ICARUS refutes OPERA: really?

Tommaso Dorigo managed to write the hype of his life about super-luminal neutrinos. This kind of accidents are unavoidable and any blogger sooner or later becomes a victim of such an accident. To my great surprise Tommaso described in a completely uncritical and hypeish manner a study by ICARUS group in Gran Sasso and concluded that it definitely refutes OPERA result. This if of course a wrong conclusion and based on the assumption that special and general relativity hold true as such and neutrinos are genuinely superluminal.

Also Sascha Vongehr wrote about ICARUS a a reaction to Tommaso's surprising posting but this was purposely written half-joking hype claiming that ICARUS proves that neutrinos travel the first 18 meters with a velocity at least 10 times higher than c. Sascha also wrote a strong criticism of the recent science establishment. The continual uncritical hyping is leading to the loss of the respectability of science and I cannot but share his views. Also I have written several times about the ethical and moral decline of the science community down to what resembles the feudal system of middle ages in which Big Boys have first night privilege to new ideas: something which I have myself had to experience many times.

What ICARUS did was to measure the energy distribution of muons detecteded in Gran Sasso. This result is used to claim that OPERA result is wrong. The measured energy distribution is compared with the distribution predicted assuming that Cohen-Glashow interpretation is correct. This is an extremely important ad hoc assumption without which the ICARUS demonstration fails completely.

1. Cohen and Glashow assume a genuine super-luminality and argue that this leads to the analog of Cherenkov radiation leading to a loss of neutrino energy: 28.2 GeV at CERN is reduced to averge of 12.1 GeV at Gran Sasso. From this model one can predict the energy distribution of muons in Gran Sasso.
2. The figure of Icarus prepring demonstrates that the distribution assuming now energy loss fits rather well the measured energy distribution of muons. The figure does not show the predicted distribution but the figure text tells that the super-luminal distribution would be much "leaner", which one can interpret as a poor fit.
3. From this ICARUS concludes that neutrinos cannot have exceeded light velocity. The experimental result of course tells only that neutrinos did not lose energy: about the neutrino velocity it says nothing without additional assumptions.

At the risk of boring the reader I repeat: the fatal assumption is that a genuine super-luminality is in question. The probably correct conclusion from this indeed is that neutrinos would lose their energy during their travel by Cherenkov radiation.

In TGD framework situation is different (see this, this, this, and also the article). Neutrinos move in excellent approximation velocity which is equal to the maximal signal velocity but slightly below it and without any energy loss. The maximal signal velocity is however higher for a neutrino carrying space-time sheets than those carrying photons- a basic implication sub-manifold gravity. I have explained this in detail in previous postings and in the article.

The conclusion is that ICARUS experiment supports the TGD based explanation of OPERA result. Note however that at this stage TGD does not predict effective superluminality but only allows and even slightly suggests it and provides also a possible explanation for its energy independence and dependences on length scale and particle. TGD suggests also new tests using relativistic electrons instead of neutrinos.

It is also important to realize that the the apparent neutrino super-luminality -if true- provides only single isolated piece evidence for sub-manifold gravity. The view about space-time as 4-surface permeates the whole physics from Planck scale to cosmology predicting correctly particle spectrum and providing unification of fundamental interactions, it is also in a key role in TGD inspired quantum biology and also in quantum consciousness theory inspired by TGD.

Let us sincerely hope that the conclusion of ICARUS will not be accepted as uncritically as Tommasso did.

For details and background see the article Are neutrinos superluminal and the chapter TGD and GRT of "Physics in Many-Sheeted Space-time".

Mayan calendar and serious astronomers

Mayan calendar inspires some people and makes many astrophysicists very very angry. If you want to raise the blood pressure of astrophysics, just mention the magic year 2012 when Earth, Sun, and galactic center are aligned along single line and something weird things start to happen.

About this alignment I learned yesterday evening from some web page as I was searching for data about the notion of galactic alignment serving as a direct indication that galaxies might be like pearls in a necklace or bubbles inside very long magnetic flux tubes and therefore strongly correlated. Similar correlations should hold true for stars along same flux tube. For instance, angular momenta would tend to be parallel for nearly straight flux tubes.

Now I must raise the blood pressure of serious astronomers whom I deeply respect. Apologies for All Serious Astronomers.

1. When Earth, Moon, and Sun are at the same line, weird things happen to the penduli as economy Nobelist Allais demonstrated in heroic experiments during which he had to remain awake for weeks to write down the recordings about the position of pendulum! TGD explanation is in terms of large hbar gravitons which cause large interference effects when Earth, Moon, and Sun are collinearly aligned (see this).

2. But exactly the same alignment occurs for Earth, Sun, and galactic center in magic year 2012! Could something very weird things indeed happen? Maybe not only penduli but the whole society would behave in very crazy manner. Just by looking what has happened in world economy and theoretical physics during last decades makes anyone in this right mind convinced that world has gone mad. If we believe Mayan calendar we have only to wait only year or so to see how mad the world can become since then Earth, Sun, and galactic center are exactly collinear and the effects maximal. After this we might hope that things will get gradually better or that even something totally new emerges.

Recall, that the posting Cosmic evolution as transformation of dark energy to matter was basically inspired about the precession of equinoxes about which I learned from my friend Pertti Kärkkäinen. This phenomenon was well-known to Mayan astronomers and Mayan calendar relies on it. The situation in which Earth, Sun, and galactic center are at the same line was of very special importance in Mayan calendar and the entire world view behind it. This also explains why the calendar ends at 2012 .

The model for the precession of equinoxes that I develpped (see this) assumes the precession of entire solar system rather than only Earth and it leads to the vision about how galaxies and stars have emerged via a formation of bubbles of ordinary matter inside flux tubes of magnetic energy identifiable as dark energy. Amusing that this idea pops up in the head of some crackpot just when we are approaching year 2012;-)! Kind of cosmic joke?

Dear Respected Astronomers, this is not a conspiracy against good science. I swear that before yesterday evening I didn't have a slightest idea about the role of equinox precession or collinearity of Earth, Sun, and galactic center in Mayan calendar: year 2012 has been for me just something as irritating as it is to every astronomer worth of his monthly salary.

Maybe something great will happen next year! Yes, this is actually true! I remember just now that politicians have promised that during 2012 I will get 120 euros -taxes =about 80 euros more to my monthly income from Kela and social office. This makes a considerable fraction of the minimum outcome thought to be necessary for basic metabolic needs!

Latest data about Higgs searches and M89 hadron physics

Lubos told about the latest information concerning Higgs search. It is not clear how much these data reflect actual situation. Certainly the mass values must correspond to observed bumps. The statistical significances are expected statistical significances, not based on real data. Hence a special caution is required. At 4.5/fb of data one has following bumps together with their expected statistical significance:

• 119 GeV: 3 sigma
• 144 Gev: 6 sigma(!)
• 240 GeV: 4.5 sigma
• 500 GeV: 4 sigma

It is interesting to try to interpret these numbers in TGD framework.

The interpretation of 144 GeV bump

Consider first the 144 GeV state 6 sigma expected significance, which is usually regarded as a criterion for discovery. Of course this is only expected statistical significance, which cannot be taken seriously.

1. 144 GeV is exactly the predicted mass of the pion of M₈₉ hadron physics which was first observed by CDF and then decided to be a statistical fluctuation. I found myself rather alone while defending the interpretation as M₈₉ pion in viXra log and trying to warn that one should not throw baby with the bath water.
2. From an earlier posting of Lubos one learns that 244 GeV state must be CP odd -just like neutral pion- and should correspond to A₀ Higgs of SUSY. Probably this conclusion as well as the claimed CP even property of 119 GeV state follow both from the assumption that these states correspond to SUSY Higgses so that one must not take them seriously.
3. The next step before TGD will be accepted is to discover that this state cannot be Higgs of any kind.

X and Y mesons as meson like bound states or color excitations of quarks or of squarks?

Could the other bumps correspond to the pseudoscalar mesons of M₈₉ hadron physics? For only a week ago I would have answered 'Definitely not'! Situation however changed completely as I realized that the weird X and Y mesons which are charmonium like states could be interpreted as dark scharmonia consisting c squark and cbar squark. Another option is that X and Y type mesons correspond to dark mesons formed from color excitations of quarks in representions 6bar of 15. The structures of the two models are essentially identical and it is not yet possible to distinguish between them. See the blog postings

Do X and Y mesons provide evidence for color excited quarks or squarks?

and

Does shadronization explain the failure to discover SUSY?

and also the article

Do X and Y mesons provide evidence for color excited quarks or squarks?.

Dark squark option led to a beautiful model explaining why light mesons do not seem to have smesonic companions and to an explanation why squarks and gluinos have not been detected at LHC nor before. The reason is simply that shadronization takes place before the decays of squarks to quark and selectro-weak gauge boson. Shadrons in turn decay to hadrons by gluino exchange.

