Observations That Transcend Law and Politics
Spin-foam is a quantum gravity approach that quantizes space-time, rather than treating gravity as a separate force with a carrier boson comparable to a photon or a gluon. We argue that effects of the quantum spin-connection foam, which describes quantum gravity according to the precanonical quantization of General Relativity, may already be observed in the form of the small cosmological constant…
The anomaly of the day is an anomaly in a certain kind of B meson decay. I'm very skeptical and think it will go away and is probably due to poor modeling of the Standard Model prediction, but I'll note its existence in this post for further analysis. The decays B→PP, where the pseudoscalar P is a π or K, have been studied under the assumption of flavour SU(3) symmetry [SU(3)F]. The global fit…
A Covarying Coupling Constant theory performs similarly to, but not better than MOND. Both are much better at explaining galaxy rotation dynamics than a Cold Dark Matter theory using an NFW dark matter distribution (which is theoretically necessary for truly sterile dark matter particles). The Covarying Coupling Constants (CCC) framework , developed to account for high-redshift JWST observations,…
Not long ago, we were finally able to find decent sized bones that proteins provided proteomic evidence (rather than DNA evidence which was not available) were able to match to Denisovans, which were found on the coast of the main island of Taiwan, finally putting a body together with the ghost population implied by DNA evidence. Two more leg bones were recently found . Earlier dating had…
There is weak evidence that the radial acceleration relation, which is implied by Milgrom's toy-model MOND theory of weak field gravity, requires a single parameter correction is correlated with the compactness of the galaxies measured, primarily in dwarf galaxies. Query if this could be due to the external field effect or due to gravitationally bound systems that are not in equilibrium? It could…
Reductionist physicists always like to derive physical constants, rather than than simply measure them. This paper proposes a way to do so for modified gravity in a MOND-like theory, expanding the theory's domain of applicability to galaxy clusters while sacrificing the universality of Milgrom's constant, a(0). It also hints, as Deur explicitly concludes, that MOND-like effects may be influenced…
A hydrogen gas cloud, called Cloud-9, that has been observed in deep space in the radio wave frequency, which cannot be seen in the visible light spectrum provides a way to distinguish between different dark matter hypotheses and while the paper below doesn't consider it, between modified gravity theories and dark matter hypotheses. Starless gas clouds provide a new way to test gravitational…
A glueball is a strong force bound system without any valence quarks that binds gluons, the carrier bosons of the strong force instead of quarks. A well-established resonance seen in experiments at discovery level significance since 2011, whose internal structure is unclear, is shown in a new preprint to be consistent with a nearly pure pseudoscalar glueball state (i.e. a spin-0,…
Observations of high energy out space sourced neutrinos from an Earth based neutrino detector further constrain the parameter space of possible sterile neutrinos in a way that the LHC, reactor experiments, and an Antarctica based cosmic ray observatory do not. While the sterile neutrino mass range probed (1-100 TeV) is vastly greater than the active neutrino mass range, this is a sterile neutrino…
Every new precision measurement of the Higgs boson mass is golden, and it is increasingly being pinned down to some precision. A measurement of the Higgs boson mass in the diphoton decay channel is performed using proton-proton collision data at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The data set recorded with the CMS detector between 2016 and 2018 is used, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of…
No matter how much you fuss with the LambdaCDM based simulations, they generically predict the wrong number and type of satellite galaxies (related study here ) producing a 2.4 sigma tension: The kinematic approach yields a larger diversity in central dark matter densities than expected from the CDM population, as inferred from the stellar-to-halo mass relation, with compact ultra-faints appearing…
The most notable findings of the study are that the number of languages in the world was already starting to decline five hundred years before the Columbian exchange and the Renaissance, and that small pre-agricultural populations placed an effective limit on the number of languages spoken in the pre-Holocene era. The peak number of languages was on the order of 10,000 to 35,000 according to the…
Even with greatly relaxed cosmology based bounds in neutrino mass that free it from the strong model dependence it has in the deeply flawed ΛCDM model, cosmology based limits on neutrino mass have a 90% confidence level upper bound that is about five times more strict than direct measurements of neutrino mass. The relaxed less model dependent bound on neutrino mass still limits the lightest…
A nice Facebook reel discusses the pre-Greek substrate of the Indo-European Greek language for which we have about 1000 Greek words that don't appear to have Indo-European origins as evidence. The geographic extent of the pre-Greek substrate It notes the geographic extent of the substrate (which is similar to that of modern Greece plus the west coast of Turkey), and the subject matter of the…
Davidski at Eurogenese has provided some thoughts on the Indo-European homeland in a teaser post with an updated large data set of ancient and modern DNA from Europe. He states: (Interactive version here ) - Yamnaya is almost certainly derived from Serednii Stih (aka Sredny Stog) . I've been talking about this for years and you can probably pick it up without too much trouble in the PCA above.…
A new study tries to extract several Standard Model Constant measurements from the same data set and obtains results generally consistent with prior efforts to measure the same constants, but with greater uncertainty than the state of the art measurements of these quantities. Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)
The conclusion of a new reanalysis of X17 relevant experimental data loosens the constraints greatly. But, I remain deeply skeptical of its existence. Also, why use units of 10^-3 GeV instead of MeV in your key chart? [T]he revised exclusion limits no longer extend to the X17 mass of 16.88 MeV, leaving a sizeable region of parameter space for the vector-boson interpretation of the anomaly, bounded…
I scan about 45,000 physics articles a year. I bookmark and think carefully about around 4,500 of them a year. I read the underlying article's body text for about 450 of them a year. I blog about 150 of them a year. This is post 3,001 at this blog. Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)
Entropic gravity models, which imply that gravity is an emergent law of physics, rather than a fundamental force in its own right, are a very attractive possibility from a reductionist perspective. This paper looks at an entropic gravity theory that would eliminate the need for dark matter and suggests a way to observationally distinguish it from ΛCDM and MOND models. It doesn't work out the…
All strong gravitational field observations are indistinguishable from general relativity. The troublesome cases are in weak gravitational fields in very large systems like galaxies that are usually modeled with simple Newtonian gravity because the math necessary to calculate their behavior in full GR is too hard and is assumed by good arguments, but without actual calculations that could capture…
Adopting the cosmological bounds on the sum of the neutrino masses and making some other unambitious assumptions, this paper argues that the lightest of the three neutrino masses is less than 2.3 meV and considers a possible phenomenological relations between the three neutrino masses. Direct measurements of the electron neutrino mass at the Katrin experiment bound it at less than 450 meV with…
Medieval ancient DNA from Eastern Europe is consistent with the historical and linguistic narrative of the peoples who make up the Russian state. The foundation of the first ancient Rus’ state occurred as a result of the consolidation of diverse communities inhabiting Eastern Europe during the second half of the first millennium CE. Historical sources imply that these communities mostly include…
The galaxy with the greatest diameter ever observed (IC1101) has a diameter of 520 kiloparsecs (1.7 million light years), and it is still growing. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy has a diameter of about 100,000 light years (about 31 kiloparsecs). Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)
A paper claims to see MOND in a reanalysis of wide-binary star data. I'm still on the fence. Wide binary stars provide natural laboratories for directly probing gravity in the low-acceleration regime, as dark matter inferred from any viable gravity has negligible effects on their internal dynamics. Various recent studies including Bayesian 3D analyses have shown that wide binaries with separations…
A global electroweak fit combines experimentally measured values of Standard Model physical constants with the theoretical relationships between those constants in the electroweak sector of the Standard Model to determine where, within the range of uncertainties in the experimental measurements the true value of those physical constants is most likely to be. Basically, it uses theory to eke out a…