Banner
An Open Letter to Nancy Mace: Go to Hell—or Propose Single-Stall Bathrooms. Sarah McBride show some backbone.

Let’s get something straight: your obsession with trans people using bathrooms is a distraction...

We Need A Million Person March

Nearly 30 years ago, Minister Louis Farrakhan called for the Million Man March—a gathering of...

Does Chat GPT Think, Is AI Research Physics, And Are We In A Universe Based On Voxels?

The answers to the title questions are, No, Yes, and why not.  What I have been doing instead...

A New Theory of Everything That Sets Scalars Equal To Tensors Looks Like Nonsense.

If your theory of everything has tensors set equal to scalars then it is wrong. Simply put...

User picture.
picture for Hank Campbellpicture for Fred Phillipspicture for Robert H Olleypicture for Chidambaram Rameshpicture for Patrick Lockerbypicture for Jerry Decker
Hontas FarmerRSS Feed of this column.

My research focuses on astrophysics from massive star formation to astroparticle physics. Born and raised in Chicagoland I have lived in Bellwood, IL since 1984 and attended public schools here... Read More »

Blogroll

Gravitational wave astronomy in space, that is the goal of the LISA Collaboration.  LISA stands for Laser Interferometer Space Antenna.  This collaboration is having a very early meeting in Florida and at that meeting there will be certain public talks broadcast on YouTube.  I will embed those here. With perhaps a translation for the perplexed later.  


If you find gravitational wave astronomy i.e. as done by the LIGO collaboration interesting, then you will love what LISA will do. 

Biased against Women and Black People? That is what the Harvard Implicit Association test  (IAT)showed me.  I took them more than once and this was the overall result.  As a SMALL part of a large collaboration that may put hardware into space, I was invited to take this test in preparation for a diversity workshop.  Since I could not attend the conference, I thought it wise to send these results out to the group.   Some may feel like these tests only target straight white males to malign them as racist and sexist.   The IAT could also show one is biased against white people.

A simple slice of life as an academic.  No chair was assigned for the session Z13 in which my theoretical research was presented along with great work in varying fields but with related themes.  Waves, and/or fluids connected all that was discussed.  The research I found most interesting was not my own.    My peers in the session elected me to the honored position since none was assigned.  Likely because APS trusted us not to act in appropriately.

Theoretical physicist have no more than five good unique insights in a lifetime. Then spend years chasing down the implications of those insights. May computers at least help with if not supplant us in this effort? Maybe, maybe not. I Went to talk, did a lot of good listening, and served as a sort of unofficial chair of the session because APS didn’t assign one for session Z13. (No so unusual peruse the session index and a handful don’t have chairs. Sessions B10, Y08). That was a new interesting experience. I could see the overarching themes of the talks APS put in the session.

A hypothesis of everything, that is not what I first thought it would be, is what I will present tomorrow at the April 2019 APS conference. Quantum Gravity, finding a way to make general relativity into a quantum theory of some kind, has been the driving mystery of my adult life.  Now, after years of work towards that, a few who have researched the problem think it was the wrong approach.  That instead we should make Quantum Field theory compatible with General Relativity in some way or the other.   Not the other way around.

By oversimplifying the complex human story of how big science done by big collaborations like Event Horizon Telescope, the mainstream media got many things wrong.    The task of the media is to inform the general public.   So, while they do have to simplify complex topics they also have to faithfully represent them.  

Social media reflects the level of understanding created in the average person by both our educational system and the major media. Being a adjunct prof at community colleges teaching introductiory to intermediate level courses this was not surprising to me.