Could the claimed bumps explained by assuming that also M₈₉ quarks have either color excitations or super partners with the same mass scale and the same mechanism is at work for M₈₉ mesons as for ordinary mesons. The same question can be made for the option based on color excitations of quarks in 6bar or 15.

Possible identification of bumps

Consider now the possible identification of the remaining Higgs candidates concentrating for definiteness to the squark option. In the recent case the decay widths of intermediate gauge bosons do not pose any constraints so that there is no need to assume darkM₈₉ squarks.

1. In the earlier framework there was no identification for meson like states below 144 GeV. The discovery of this week was however that squarks could have the same p-adic mass scale as quarks and that one has besides mesons also smesons consisting of squark pair as a consequence. Every meson would be accompanied by a smeson. Gluino exchange however mixes mesons and smesons so that mass eigenstates are mixtures of these stgates. At low energies however the very large non-diagonal element of mass squared matrix can make second mass eigenstate tachyonic. This must happen for mesons consisting of light quarks. This of course for the M₁₀₇ hadron physics familiar to us.

2. Does same happen in M₈₉ hadron physics? Or is the non-diagonal element of mass squared matric so small that both states remain in the spectrum? Could 119 GeV state and 144 GeV state correspond to the mass eigenstates of supersymmetric M₈₉ hadron physics? If this is the case one could understand also this state.

3. What about 240 GeV state? The proposal has been that selectron corresponds to M₈₉. This would give it the mass 262.14 GeV by direct scaling; m(selectron)= 2^(127-89)/2m(electron). This is somewhat larger than 240 GeV.

   Could this state correspond to spartner of the ρ₈₉ consisting of M₈₉ squarks. There is already earlier evidence for bumps at 325 GeV interpreted in terms of ρ and ω. The mass squared difference should be same for pionic mass eigenstates and ρ like mass eigenstates. This would predict that the mass of the second ρ like eigenstate is 259 GeV, which is not too far from 240 GeV.

   Addition: I just found Tommaso Dorigo's newest posting The Plot Of The Week - The 327 GeV ZZ Anomaly, which in TGD framework could be interpreted in terms of decays of the neutral member of ρ₈₉ isospin triplet or ω₈₉, which is isospin singlet. A small splitting in mass found earlier is expected unless this decay corresponds to ω₈₉. Also WZ anomaly is predicted.

4. What about the interpretation of 500 GeV state? The η^′ meson of M₁₀₇ hadron physics has mass 957.66 MeV. The scaling by 512 gives 490.3 GeV- not too far from 500 GeV!

The alternative option replaces squarks with their color excitations. The arguments are identical in this case. Many other pseudoscalar mesons states are predicted if either of these options is correct. In the case of squark option one could say that also SUSY in TGD sense has been discovered and has been discovered in ordinary hadron physics for 8 years ago! SUSY would not reveal itself via the usual signatures since shadronization would be faster process than the decay of squarks via emission of selectro-weak bosons.

All this looks too good to be true. I do not know how the expected significances are estimated and how precisely the mass values correspond to experimental data. In any case, if these states turn out to be pseudoscalars, one can say that this is a triump for TGD. Combining this with the neutrino super-luminality which can be explained easily in terms of su

For details and background see the article Do X and Y mesons provide evidence for color excited quarks or squarks? and the chapter New particle physics predicted by TGD of "Dark Matter Hierarchy and p-Adic Length Scale Hypothesis".

Does shadronization explain the failure to discover SUSY?

In the earlier posting I proposed an explanation of the weird X and Y mesons believed to consist of ccbar pairs in terms of bound states of either color excited c and cbar or corresponding squarks. It is necessary to assume that dark matter in TGD sense is in quesetion so that hbar does not have the standard value. The mathematical structure of these models is apart from minor details exactly the same and at least moment I cannot decide which of them I should prefer.

If dark squarks are in question, the prediction would be that quarks and squarks have the same p-adic mass scale, perhaps even identical masses! This sounds completely non-sensical but could make sense if one believes the arguments of the article Do X and Y mesons provide evidence for color excited quarks or squarks?.

The point is that the usual view about how SUSY manifests itself experimentally could be manifestly wrong. It could quite well be that a strong process which might be called shadronization takes place much faster the the decay of squarks and gluinos to quarks and gluinos and electroweak gauginos (selectro-weak process). Shadrons would in turn decay to ordinary hadrons by gluino exchange. One could also speak about R-parity confinement. No neutralinos (which in TGD framework would correspond to neutrinos) would be produced so that the missing energy and jets would not serve as a signature of SUSY. This would explain why no sign of SUSY was found at LHC nor in all the earlier experiments at low energies. X and Y mesons -actually smesons- would however provide a direct signature of SUSY discovered already 8 years ago!

This picture would lead to a completely new view about detection of squarks and gluinos.

1. In the standard scenario the basic processes are production of squark and gluino pair. The creation of squark-antisquark pair is followed by the decay of squark (anti-squark) to quark (antiquark) and neutralino or chargino. If R-parity is conserved, the decay chain eventually gives rise to at least two hadron jets and lightest neutralinos identifiable as missing energy. Gluinos in turn decay to quark and anti-squark (squark and antiquark) and squark (anti-squark) in turn to quark (anti-quark) and neutralino or chargino. At least four hadron jets and missing energy is produced. In TGD framework neutralinos would decay eventually to zinos or photinos and right-handed neutrino transforming to ordinary neutrino (R-parity is not conserved). This process might be however slow.

2. In the recent case quite different scenario relying on color confinement and "shadronization" suggests itself. By definition smesons consist of squarks and antisquark. Sbaryons could consist of two squarks containing right-handed neutrino and its antineutrino ( N=2 SUSY) and one quark and thus have same quantum numbers as baryon.

   Also now dark squark or gluino pair would be produced at the first step. These would shadronize. One can indeed argue that the required emisson of winos and zinos and photinos is too slow a process as compared to shadronization. Shadrons (mostly smesons) would in turn decay to hadrons by the exchange of gluinos between squarks. No neutralinos (missing energy) would be produced. This would explain the failure to detect squarks and gluinos at LHC.

   This mechanism does not however apply to sleptons so that it seems that the p-adic mass scale of sleptons must be much higher for sleptons than that for squarks as I have indeed proposed.

The identification of X and Y as smesons looks like a viable option and M₈₉ shadronization could explains the failure to find SUSY at LHC if shadronization is a fast process as compared to the selectro-weak decays. M₈₉ squarks need not however be dark since intermediate gauge boson decay widths pose not constraints. The option certainly deserves an experimental testing. One could learn a lot about SUSY in TGD sense (or maybe in some other sense!) by just carefully scanning the existing data at lower energies. For instance, one could try to answer the following questions by analyzing the already existing experimental data.

1. Are X and Y type mesons indeed in 1-1 correspondence with charmonium states? One could develop numerical models allowing to predict the precise masses of scharmonium states and their decay rates to various final states and test the predictions experimentally.

2. Do bbarb mesons have smesonic counterparts with the same mass scale? What about B_c type smesons containing two heavy squarks?

3. Do the mesons containing one heavy quark and one light quark have smesonic counterparts? My light-hearted guess that this is not the case is based on the assumption that the general mass scale of the mass squared matrix is defined by the p-adic mass scale of the heavy quark and the non-diagonal elements are proportional to the color coupling strength at p-adic length scale associated with the light quark and therefore very large: as a consequence the second mass eigenstate would be tachyonic.

4. What implications the strong mixing of light mesons and smesons would have for CP breaking? CP breaking amplitudes would be superpositions of diagrams representing CP breaking for mesons resp. smesons. Could the presence of smesonic contributions perhaps shed light on the poorly understood aspects of CP breaking?

For details and background see the article Do X and Y mesons provide evidence for color excited quarks or squarks? and the chapter The Recent Status of Leptohadron Hypothesis of "p-Adic Length Scale Hypothesis and Dark Matter Hierarchy".

Access denied in Science2.0 blogs

It seems that censorship in blogs is real or that Science2.0 blogs are functioning in very weird manner. I tell about the strange course events knowing that I should not do this since the very purpose of the activity might be to give me a label of paranoid. In the recent situation when neutrino superluminality might turn to give an extremely simple experimental proof for TGD based view about space-time this would be very convenient excuse for the powerholders of science who have silenced me for 33 years now.

• Yesterday I tried to add a comment to Tommaso Dorigo's blog. To each trial I got the answer "Access denied". I added to my blog a posting comment about the situation.
• After two hours I found to my great surprise that my comment had mysteriously appeared in the blog of Tommaso. I removed my blog posting thinking that this was just one of those mysterious errors which happen sometimes.
• I checked the situation today again: the my earlier published comment had disappeared! My question to Tommaso about what might be happening did not appear in the comment section. Something very strange is clearly happening.
• Today I also tried to answer to a comment in Sascha Vongehr's blog after I had received a notification about comment which was a comment to what I had said. Here is the email notification

  "You have asked to receive notification of comments on the article,"Neutrinos CAN Go Faster Than Light Without Violating Relativity". You can view the comment at the following url

  http://www.science20.com/alpha_meme/neutrinos_can_go_faster_light_without_violating_relativity-82950#comment-83546"

  My attempt failed. Later I found that even the comment which I tried to answer had disappeared! This begins to look really surreal.

