Welcome September! I’m going to be quite busy for a bit, partly because I have two big science projects that need to get finished, partly because I’m settling in at my new location this week — which always takes longer than one hopes and expects. But I’ve got a few things in the pipeline for the blog, so there will be posts to follow soon.
If you were away last week, you missed the first two sections of a collection of articles that I’m writing on “naturalness”, a concept that’s central to the lines of reasoning often taken by particle physicists and their colleagues, both nowadays and over the past few decades. These articles came out last week, one on Tuesday (explaining what “natural” means in this context, and giving a first glimpse into what particle physicists mean by saying the Standard Model is “unnatural”) and one on Friday of last week, where I explained something about the quantum fluctuations of the fields of nature and how they can have lots of energy — energy which,
- when intertwined with Einstein’s theory of gravity, leads to the cosmological constant problem, and,
- when intertwined with the Higgs field and particle, leads to the naturalness problem of the Standard Model.
I said something (not very much, really) about the first problem on Friday, and it’s not my main focus right now. My plan this week is to start explaining the details of the second problem.
So stay tuned…
5 Responses
Stay tuned… finely tuned.
Dear Professor: I recently saw a video of a talk by Dr Fay Dowker given at the Perimeter Institute in which she claimed the cosmological constant problem had been solved long before dark energy was discovered by theorists working on the Causal Set structure of spacetime. What do you think about that? Thanks.
You might want to get around to updating your About Me page now that you’ve landed at Harvard. 🙂 Also, congratulations !
I’ve read a few statements by leading physicists like Lee Smolin who seem to think that a lot pf this is farflung. I however, think you may be going in the right direction and only time will tell. Until then, I will continue to follow the field and read more on it.
Meteorologist Larry Olson
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