional’ structures in geometry and group theory.

• John Baez, The octonions.

There have been various attempts to use the octonions in physics. While they play a clear role in superstring theory, which is mathematically beautiful but distant from what we observe in nature, there are also some hopes that they could explain the quirky patterns in the forces and particles we actually see. I’m not extremely optimistic about these hopes, but there are some tantalizing facts here and there, so I’ve decided to write some blog articles explaining them.

I should emphasize that I’m not proposing or even advocating any theory of physics here! Instead, I’m just collecting and explaining some interesting relations between octonionic mathematics and the Standard Model. I thought about this stuff for a long time, so I wanted to write it up before I forget it all—especially some work I did with Greg Egan and John Huerta back in November 2015.

Here are the posts so far:

• Octonions and the Standard Model 1. How to define octonion multiplication using complex scalars and vectors, much as quaternion multiplication can be defined using real scalars and vectors. This description requires singling out a specific unit imaginary octonion, and it shows that octonion multiplication is invariant under SU(3).

• Octonions and the Standard Model 2. A more polished way to think about octonion multiplication in terms of complex scalars and vectors, and a similar-looking way to describe it using the cross product in 7 dimensions.

• Octonions and the Standard Model 3. How a lepton and a quark fit together into an octonion – at least if we only consider them as representations of SU(3), the gauge group of the strong force. Proof that the symmetries of the octonions fixing an imaginary octonion form precisely the group SU(3).

• Octonions and the Standard Model 4. Introducing the exceptional Jordan algebra: the 3×3 self-adjoint octonionic matrices. A result of Dubois-Violette and Todorov: the symmetries of the exceptional Jordan algebra preserving their splitting into complex scalar and vector parts and preserving a copy of the 2×2 adjoint octonionic matrices form precisely the Standard Model gauge group.

I didn’t give the proof of that result.   Instead I moved in a different direction, which should eventually loop back:

• Octonions and the Standard Model 5. How to think of the 2×2 self-adjoint octonionic matrices as 10-dimensional Minkowski space, and pairs of octonions as left- or right-handed Majorana-Weyl spinors in 10 dimensional spacetime.

• Octonions and the Standard Model 6.  The linear transformations of the exceptional Jordan algebra that preserve the determinant form the exceptional Lie group E6. How to compute this determinant in terms of 10-dimensional spacetime geometry: that is, scalars, vectors and left-handed spinors in 10d Minkowski spacetime.

• Octonions and the Standard Model 7. How to describe the Lie group E6 using 10-dimensional spacetime geometry. This group is built from the double cover of the Lorentz group, left-handed and right-handed spinors, and scalars in 10d Minkowski spacetime.

• Octonions and the Standard Model 8  A geometrical way to see how E6 is connected to 10d spacetime, based on the octonionic projective plane.

• Octonions and the Standard Model 9.  Duality in projective plane geometry, and how it lets us break the Lie group E6 into the Lorentz group, left-handed and right-handed spinors, and scalars in 10d Minkowski spacetime.

• Octonions and the Standard Model 10.  Jordan algebras, their symmetry groups, their invariant structures — and how they connect quantum mechanics, special relativity and projective geometry.

• Octonions and the Standard Model 11.  Particle physics on the spacetime given by the exceptional Jordan algebra: a summary of work with Greg Egan and John Huerta.

As usual, once I start writing about something I get more interested in it. There’s a lot more left to say, and it’s a lot of fun, so there will be more posts.

The SPARC Fusion Reactor

There’s a lot of excitement about a new approach to fusion power:

• Henry Fountain, Compact nuclear fusion reactor is ‘very likely to work,’ studies suggest, The New York Times, 29 September 2020.

Scientists developing a compact version of a nuclear fusion reactor have shown in a series of research papers that it should work, renewing hopes that the long-elusive goal of mimicking the way the sun produces energy might be achieved and eventually contribute to the fight against climate change.

Construction of a reactor, called SPARC, which is being developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a spinoff company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, is expected to begin next spring and take three or four years, the researchers and company officials said.

Although many significant challenges remain, the company said construction would be followed by testing and, if successful, building of a power plant that could use fusion energy to generate electricity, beginning in the next decade.

This ambitious timetable is far faster than that of the world’s largest fusion-power project, a multinational effort in Southern France called ITER, for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. That reactor has been under construction since 2013 and, although it is not designed to generate electricity, is expected to produce a fusion reaction by 2035.

But fusion has been twenty years off since the 1950s. What’s the evidence that Sparc will work? I guess most of the evidence is here—a series of seven papers, which luckily are available open-access:

• Status of the SPARC physics basics, Journal of Plasma Physics 86 (2020).

I have not read these! And even if I did, since I’m not an expert on fusion reactors—obviously a tricky subject—I’m not sure how much my impression would help.

Do you know any commentary on SPARC from other experts on fusion reactors? The more detailed, the better. All I’ve seen so far are very sketchy remarks from people who don’t seem to know what they’re talking about.