It seems that something very strange is happening in Science2.0 blogs. It would be sad if censorship so familiar to me has been extended to blogging. I do not believe that either Sascha Vongehr or Tommaso have anything to do with the censorship. Science2.0 just functions improperly. The silliest thing for those behind Science2.0 to do would be "Access denied" type censorship but one must take into account this possibility in the recent heated situation in theoretical particle physics. I would not be surprised if some third party has managed to somehow to interfere with the functioning of Science2.0 blogs. After the intense virus attacks that I have suffered during years I would not be surprised at all if there were individuals ready to perform also this kind of terror.

I add my blog posting which I removed first since these strange events suggest strongly that censorship is at work.

----------------------------------------------

It seems that the attempts to silence me are getting more intensive. I tried to send the message below to Tommaso Dorigo's blog three times but the only response was "Access denied".

I have experiencing all kinds of silencing activities during this year. I of course perfectly well understand the motivations of the hegemony: the situation in the theoretial particle physics is scandalous. There exists a highly-developed successful theory, which year after year has been brutally censored from journals and arXiv, and too many scientists and layman have begun to realize what has happened. Despite these strange "Access denied" messages I sincerely hope that Tommaso's Blog is not participating these activities. On the other hand, I am afraid that the particle physics empire might be beating back by trying to minimize information about the existence of me and TGD from web.

In any case, I glue below the message that I repeatedly tried to send to Tommaso's blog.

-------------------------------------------------

Also my experience from reading Sascha's posting was that there was critical attitude both towards the OPERA result and the easy arguments claiming that the result is a result of an error. What has happened during this year should have taught to us that Big Science suffers from real problems which are to high extent ethical: too much hype, arrogant attitudes preventing real communication, and complete silencing of those who are able to represent something original,....

To my view the job of theoretical physicist is to imagine various possibilities rather than passively wait that LHC tells the truth. It is nice that theoreticians try to demonstrate that OPERA result contains an error but most of the claims I have seen do not have much weight. It is so easy to forget the whole damned thing by using some easy pet argument.

Why not to pretend for a moment that OPERA result is real and look for the consequences from various points of view? Could tachyons be real? If not, does the very notion of maximal signal velocity need an updating? Is it possible to imagine a generalization of the framework provided by special and general relativities consistent with Principle of Relativity (Poincare invariance), General Coordinate Invariance, and Equivalence Principle?

I have been wondering all these years as theoreticians have talked about LHC as a savior of theoretical physics and at the same time put under the rug various anomalies, which should be pure gold for a good theoretician.

Do X and Y mesons provide evidence for color excited quarks or squarks?

Now and then come the days when head is completely empty of ideas. One just walks around and gets more and more frustrated. One can of course make authoritative appearances in blog groups and express strong opinions but sooner or later one is forced to look for web if one could find some problem. At this time I had good luck. By some kind of divine guidance I found myself immediately in Quantum Diaries and found a blog posting with title Who ordered that?! An X-traordinary particle?

Not too many unified theorists take meson spectroscopy seriously. Although they are now accepting low energy phenomenology (the physics for the rest of us) as something to be taken seriously, meson physics is for them a totally uninteresting branch of botany. They could not care less. As a crackpot I am however not well-informed about what good theoretician should do and shouldn't do and got interested. Could this give me a problem that my poor crackpot brain is crying for?

The posting told me that in the spectroscopy of ccbar type mesons is understood except for some troublesome mesons christened imaginatively with letters X and Y plus brackets containing their mass in MeVs. X(3872) is the firstly discovered troublemaker and what is known about it can be found in the blog posting and also in Particle Data Tables. The problems are following.

1. First of all, these mesons should not be there.
2. Their decay widths seem to be narrow taking into account their mass.
3. Their decay characteristics are strange: in particular the kinematically allow decays to DDbar dominating the decays of Ψ(3770) with branching ratio 93 per cent has not been observed whereas the decay to DDbarπ⁰ occurs with a branching fraction >3.2× 10^-3. Why the pion is needed?
4. X(3872) should decay to photon and charmonium state in a predictable way but it does not.

One of the basic predictions of TGD is that both leptons and quarks should have color excitations (see this). In the case of leptons there is a considerable support as carefully buried anomalies: the first ones come from seventies. But in the case of quarks this kind of anomalies have been lacking. Could these mysterious X:s and Y:s provide the first signatures about the existence of color excited quarks. An alternative proposal is that X and Y are meson like states formed from superpartners of charmed quark and antiquark. Consider for definiteness the option based on color excited quarks.

1. The first basic objection is that the decay widths of intermediate gauge bosons do not allow new light particles. This objection is encountered already in the model of leptohadrons. The solution is that the light exotic states are possible only if they are dark in TGD sense having therefore non-standard value of Planck constant and behaving as dark matter. The value of Planck constant is only effective and has purely geometric interpretation in TGD framework.
2. The basic objection is that light quarks do not seem to have such excitations. The answer is that gluon exchange transforms the exotic quark pair to ordinary one and vice versa and considerable mixing of the ordinary and exotic mesons takes place. This kind of coupling between gluon octet, color triplet and D-dimensional triality one representation is possible for D=6bar and D=15 (note that standard Lie-algebra coupling of gluons is not in question). At low energies where color coupling strength becomes very large and this gives rise to mass squared matrix with very large non-diagonal component and the second eigenstate of mass squared is tachyon and therefore drops from the spectrum. For heavy quarks situation is different and one expects that charmonium states have also exotic counterparts.

3. The selection rules can be also understood. The decays to DDbar involve at least two gluon emissions decaying to quark pairs and producing additional pion unlikes the decays of ordinary charmonium state involving only the emission of single gluon decaying to quark pair so that DDbar results.

   The decay of lightest X to photon and charmonium is not possible in the lowest order since at least one gluon exchange is needed to transform exotic quark pair to ordinary one. Exotic charmonia can however transform to exotic charmonia. Therefore the basic constraints seem to be satisfied.

The above arguments apply with minimal modifications also to squark option and at this moment I am not able to to distinguish between this options. The SUSY option is however favored by the fact that it would explain why SUSY has not been observed in LHC in terms of shadronization and subsequent decay to hadrons by gluino exhanges so that the jets plus missing energy would not serve as a signature of SUSY. Note that the decay of gluon to dark squark pair would require a phase transition to dark gluon first.

For details and background see the article Do X and Y mesons provide evidence for color excited quarks or squarks? and the chapter The Recent Status of Leptohadron Hypothesis of "p-Adic Length Scale Hypothesis and Dark Matter Hierarchy".

Wikipedia and Finnish physicists

The power holders of Finnish science continue to create classics of involuntary comics. Some examples related to Wikipedia.

A couple of years ago my name had appeared to the list of Finnish scientist. I was asthonished: how this kind of accident could have happened. Censors had been sleeping. The list contained also Claus Montonen: his name is familiar to every theoretical physicist from Montonen-Olive duality. In any civilized country a scientist of this caliber would be a professor but not in Finland.

I decided to check the situation since the reasonable expectation was that the recent experimental support for TGD must have raised the blood pressure and addrenaline excretion of my colleagues and also waked up the censors.

Gunnar Nordström was still there with an elaboration felt to be very important: "theoretical physicists, did not invent general relativity" (italics is not mine)! How movingly Finnish! For some years ago there had been a proposal to name one street in Kumpula according to Nordström for reasons obvious for anyone with intelligence quotient above 100. The attempt failed: the justification of professors was that Nordstöm had not been a professor!

Not surprisingly, I also learned that the decision makers of Finnish science had reacted to the Wikipedia article appropriately and removed my name as also the name of Claus Montonen! The latter removal made me astohished but tells a lot about the intelligence quotient of the Wikipedia activists involved.

Another descriptive event. For years ago an article about TGD was added to Wikipedia. It created an immense furor and very probably many of the anonymous and extremely aggressive commenters were finnish colleagues. It was amusing to find how creative fiction these otherwise rather unimaginative souls had managed to produce. Was this extreme perverse and in all imaginable manners mad and evil character they had created in the burst of godly (or devilishly?) inspiration really me?!

Later Lubos Motl added a short page about me as a physicst to the category "Physicists" in Wikipedia. Lubos was cautious and took good care that ambivalent interpretation as a crackpot or genius was possible. Even this was too much since this page disappeared in a mysterious manner. It was impossible to find the usual commentary explaining what had happened. Maybe Finnish colleagues had managed to somehow short circuit the usual procedures trying to prevent Wikipedia vandalism.

The laughing audience should however not forget that comic appears only when you look from large enough distance. Improving the resolution reveals tragic suffering and the best comics transform their personal suffering to a universal art. We should feel deep compassion: these poor fellows are really suffering! Really! Jealousy is a horrible and tragic disease.

Addition: Sahscha Vongehr has a nicely written article Superluminal Knee Jerk A Symptom But Transparent Science Maybe Cure about the recent situation in big science. The motivation for the article comes from neutrino super-luminality. The main stream is ready to forget the discovery without further comments as an unidentified measurement error just alike many earlier anomalies. I cannot but agree with the message of Sascha. In media we see only POP science producing hype after hype and ruthless censorship has been accepted as an essential part of science. The degeneration of science ethics has already led to a loss of respectability: laymen are not idiots ready to swallow any kind of hype. My hope is that the openness forced by web could cure the situation. Maybe the situation is becoming mature for a profound change: enough is simply enough.

Does Witten prefer knots over strings?

Peter Woit tells in his blog some the news from Dublin is that Witten will be in town soon to give the Hamilton Lecture, with the Irish Times reporting that

Witten’s Hamilton Lecture will abandon string theory, however, in favour of knots, with a talk entitled: The Quantum Theory of Knots.

Suppose that this statement is true and not only journalistic exaggeration. What if means if taken at face value?

1. Strings can get knotted (and linked and braided) in 3-D space: Witten's paper which led to a Fields medal was about topological theory based on Chern-Simons action, which he used to classify knots and 3-topologies in terms of invariant known as Jones polynomial.

2. In 4-D space one has 2-knots and their knotting. Linking is replaced with the intersection of four-surfaces in 4-D case. The so called intersection form is a topological invariant used to classify four-manifolds so that intersection string world sheets could be used to classify four-topologies. Note than linking and knotting are not the same thing in dimensions higher than D=3.

D=4 is the dimension of space-time surface containing string world sheet in TGD framework and I have of course done my best to transform in my own humble physicists's style Witten's horribly technical approach to the description of knots and also knots and also 2-knots in TGD framework (see this).

In TGD Universe knots, links, and braids can be assigned with two kinds of 3-surfaces.

1. 3-surfaces can be light-like 3-surfaces at which the signature of the induced metric changes: they are identified as basic building bricks of elementary particles. One could speak of light-like braids (somewhat illogically I have talked about time-like braids).
2. The second kind of 3-surfaces are space-like 3-surfaces at the ends of space-time sheets at boundaries of causal diamonds. These could be called space-like braids.

Also two-knots emerge in D=4. These light-like resp. space-like braids corresponds to the space-like and light-like boundaries of 2-knots in the interior of space-time defining the counterparts of string world sheets. The basic operations (admittedly somewhat violent;-)) that Alexander the Great used to open knots have interpretation in terms of basic reaction vertices for strings.

This suggests that string diagrams can be used to describe the Alexandrian method of opening knots whose generalization is widely used in Finnish academic life to resolve more abstract problems related to funding issues. If so, a careful recording the steps of this rather unpleasant procedure (from the point of view of knot and -in more abstract context - of finnish scientific dissident) would define a knot invariant.

In TGD framework the topology of the imbedding of string world sheet has a deep physical meaning. DNA as topological quantum computer vision provides a more concrete application of these ideas in quantum biology. One beautiful application is a concrete mechanism of memory coding based on braiding of magnetic flux tubes (amusingly, knots have been used as a manner to code memories!).

So: the innocent question is whether Witten is beginning or has has begun to realize that TGD exists (should I add ";-)" or not?)?

p-Adic Numbers and Cosmology

In Not-Even-Wrong there is a posting with title p-Adic Numbers and Cosmology. Peter Woit tells that Leonard Susskind has suddenly discovered p-adic numbers and their applicability to cosmology. I glue below my comment on the topic of posting.

--------------------------------------------

Nice to learn that p-adic numbers about which I have been talking for two decades now and written numerous articled and 15 books with practically everyone of them containing applications of p-adic physics and of a more general vision fusing real and p-adic physics for various primes p to single coherent whole.

There are 7 books about TGD proper and all they contain applications of p-adic physics in various length scales. There are 8 books about quantum biology and consciousness acording to TGD and also here p-adic physics plays also a central role.

Here is a sample of links to online books containing some applications ranging from Planck length scale to cosmology. The book

Physics as Generalized Number Theory

in particular the following chapters

• TGD as a Generalized Number Theory I: p-Adicization Program
• p-Adic Numbers and TGD: Physical Ideas
• Fusion of p-Adic and Real Variants of Quantum TGD to a More General Theory

The chapters in the book p-Adic length scale hypothesis and dark matter hierarchy about p-adic mass calculations and other particle physics related applications. The basic results are also published in Prespacetime journal - actually quite recently - so that I have at least formal priority to these 15 year old results, whose publication was completely out of question in so called respected journals and in arXiv.

At the age of 61 years and having lived for my whole life as academic out-of-law I would be of course really happy if half of my life work which has taken 35 years of my life would be at least mentioned in the reference lists of future articles applying p-adic notions. I however know that we are living the era of Big Science and on basis of my experiences it seems that research ethics does not to belong to Big Science.

Why neutrinos travel faster in short length scales?

Sasha Vongehr written several interesting blog postings about superluminal neutrinos. The latest one is titled A million times the speed of light. I glue below my comment about explaining how one can understand qualitatively why the dependence of the maximal signal velocity at space-time sheet along with the relativistic particle propagates is lower in long length scales.

The explanation involves besides the induced metric also the notion of induced gauge field (induced spinor connection): here brane theorists reproducing TGD predictions are bound to meet difficulties and an instant independent discovery of the notion of induced gauge field and spinor structure is needed in order to proceed;-). Here is my comment in somewhat extended form.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Sascha,

I would be critical about two points.

1. I would take Poincare invariance and general coordinate invariance as a starting point. I am not sure whether your arguments are consistent with these requirements.
2. The assumption that neutrinos slow down and have gigantic maximal signal velocities initially does not seem plausible to me. Just the dependence of the maximal signal velocity on length scale is enough to understand the difference between SN1987A and OPERA. What this means in standard physics framework is not however easy to understand.

If one is ready to accept sub-manifold gravity a la TGD, this boils down to the identification of space-time sheets carrying the neutrinos (or any relativistic particles from point A to point B). This TGD prediction is about 25 years old: from Peter Woit's blog's comment section I learned that brane people are now proposing something similar: my prediction at viXra log and my own blog was that this will happen within about week: nice to learn that my blog has readers!

This predicts that the really maximal signal velocity (that for M⁴) is not probably very much higher than the light velocity in cosmic scales and Robertson-Walker cosmology predicts that the light velocity in cosmic scales is about 73 percent of the really maximal one.

The challenge for sub-manifold gravity approach is to understand the SN1987A-OPERA difference qualitatively. Why neutrino (and any relativistic particle) travels faster in short length scales?

1. Suppose that this space-time sheet is massless extremal topologically condensed on a magnetic flux tube thickened from a string like object X²×: Y² subset M⁴× CP₂ to a tube of finite thickness. The longer and less straight the tube, the slower the maximal signal velocity since the light-like geodesic along it is longer in the induced metric (time-like curve in M⁴× CP₂). There is also rotation around the flux lines increasing the path length: see below.
2. For a planar cosmic string (X² is just plane of M⁴) the maximal signal velocity would be as large as it can be but is expected to be reduced as the flux tube develops 4-D M⁴ projection. In thickening process flux is conserved so that B scales as 1/S, S the transversal area of the flux tube. Magnetic energy per unit length scales as 1/S and energy conservation requires that the length of the flux tube scales up like S during cosmic expansion. Flux tubes become longer and thicker as time passes.
3. The particle -even neutrino!!- can rotate along the flux lines of electroweak fields inside the flux tube and this makes the path longer. The thicker/longer the flux tube,- the longer the path- the lower the maximal signal velocity. I emphasize that classical Z⁰ and W fields (and also gluon fields!) are the basic prediction of TGD distinguishing it from standard model: again the notion of induced gauge field pops up!
4. Classically the cyclotron radius is proportional to the cyclotron energy. For a straight flux tube there is free relativistic motion in longitudinal degrees of freedom and cyclotron motion in transversal degrees of freedom and one obtains essentially harmonic oscillator like states with degeneracy due to the presence of rotation giving rise to angular momentum as an additional quantum number. If the transversal motion is non-relativistic, the radii of cyclotron orbits are proportional to a square root of integer. In Bohr orbitology one has quantization of the neutrino speeds: wave mechanically the same result is obtained in average sense. Fermi statistics implies that the states are filled up to Fermi energy so that several discrete effective light velocities are obtained. In the case of a relativistic electron the velocity spectrum would be of form

   c_eff= L/T= [1+n×(hbar eB/m)]^-1/2× c_#

   Here L denotes the length of the flux tube and T the time taken by a motion along a helical orbit when the longitudinal motion is relativistic and transversal motion non-relativistic. In this case the spectrum for c_eff is quasi-continuous. Note that for large values of hbar =nhbar₀ (in TGD Universe) quasicontinuity is lost and in principle the spectrum might allow to the determination of the value of hbar.

5. Neutrino is a mixture of right-handed and left handed components and right-handed neutrino feels only gravitation where left-handed neutrino feels long range classical Z⁰ field. In any case, neutrino as a particle having weakest interactions should travel faster than photon and relativistic electron should move slower than photon. One must be however very cautious here. Also the energy of the relativistic particle matters.

Here brane-theorists trying to reproduce TGD predictions are in difficulties since the notion of induced gauge field is required besides that of induced metric. Also the geometrization of classical electro-weak gauge fields in terms of the spinor structure of imbedding space is needed. It is almost impossible to avoid M⁴× CP₂ and TGD.

To sum up, this would be the qualitative mechanism explaining why the neutrinos travel faster in short scales. The model can be also made quantitative since the cyclotron motion can be understood quantitatively once the field strength is known.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For background see the chapter TGD and GRT of the online book "Physics in Many-Sheeted Space-time" or the article Are neutrinos superluminal?.

Cosmic evolution as transformation of dark energy to matter

The anomalous behavior of the equinox precession and the recent surprising findings about heliosphere by NASA can be combined with the TGD inspired model for stars. The mdoel relies on the heuristic idea that stars (as also galazies) are like pearls in a necklace defined by long magnetic flux tubes carrying dark matter and strong magnetic field responsible for dark energy and possibly accompanied by the analog of solar wind. Heliosphere would be like a bubble in the flow defined by magnetic field inside the flux tube inducing its local thickening. A possible interpretation is as a bubble of ordinary and dark matter in the flux tube containing dark energy: this would provide a beautiful overall view about the emergence of stars and their heliospheres as a phase transition transforming dark energy to dark and visible matter. Among other things the magnetic walls surrounding the solar system would shield the solar system from cosmic rays. The bubble option is favored by the fact that Newtonian theory works so well inside planetary system. The model suggests bound state precessing solutions without nutation as the first approximation expected to be stable against dissipation. A small nutation around the equilibrium solution could explain the slow variation of the precession rate and can be treated as a small oscillatory perturbation around non-nutating ground state. The variation could be also caused by external perturbations. What is amusing from the mathematical point of view is that the model is analytically solvable and that the solution involves elliptic functions just as the Newtonian two-body problem does.

The model suggests a universal fractal mechanism leading to the formation of astrophysical and even biological structures as a formation of bubbles of ordinary or dark matter inside magnetic flux tubes carrying dark energy identified as magnetic energy of the flux tubes. In primordial cosmology these flux tubes would have been cosmic strings with enormous mass density, which is however below the black hole limit for straight strings. Strongly entangled strings could form black holes if general relativistic criteria hold true in TGD.

One must be very critical concerning the model since in TGD framework the accelerated cosmic expansion has several alternative descriptions, which should be mutually consistent. It seems that these descriptions corresponds to the descriptions of one and same thing in different length scales.

1. The critical and over-critical cosmologies representable as four-surfaces in M⁴× CP₂ are unique apart from their duration (see this). The critical cosmology corresponds to flat 3-space and would effectively replace inflationary cosmology in TGD framework and criticality would serve as a space-time correlate for quantum criticality in cosmological scales natural if hierarchy of Planck constants is allowed. The expansion is accelerating for the critical cosmology and is caused by a negative "pressure" basically due to the constraint force induced by the imbeddability condition, which is actually responsible for most of the explanatory power of TGD (say geometrization of standard model gauge fields and quantum numbers).

2. A more microscopic manner to understand the accelerated expansion would be in terms of cosmic strings. Cosmic strings (see this) expand during cosmic evolution to flux tubes and serve as the basic building bricks of TGD Universe. The magnetic tension along them generates a negative "pressure", which could explain the accelerated expansion. Dark energy would be magnetic energy.

   The proposed boiling of the flux tubes with bubbles representing galaxies, stars, ..., cells, etc.. would serve as a universal mechanism generating ordinary and dark matter. The model should be consistent with the Bohr orbitology for the planetary systems (see this) in which the flux tubes mediating gravitational interaction between star and planet have a gigantic Planck constant. This is the case if the magnetic flux tubes quite generally correspond to gigantic values of Planck constant of form hbar_gr=GM₁M₂/v₀, v₀/c<1, where M₁ and M₂ are the masses of the objects connected by the flux tube.

3. Even more microscopic description of the accelerated expansion would be in terms of elementary particles. In TGD framework space-time decomposes into regions having both Minkowskian and Euclidian signatures of the induced metric (see this). The Euclidian regions are something totally new as compared to the more conventional theories and have interpretation as space-time regions representing lines of generalized Feynman diagrams.

   The simplest GRT limit of TGD relies of Einstein-Maxwell action with a non-vanishing cosmological constant in the Euclidian regions of space-time (see this): this allows both Reissner-Nordström metric and CP₂ as special solutions of field equations. The cosmological constant is gigantic but associated only with the Euclidian regions representing particles having typical size of order CP₂ radius. The cosmological constant explaining the accelerated expansion at GRT limit could correspond to the space-time average of the cosmological constant and therefore would be of a correct sign and order of magnitude (very small) since most of the space-time volume is Minkowskian.

   This picture can be consistent with the idea that magnetic flux tubes which have Minkowskian signature of the induced metric are responsible for the efffective cosmological constant if the magnetic energy inside the magnetic flux tubes transforms to elementary particles in a phase transition generating dark and ordinary matter from dark energy and therefore gives rise to various visible astrophysical objects.

For details and background see the article Do we really understand the solar system? and the chapter TGD and Astrophysics of "Physics in Many-Sheeted Space-time".

Do we really understand the solar system?

The recent experimental findings have shown that our understanding of the solar system is surprisingly fragmentary. As a matter fact, so fragmentary that even new physics might find place in the description of phenomena like the precession of equinoxes (I am grateful for my friend Pertti Kärkkäinen for telling me about the problem) and the recent discoveries about the bullet like shape of heliosphere and strong magnetic fields near its boundary bringing in mind incompressible fluid flow around obstacle.

TGD inspired model is based on the heuristic idea that stars are like pearls in a necklace defined by long magnetic flux tubes carrying dark matter and strong magnetic field and possibly accompanied by the analog of solar wind. Heliosphere would be like bubble in the flow defined by magnetic field in the flux tube inducing its local thickening. A possible interpretation is as a bubble of ordinary and dark matter in the flux tube containing dark energy: this would provide a beautiful overall view about the emergence of stars and their heliospheres as a phase transition transforming dark energy to dark and visible matter. Among other things the magnetic walls surrounding the solar system would shield the solar system from cosmic rays.

For details and background see the article Do we really understand the solar system? and the chapter TGD and Astrophysics of "Physics in Many-Sheeted Space-time".

More about nasty superluminal neutrinos

The superluminal speed of neutrino has stimulated intense email debates and blog discussions. There is now an article by OPERA collaboration in arXiv so that superluminal neutrinos are not a rumour anymore. Even the finnish tabloid "Iltalehti" reacted to the news and this is really something unheard! Maybe the finding could even stimulate colloquium in physics department of Helsinki University!

The reactions to the potential discovery depend on whether the person can imagine some explanation for the finding or not. In the latter case the reaction is denial: most physics bloggers have chosen this option for understandable reasons. What else could they do? The six sigma statistics does not leave much room for objections but there could of course be some very delicate systematical error involved. Lubos wrote quite an interesting piece about possible errors of this kind and classified the possible errors to timing errors either at CERN or Italy or to errors in distance measurement.

The neutrinos are highly relativistic having average energy 17 GeV much larger than the mass scale of neutrinos of order .1 eV. The distance between CERN and Gran Sasso is roughly 750 km, which corresponds to the time of travel equal to T=2.4 milliseconds. The nasty neutrinos arrived to Gran Sasso &Delta T=60.7+/-6.9 (statistical) +/-7.4 (systematic) ns before they should have done so. This time corresponds to a distance Δ L= 18 m. From this is is clear that the distance and timing measurements must be extremely accurate. The claimed distance precision is 20 cm (see this.

Experimentalists tell that they have searched for al possible systematic errors that they are able to imagine. The relative deviation of neutrino speed from the speed of light is (c-v)/v= (5.1+/- 2.9)×10^-5 which is much larger than the uncertainty related to the value of the speed of light. The effect does not depend on neutrino energy. 6.1 sigma result is in question (for sigmas see this) so that it can be a statistical fluctuation with probability of 10^-9 in the case that there is no systematic error.

I already wrote about TGD based explanation of the effect assuming that it is real. The tachyonic explanations of the finding fail because different tachyonic mass is required to explain SN1987A and recent anomaly and other similar anomalies. Tachyons are of course also in conflict with causality. I repeat here the main points here and andd some new points that have emerged in numerous email discussions and blog discussion in viXra log.

1. It is sub-manifold geometry which allows to fuse the good aspects of both special relativity (the existence of well-defined conserved quantities due to the isometries of imbedding space) and general relativity (geometrization of gravitation in terms of the induced metric). As an additional bonus one obtains a geometrization of the electro-weak and color interactions and of standard model quantum numbers. The choice of the imbedding space is unique. The new element is the generalization of the notion of space-time: space-time identified as a four-surface has shape as seen from the perspective of the imbedding space M⁴×CP₂. The study of field equations leads among other things to the notion of many-sheeted space-time.

