John W. Moffat recently wrote a book with this title. Professor Moffat has been an active participant in the quest for the structure of matter. He independently discovered the charm quark, which is a very important piece of the Code he discusses in his book. Given the announcement from CERN about the discovery of the Higgs particle, this is a very timely book. Here I write some of my own ideas inspired by this book.
I met Professor Robert Brout in Mexico in the early 70s. He explained to us, the importance of understanding phase transitions concurrently with the study of Particle Physics Theory. He would've gotten the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for his discovery of spontaneous symmetry breaking in particle physics. Unfortunately he died prior to that announcement.
My contribution here is non-standard, as the authors mentioned here encourage me to be.
A friend, from my student years at UCSB, Kris Krogh, also inspires me. He made me aware of the pioneering, and non-standard , work of Louis de Brogle, on the so-called Pilot Wave Theory. Which is pursued by Professor Antony Valentini at Clemson University.
What follows is my interpretation of the recent BICEP2 result, on polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background.
I imagine inflation as a bottle neck, increasing in size very fast. Waves and matter reach thermal equilibrium, which I imagine as a purely statistical behavior. At that scale matter becomes locked, just like Lord Kelvin predicted in the middle of the nineteenth century. In this view, quantum behavior is explained as a dead state of matter. The particle with a mass of 35.25 GeV, surmised by Dan Hooper, et al., could be the first WIMP observed. With this scale, one could try to get fundamental constants, like Planck's, and the speed of light; determined with principles of information, stability, and structure formation.
That'll crack the code!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment