Scenic Lookout

Let us summarise a few of the observational results of special interest. Neutrino experiments are as interesting as ever. The anomalies at long baseline, reactor and other experiments remain unresolved.

1. We know that CP violation for the SM neutrinos almost certainly measures in at J=0.024, and this could actually be measured in the forseeable future.
2. MINOS recently confirmed the delta m square values coming from the mirror neutrino hypothesis. Although one decimal place might not sound like an impressive prediction, it's a start, and let us not forget that the false rumour mill was trying to put us off the scent, as usual.
3. The Planck mission are having trouble finding tensor modes, and their low multipole data is definitely not falling in line with the LCDM paradigm. And check out that Hubble constant. If we can get it back in agreement with WMAP9, then Louise's prediction for Omega_b will be right.
4. IceCube had the gall to observe PeV neutrinos about the sky, and not in obvious correspondence with any known astrophysical sources.
5. The positrons from Fermi and Pamela are not behaving like wimpy positrons ought to. It is still possible that the excess is due to ordinary astrophysical processes, but one can easily imagine many mechanisms that do not hinge on wimpy annihilations. And let us not forget the Fermi bubble.

A Little History

Since the worst kind of people have everyone's personal information, perhaps it is time we laid a few cards on the table. That's right, believe it or not, despite all those years of blogging, you have never heard the whole story. Nowhere near it.

Things were bad all along, but the serious problems started in 2004, when the academics decided that my career was a joke. The PTSD was getting worse and worse, but nobody ever discussed such things with me and the compulsory mentoring program somehow passed me over. In 2005 the money ran out, and a long spate of malnutrition ensued. By early 2006, I was getting no exercise, staring at my desktop screen all day, and essentially living off sweet biscuits from the tea room. The academics never stopped torturing me. In June 2006, I landed in hospital with psychosis. It lasted only 3 days, but this has been used by certain people ever since to argue against allowing me into academia. So much for discrimination policies. It turns out, as I only found out this year, that the Christchurch people knew all about the illness, although of course it was never discussed with me.

When I finally managed to return to the university again in 2007, the academics soon made sure that I was starving again. But the thesis had been submitted, and that boosted my ridiculous hopes for a little while. Unfortunately, the chronic depression goes back to early 1989. There can be no doubt as to its cause, because it inevitably appears whenever I am cast out of the world of physics. To get better, one needs to be treated like a human being, with genuine respect. Since we all know that's not going to happen, the perpetual outcome is inevitable. I realise I am condemned to spend the rest of my life alone in poverty. I don't know if I can ever get rid of the anxiety. As for the psychosis - it is something I understand, and it is enlightening. If one gets enough exercise and food, it is not a problem.

As you know, since 2007, things got a whole lot more interesting. Suddenly, all those academics that had mocked me for working on category theory were going to conferences with talks on category theory, making sure in the mean time that I could never attend such conferences ever again. Suddenly, all those string theorists who laughed at quantum information were working on quantum information and twistor field theory. Some men started showing concern that a woman should be interested in these things. Probably they wanted to drive me to my death, but I guess they were satisfied with insanity. Only, they are operating under the assumptions of patriarchal doctrine, so they fail to understand that the strong can sometimes keep on going.

Back to Basics

 

 

Despite years of ridicule for particle ribbon graphs, it is still difficult to understand how they differ much from twistor diagrams. Replacing a single ribbon leg for the permutations on three letters with a ribbon triplet, we get back to the tetractys, namely the path space for three letters. The central bloop is the internal hexagon dual to the tetractys centre, which is just a copy of the permutation group. Moreover, the braid pictures (with some more detail) are themselves representations of the group (the odd cycles), and of particle annihilation. Mathematicians should like octupi.

Remember that braid diagrams are dual to arrows in a category, so that the triangle of annihilation really can be a vertex. The googly thingy is then just a matter of drawing the full picture.

Quote of the Month

We need those who refuse to see any conceivable option but victory. Women like the one who wrote to the Daily Telegraph in 1913. "Sir, Everyone seems to agree upon the necessity of putting a stop to Suffragist outrages; but no one seems certain how to do so. There are two, and only two, ways in which this can be done. Both will be effectual. 1. Kill every woman in the United Kingdom. 2. Give women the vote. Yours truly, Bertha Brewster."

Remember the suffragettes

Another Administrative Note

Of course, the majority of readers here these days come from the kind of website that a self respecting woman would never read. Personally, I can't understand their interest in a woman as old as I am, but I'm sure many physics dudes find all that misogynist porn very entertaining and amusing. Certainly many of them are reading it, anyway, and no doubt they have their fun with photoshop.

Yes, the women taught me that lesson when I was a teenager, oh so long ago. It was made very clear to me that I would never want for anything, if only I would dress and behave in a certain manner. Every day I live in poverty it is my choice.

Ho Higher Hum

To be honest, I never thought I would live to see this in my lifetime. It seems I can't open a newspaper without finding the general public laying into the dumb academics for not being able to figure anything out. In theoretical physics, especially. One cannot begin to imagine what that must be like for those who have spent a lifetime exalted in ivory towers. That cognitive dissonance must be rattling the braincase. One funeral at a time, as they say.

Meanwhile, every opportunist with funds to spare has latched onto some kind of chiral vacuum story without localised dark matter. It would have been more impressive before the observational evidence stockpile had reached current proportions. A theorist's job is to make unexpected predictions, not bleeding obvious postdictions or Orwellian newspeak.

So the latest craze is 14 dimensions. For the love of chocolate, if one can't get past classical geometry, why bother. Needless to say, I will not be attending or viewing said seminar, but the number 14 immediately suggests the 14 vertices of the Stasheff polytope in dimension 3! Which means it can't do that much, because we need higher dimensional ordinals for gravity. Perhaps this guy means something else, but then 14 would probably be some M theory thing with a few extra degrees of freedom tacked on. Notably, though, it is du Sautoy who is sponsoring the work. The mathematicians have finally realised that gravity and the Riemann hypothesis are very closely related, and not just in the way that Connes imagined. They must be dreaming of floating bank bills.

Slowly, Slowly II

One of the hardest things is knowing that every piece of work I ever do or have ever done, no matter what, will be claimed by some dude. When a new paper leads to a swarm of blog hits, but few have actually downloaded it, it's kind of obvious where the intentions lie. Now that the misogynists have convinced everyone that I'm just a idiot, there are only a few that avidly read every word I say. It's a law of nature, isn't it? The people who take you the most seriously are often your most mortal enemies.