2. For many-sheeted space-time light velocity is assigned to light-like geodesic of space-time sheet rather than light-like geodesics of imbedding space M⁴×CP₂. The effective velocity determined from time to travel from point A to B along different space time sheets is different and therefore also the signal velocity determined in this manner. The light-like geodesics of space-time sheet corresponds in the generic case time-like curves of the imbedding space so that the light-velocity is reduced from the maximal signal velocity.

3. For Robertson-Walker cosmology imbedded as 4-surface (this is crucial!) in M⁴×CP₂ (see this) the light velocity would be about 73 per cent from the maximal one which would be along light-like geodesics of M⁴ factor as the simple estimate of the previous posting demonstrates.

   This leaves a lot of room to explain various anomalies (problems with determination of Hubble constant, apparent growth of the Moon-Earth distance indicated by the measurement of distance by laser signal,....). The effective velocity can depend on the scale of space-time sheet along which the relativistic particles arrive (and thus on distance distinguishing between OPERA experiment and SN1987A), it can depend on the character of ultra relativistic particle (photon, neutrino, electron,...), etc. The effect is testable by using other relativistic particles -say electrons.

4. The energy independence of the results fits perfectly with the predictions of the model since the neutrinos are relativistic. There can be dependence on length scale: in other words distance scale and this is needed to explain SN1987A -CERN difference in Δ c/c. For SN1987A neutrinos were also relativistic and travelled a distance is L=cT=168,000 light years and the neutrinos arrived about Δ T=2-3 hours earlier than photons (see this). This gives Δ c/c = Δ T/T≈ .8-1.2 ×10^-6 which is considerably smaller than for the recent experiment. Hence the tachyonic model fails but scale and particle dependent maximal signal velocity can explain the findings easily.

5. The space-time sheet along which particles propagate would most naturally correspond to a small deformation of a "massless extremal" ("topological light ray", see this) assignable to the particle in question. Many-sheeted space-time could act like a spectroscope forcing each (free) particle type at its own kind of "massless extremal". The effect is predicted to be present for any relativistic particle. A more detailed model requires a model for the propagation of the particles having as basic building bricks wormhole throats at which the induced metric changes its signature from Minkowskian to Euclidian: the Euclidian regions have interpretation in terms of lines of generalized Feynman graphs. The presence of wormhole contact between two space-time sheets implies the presence of two wormhole throats carrying fermionic quantum numbers and the massless extremal is deformed in the regions surrounding the wormhole throat. At this stage I am not able to construct detailed model for deformed MEs carrying photons, neutrinos or some other relativistic particles.

If I were a boss at CERN, I would suggest that the experiment would be carried out for relativistic electrons whose detection would be much easier and for which one could use much shorter scale.

1. Could one use both photon and electron signal simultaneously to eliminate the need to measure precisely the distance between points A and B.
2. Can one imagine using mirrors for photons and relativistic electrons and comparing the times for A→ B→ A?

As a matter fact, there is an old result by electric engineer Obolensky that I have mentioned earlier (see this), and which states that in circuits signals seem to travel at superluminal speed. The study continues the tradition initiated by Tesla who started the study of what happens when relays are switched on or off in circuits.

1. The experimental arrangement of Obolensky suggest that that part of circuit - the base of the so called Obolensky triangle- behaves as a single coherent quantum unit in the sense that the interaction between the relays defining the ends of the base is instantaneous: the swithing of the relay induces simultaneously a signal from both ends of the base.
2. There are electromagnetic signals propagating with velocities c₀(with values 271 +/- 1.8× 10⁶ m/s and 278 +/- 2.2× 10⁶ m/s) and c₁ (200.110× 10⁶ m/s): these velocities are referred to as Maxwellian velocities and they are below light velocity in vacuum equal to c=3× 10⁸ m/s. c₀ and c₁ would naturally correspond to light velocities affected by the interaction of light with the charges of the circuit.
3. There is also a signal propagating with a velocity c₂ ((620+/- 2.7) × 10⁶ m/s), which is slightly more than twice the light velocity in vacuum. Does the identification c₂=c_max, where c_max is the maximal signal velocity in M⁴× CP₂, make sense? Could the light velocity c in vacuum correspond to light velocity, which has been reduced from the light velocity c_#= .73 c_max in cosmic length scales due to the presence of matter to c_#=.48c_max. Note that this interpretation does not require that electrons propagate with a super-luminal speed.
4. If Obolensky's findings are true and interpreted correctly, simple electric circuits might allow the study of many-sheeted space-time in garage!

To conclude, if the finding turns out to be true it will mean for TGD what Mickelson-Morley meant for special relativity.

For background see the chapter TGD and GRT of the online book "Physics in Many-Sheeted Space-time" or the article Are neutrinos superluminal?.

Addition: Those string theorists are simply incredible. Here is This Week's hype which appeared in New Scientist.

So if OPERA’s results hold up, they could provide support for the existence of sterile neutrinos, extra dimensions and perhaps string theory. Such theories could also explain why gravity is so weak compared with the other fundamental forces. The theoretical particles that mediate gravity, known as gravitons, may also be closed loops of string that leak off into the bulk. “If, in the end, nobody sees anything wrong and other people reproduce OPERA’s results, then I think it’s evidence for string theory, in that string theory is what makes extra dimensions credible in the first place,” Weiler says.

This is absolute nonsense. What is wrong in physics community: why lying has become everyday practice?

Addition: From the comment section in Peter Woit's blog I learned that M-theorists have already represented a direct modification of the TGD explanation for neutrino super-luminality by replacing space-time surfaces with branes: web is a very effective communication tool;-). My guess was that the "discovery" takes place within a week. I would not be surprised if neutrino super-luminality would become the last straw for drowning M-theory. Sad that we must still tolerate a decade M-theoretic non-sense.

Speed of neutrino larger than speed of light?

The newest particle physics rumour is that the CERN OPERA team working in Gran Sasso, Italy has reported 6.1 sigma evidence that neutrinos move with a super-luminal speed. The total travel time is measured in milliseconds and the deviation from the speed of the light is nanoseconds meaning Δ c/c ≈ 10^-6 which is roughly 10³ times larger than the uncertainty 4.5× 10^-9 in the measured value of the speed of light. If the result is true it means a revolution in the fundamental physics.

The result is not the first of this kind and the often proposed interpretation is that neutrinos behave like tachyons. The following is the abstract of the article giving a summary about the earlier evidence that neutrinos can move faster than the speed of light.

From a mathematical point of view velocities can be larger than c. It has been shown that Lorentz transformations are easily extended in Minkowski space to address velocities beyond the speed of light. Energy and momentum conservation fixes the relation between masses and velocities larger than c, leading to the possible observation of negative mass squared particles from a standard reference frame. Current data on neutrino mass squared yield negative values, making neutrinos as possible candidates for having speed larger than c. In this paper, an original analysis of the SN1987A supernova data is proposed. It is shown that all the data measured in '87 by all the experiments are consistent with the quantistic description of neutrinos as combination of superluminal mass eigenstates. The well known enigma on the arrival times of the neutrino bursts detected at LSD, several hours earlier than at IMB, K2 and Baksan, is explained naturally. It is concluded that experimental evidence for superluminal neutrinos was recorded since the SN1987A explosion, and that data are quantitatively consistent with the introduction of tachyons in Einstein's equation.

Personally I cannot take tachyonic neutrinos seriously. I would not however choose the easy option and argue that the result is due to a bad experimentation as Lubos and Jester do. This kind of effect is actually one of the basic predictions of TGD and emerge for more than 20 years ago. Also several Hubble constants are predicted and explanation for why the distance between Earth and Moon seems to increasing as an apparent phenomenon emerges. There are many other strange phenomena which find an explanation.

In TGD Universe space-time is many-sheeted 4-surface in 8-D imbedding space M⁴× CP₂ and since the light-like geodesics of space-time sheet are not light-like geodesics of Minkowski space it takes in general longer time to travel from point A to B along them than along imbedding space geodesics. Space-time sheet is bumpy and wiggled so that the path is longer. Each space-time sheet corresponds to different light velocity as determined from the travel time. The maximal signal velocity is reached only in an ideal situation when the space-time geodesics are geodesics of Minkowski space.

Robertson-Walker cosmology gives a good estimate for the light velocity in cosmological scales.

1. One can use the relationship

   da/dt= g_aa^-1/2

   relating the curvature radius a of RW cosmology space (equal to M⁴ light-cone proper time, the light-like boundary of the cone corresponds to the moment of Big Bang) and cosmic time t appearing in Robertson-Walker line element

   ds²=dt²- a²dσ²₃.

2. If one believes that Einstein's equations in long scales, one obtains

   (8πG/3)× ρ =(g_aa^-1-1)/a².

   One can solve from this equation g_aa and therefore get an estimate the cosmological speed of light as

   c_#=(g_aa)^1/2.

3. By plugging in the estimates

   a= ≈ t≈ 13.8× Gy (the actual value is around 10 Gy)

   ρ≈ 5 m_p/m³ (5 protons per cubic meter)

   G= 6.7× 1o^-11 m³kg^-1s^-2

   one obtains the estimate

   (g_aa)^1/2 ≈ .73.

What can we conclude from the result? The light velocity identified as cosmic light velocity would 27 per cent smaller than the maximal signal velocity. This could easily explain why neutrinos arrived from SN1987A few hours earlier than photons: they just arrived along different space-time sheet containing somewhat less matter. One could also understand OPERA results.

If these findings survive they will provide an additional powerful empirical support for the notion of many-sheeted space-time. Sad that TGD predictions must still be verified via accidental experimental findings. It would be much easier to do the verification of TGD systematically. In any case, Laws of Nature do not care about science policy, and I dare hope that the mighty powerholders of particle physics are sooner or later forced to accept TGD as the most respectable known candidate for a theory unifying standard model and General Relativity.

For background see the chapter TGD and GRT of the online book "Physics in Many-Sheeted Space-time" or the article Are neutrinos superluminal?.

Could TGD be an integrable theory?

During years evidence supporting the idea that TGD could be an integrable theory in some sense has accumulated. The challenge is to show that various ideas about what integrability means form pieces of a bigger coherent picture. Of course, some of the ideas are doomed to be only partially correct or simply wrong. Since it is not possible to know beforehand what ideas are wrong and what are right the situation is very much like in experimental physics and it is easy to claim (and has been and will be claimed) that all this argumentation is useless speculation. This is the price that must be paid for the luxury of genuine thinking.

Integrable theories allow to solve nonlinear classical dynamics in terms of scattering data for a linear system. In TGD framework this translates to quantum classical correspondence. The solutions of modified Dirac equation define the scattering data. The conjecture is that octonionic real-analyticity with space-time surfaces identified as surfaces for which the imaginary part of the biquaternion representing the octonion vanishes solves the field equations. This conjecture generalizes the conformal invariance to its octonionic analog. If this conjecture is correct, the scattering data should define a real analytic function whose octonionic extension defines the space-time surface as a surface for which its imaginary part in the representation as bi-quaternion vanishes. There are excellent hopes about this thanks to the reduction of the modified Dirac equation to geometric optics.

I do not bother to type 10 pages of text here but refer to the article An attempt to understand preferred extremals of Kähler action and to the chapter TGD as a Generalized Number Theory II: Quaternions, Octonions, and their Hyper Counterparts of "Physics as Generalized Number Theory".

Where did the Lithium go?

In the comment section of my blog Ulla gave an interesting link concerning Lithium problem to an article by Elisabetta Caffau et al titled "An extremely primitive halo star".

What has been found is a star which is extremely poor on metallic elements: ("metallic" refers to elements heavier than Li). The mystery is that not only elements heavier than Li but also Li itself, whose average abundance is believed to be determined by cosmological rather than stellar nucleosynthesis, is very scarcely present in these stars.

This finding can be coupled with too other observations about anomalies in Li abundance.

1. The average abundance of Li in cosmos is lower than predicted by standard cosmology by a factor between 2 and 3. See this.
2. Also Sun has too low Li abundance. See this.

I have proposed years ago (see this) that part of Li has transformed to dark matter (gained larger value of Planck constant) and therefore effectively disappeared. This process would have occurred both in interstellar medium and in stars so that all three Li problems would be solved at once.

One might even imaginge a process in which star gradually loses its heavier elements as they transform to dark matter and are "eaten" by a dark star formed at the same time in the vicinity. If this were the case, dark matter stars would tend to be near ordinary start with anomalously low abundance of Li and heavier elements.

Many question marks remain. What about the rate for the phase transition to dark matter? Also the nuclei lighter than Li should be able to transform to dark form. Why the cosmological abundances for them are however essentially those predicted by the standard model of primordial nucleosynthesis? Is the reason that Li their fusion to Li was much faster than transformation to dark matter during primordial nucleosynthesis whereas Li fused very slowly and had time to transform to dark Li?

Authors think that some process could have created very high temperature destroying the Li in this kind of stars: maybe dark matter annihilation might have caused this. This looks rather artificial to me and would not explain too low Li abundance for other stars and for interstellar medium.

Li problem would rather sharply distinguish between two very different views about dark matter: dark matter as some exotic elementary particles on one hand and dark matter as phases of ordinary matter implied by generalization of quantum theory on the other hand.

For background see the chapter Nuclear String Hypothesis of "p-Adic Length Scale Hypothesis and Dark Matter Hierarchy".

Entropic gravity in difficulties?

Eric Verlinde's Entropic Gravity is one of the fashions of recent day theoretical physics which come and go (who still remembers Lisi's "Exceptionally simple theory of everything", which raised Lisi for a moment a potential follower of Einstein?) That this would happen was rather clear to me from the beginning and I expressed my views in several postings: see this, this, and this. The idea that gravitons are there not all and gravitational force is purely thermodynamical force looks nonsensical to me on purely mathematical grounds. But what about physics? Kobakhidze wrote a paper in which he demonstrated that the neutron interferometry experiments disfavor the notion of entropic gravity. Neutron behaves like a quantal particle obeying Schrödinger equation in the gravitational field of Earth and it is difficult to understand this if gravitation is entropic force.

I wrote detailed comments about this in the second posting and proposed different interpretation of the basic formulas for gravitational temperature and entropy based on zero energy ontology predicting that even elementary particle are at least mathematically analogous to thermodynamical objects. The temperature and entropy would be associated with the ensemble of gravitons assigned with the flux tubes mediating gravitational interaction and temperature behaves naturally as 1/r² in absence of other graviton/heat sourcers and entropy is naturally proportional to the flux tube length and therefore to the radial distance r. This allows to understand the formulas deduced by Sabine Hossenfelder who has written one of the rather few clear expositions about entropic gravity (Somehow it reflects the attitudes towards women in physics that her excellent contribution was not mentiond in the reference list of the Wikipedia article. Disgusting.). Entropic gravitons are of course quite different thing than gravitation as entropic force.

The question about the proper interpretation of the formulas was extremely rewarding since it also led to ask what is the GRT limit of TGD could be. This led to beautiful answer and in turn forced to ask what black holes really are in TGD Universe. We have no empirical information about their interiors so that general relativistic answer can be taken only as one possibility which is even plagued by mathematical difficulties. Blackhole horizon is quite concretely the door to the new physics so that one should have be very openminded here- we really do not know what is behind the door!

The TGD based answer was surprising: black holes in TGD Universe correspond to the regions of space-time with Euclidian signature of the induced metric. In particular, the lines of generalized Feynman diagrams are blackholes in this sense. This view would unify elementary particles and blackholes. This proposal also leads to a concrete proposal for how to understand the extremely small value of the cosmological constant as the average value of cosmological constant which vanishes for Minkowskian regions but is large for Euclidian regions and determined by CP₂ size.

The first article of Kobakhidze appeared in arXiv already two years ago but was not noticed by bloggers (except me but as a dissident I am of course not counted;-). Here the fact that I was asked to act as a referee helped considerably. Unfortunately I did not have time for this!).) . The new article Once more: gravity is not an entropic force of Kobakhidze was however noticed by media and also by physics bloggers.

Lubos came first: Lubos however had read the article carelessly (even its abstract) and went to claim that M. Chaichian, M. Oksanen, and A. Tureanu state in their article that Kobakhidze's claim is wrong and that they support entropic gravity. This was of course not the case: the authors agreed with Kobakhidze about entropic gravity but argued that there was a mistake in his reasoning. In honor of Lubos one must say that he noticed the problems caused by the lack of quantum mechanical interferene effects already much earlier.

Also Johannes Koelman wrote about the topic with inspiration coming from the popular web article Experiments Show Gravity Is Not an Emergent Phenomenon inspired by Kobakhidze's article.

To my opinion Verlinde's view is wrong but it would be a pity if one would not try to explain the highly suggestive formulas for entropy and temperature like parameters nicely abstracted by Sabine Hossenfelder from Verlinde's work. I have already described briefly my own interpretation inspired by zero energy ontology. In TGD framework it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that also the mediators of other interactions are in thermal equilibrium at corresponding space-time sheets and that the temperature is universally the Unruh temperature determined by acceleration. Also the expression for the entropy can be deduced as the following little argument shows.

What makes the situation so interesting is that the sign of both temperature and entropy are negative for repulsive interactions suggesting thermo-dynamical instability. This leads to the question whether matter antimatter separation could relate to are reversal of the arrow of geometric time at space-time sheets mediating repulsive long range interactions. This statement makes sense in zero energy ontology and the arrow of time has a concrete mathematical content as a property of zero energy states. In the following I will consider identification of the temperature and entropy assignable to the flux tubes mediating gravitational or other interactions. I was too lazy to deduce explicit formulas in the original version of the article about this topic and added the formulas also into it.

Graviton temperature

Consider first the gravitonic temperature. The natural guess for the temperature parameter would be as Unruh temperature

T_gr= (hbar/2π) a ,

where a is the projection of the gravitational acceleration along the normal of the gravitational potential = constant surface. In the Newtonian limit it would be acceleration associated with the relative coordinates and correspond to the reduced mass and equal to a=G(m₁+m₂)/r².

One could identify T_gr also as the magnitude of gravitational acceleration. In this case the definition would involved only be purely local. This is in accordance with the character of temperature as intensive property.

The general relativistic objection against the generalization is that gravitation is not a genuine force: only a genuine acceleration due to other interactions than gravity should contribute to the Unruh temperature so that gravitonic Unruh temperature should vanish. On the other hand, any genuine force should give rise to an acceleration. The sign of the temperature parameter would be different for attractive and repulsive forces so that negative temperatures would become possible. Also the lack of general coordinate invariance is a heavy objection against the formula.

In TGD Universe the situation is different. In this case the definition of temperature as magnitude of local acceleration is more natural.

1. Space-time surface is sub-manifold of the imbedding space and one can talk about acceleration of a point like particle in imbedding space M⁴× CP₂. This acceleration corresponds to the trace of the second fundamental form for the imbedding and is completely well-defined and general coordinate invariant quantity and vanishes for the geodesics of the imbedding space. Since acceleration is a purely geometric quantity this temperature would be same for flux sheets irrespective of whether they mediate gravitational or some other interactions so that all kinds of virtual particles would be characterized by this same temperature.

2. One could even generalize T_gr to a purely local position dependent parameter by identifying it as the magnitude of second fundamental form at given point of space-time surface. This would mean that the temperature in question would have purely geometric correlate. This temperature would be alwas non-negative. This purely local definition would also save from possible inconsistencies in the definition of temperature resulting from the assumption that its sign depends on whether the interaction is repulsive or attractive.

3. The trace of the second fundamental form -call it H- and thus T_gr vanishes for minimal surfaces. Examples of minimal surfaces are cosmic strings, massless extremals and CP₂ vacuum extremals with M⁴ projection which is light-like geodesic. Vacuum extremals with at most 2-D Lagrangian CP₂ projection has a non-vanishing H and this is true also for their deformations defining the counterpart of GRT space-time. Also the deformations of cosmic strings with 2-D M⁴ projection to magnetic flux tubes with 4-D M⁴ projection are expected to be non-minimal surfaces. Same applies to the deformations of CP₂ vacuum extremals near the region where the signature of the induced metric changes. The predicted cosmic string dominated phase of primordial cosmology would correspond to the vanishing gravitonic temperature. Also generic CP₂ type vacuum extremals have non-vanishing H.

4. Massless extremals are excellent macroscopic space-time correlate for gravitons. The massivation of gravitons is however strongly suggested by simple considerations encouraged by twistorial picture and wormhole throats connecting parallel MEs definine the basic building bricks of gravitons and would bring in non-vanishing geometric temperature, (extremely small but non-vanishing) graviton mass, and gravitonic entropy.
   1. The M⁴ projection of CP₂ type vacuum extremal is random light-like curve rather than geodesic of M⁴ (this gives rise to Virasoro conditions). The mass scale defined by the second fundamental form describing acceleration is non-vanishing. I have indeed assigned this scale as well as the mixing of M⁴ and CP₂ gamma matrices inducing mixing of M⁴ chiralities giving rise to massivation. The original proposal was that the trace of second fundamental form could be identifiable as classical counterpart of Higgs field. One can speak of light-like randomness above a given length scale defined by the inverse of the length of the acceleration vector.

   2. This suggests a connection with p-adic mass calculations: the p-adic mass scale m_p is proportional to the acceleration and thus could be given by the geometric temperature: m_p=n R^-1p^-1/2∼ hbar H=hbar a, where R∼ 10⁴L_Pl is CP₂ radius, and n some numerical constant of order unity. This would determine the mass scale of the particle and relate it to the momentum exchange along corresponding CP₂ type vacuum extremal. Local graviton mass scale at the flux tubes mediating gravitational interaction would be essentially the geometric temperature.

   3. Interestingly, for photons at the flux tubes mediating Coulomb interactions in hydrogen atom this mass scale would be of order

      hbar a ∼ e²hbar/[m_pn⁴a₀²]∼ 10^-5 /n⁴ eV,

      which is of same order of magnitude as Lamb shift, which corresponds to 10^-6 eV energy scale for n=2 level of hydrogen atom. Hence it might be possible to kill the hypothesis rather easily.

   4. Note that momentum exchange is space-like for Coulomb interaction and the trace H^k of the second fundamental form would be space-like vector. It seems that one define mass scale as H=(-H^kH_k)^1/2 to get a real quantity.

   5. This picture is in line with the view that also the bosons usually regarded as massless possess a small mass serving as an IR cufoff. This vision is inspired by zero energy ontology and twistorial considerations kenociteallb/twistor. The prediction that Higgs is completely eaten by gauge bosons in massivation is a prediction perhaps testable at LHC already during year 2011.

Remark: In MOND theory of dark matter a critical value of acceleration is introduced. I do not believe personally to MOND and TGD explains galactic rotation curves without any modification of Newtonian dynamics in terms of dark matter assignable to cosmic strings containing galaxies like around it like pearls in necklace. In TGD framework the critical acceleration would be the acceleration above which the gravitational acceleration caused by the dark matter associated with the cosmic strings traversing along galactic plane orthogonally and behaving as 1/ρ overcomes the acceleration caused by the galactic matter and behaving as 1/ρ². Could this critical acceleration correspond to a critical temperature T_gr and could critical value of H perhaps characterize also a critical magnitude for the deformation from minimal surface extremal? The critical acceleration in Milgrom's model is about 1.2*10^-10 m/s² and corresponds to a time scale of 10¹² years, which is of the order of the age of the Universe.

The formula contains Planck constant and the obvious question of the inhabitant of TGD Universe is whether the Planck constant can be identified with the ordinary Planck constant or with the effective Planck constant coming as integer multiple of it (see this).

1. For the ordinary value of hbar the gravitational Unruh temperature is extremely small. To make things more concrete one can express the Unruh temperature in gravitational case in terms of Schwartschild radius r_S=2GMm at Newtonian limit. This gives

   T_gr= (hbar/4π r_S) [ (M+m)/M] (r_S/r)² .

   Even at Schwartschild radius the temperature corresponds to Compton length of order 4π r_S for m<<M.

2. Suppose that Planck constant is gravitational Planck constant hbar_gr= GMm/v₀, where v₀≈ 2^-11 holds true for inner planets in solar system (see this). This would give

   T_gr= (m/8π v₀) [(M+m)/M] (r_S/r)² .

   The value is gigantic so that one must assume that the temperature parameter corresponds to the minimum value of Planck constant.

Gravitonic entropy

A good guess for the value of gravitational entropy (gravitonic entropy associated with the flux tube mediating gravitational interaction) comes from the observation that it should be proportional to the flux tube length. The relationship dE= dS/T suggests S∝ φ_gr/T_gr as the first guess in Newtonian limit. A better guess would be

S_gr= -V_gr/T_gr= [(M+m)/M] (r/hbar m) ,

The replacement M→ M+m appearing in the Newtonian equations of motion for the reduced mass has been performed to obtain symmetry with respect to the exchange of the masses.

The entropy would depend on the interaction mediated by the space-time sheet in question which suggests that the generalization is

S=-V(r)/T_gr .

Here V(r) is the potential energy of the interaction. The sign of S depends on whether the interaction is attractive or repulsive and also on the sign of the temperature. For a repulsive interaction the entropy would be negative so that the state would be thermodynamically unstable in ordinary thermodynamics.

The integration of dE= TdS in the case of Coulomb potential gives E= V(r)-V(0) for both options. If the charge density near origin is constant, one has V(r) proportional to r² in this region implying V(0)=0 so that one obtains Coulombic interaction energy E=V(r). Hence thermodynamical interpretation makes sense formally.

The challenge is to generalize the formula of entropy in Lorentz invariant and general coordinate invariant manner. Basically the challenge is to express the interaction energy in this manner. Entropy characterizes the entire flux tube and is therefore a non-local quantity. This justifies the use of interaction energy in the formula. In principle the dynamics defined by the extremals of Kähler action predicts the dependence of the interaction energy on Minkowskian length of the flux tube, which is well-defined in TGD Universe. Entropy should be also a scalar. This is achieved since the rest frame is fixed uniquely by the time direction defined by the time-like line connecting the tips of CD: the interaction energy in rest frame of CD defines a scalar. Note that the sign of entropy correlates with the sign of interaction energy so that the repulsive situation would be thermodynamically unstable and this suggests that matter antimatter asymmetry could relate to thermal instability.

See the article TGD inspired vision about entropic gravity. For background see the chapter TGD and GRT of "Physics in Many-Sheeted Space-Time".