Just back from the allotment with a couple of hours to kill.
I'm not sure what your meaning actually is Paul. Helios refers to Greece or Hellos. The Ptolomaic system was wrong, Copernicus was correct. From hindsight, although I doubt anyone has used it, after the fact we may refer to it as heliocentric dogma. Can we refer to our current understanding of the cosmos origin as cosmological dogma?
Within the last 6 months there has been the greatest turmoil happening in the history of Science. There have been thousands of archived and published papers on tachyon neutrinos; there wasn't some doubt individually, collectively there was huge doubt. Again thousands of theories on Susy have been trashed by the LHC exclusion energy ranges reported almost on a monthly basis. In the history of Science never has there been so much carnage; mega brains the likes of that robot in Hitch Hikers Guide, reduced to menial tasks and utter depression. Last week woeful news in that the anticipated flux of high energy neutrinos from gamma ray bursts failed to materialise in the Ice Cube South Pole experiment! If only we had known that in the late 60's.
This isn't science in general; it's all about hard physics and mathematics. There may be a lot of worries about the increase of pseudoscience or antiscience. When we talk about particle physics or dark matter and its implications to cosmology, the history that takes us to current views about standard models in either fields it is a comedy of errors and changing viewpoints, often radical personal changes of view in particle physics but things are quiet on the cosmology front.
It's not that you know too little science, infact you know too much. There's no simplicity here in hard physics. Occam's razor led many a particle physicist astray. Much of the theory is counterintuitive; it's not simple and it isn't Occam's razor in tortuous old English. There are many scientific disciplines. A decade ago a can of sardines or a glass of red wine was good for you, nowadays it isn't; it could be a statistical 10% enhanced chance of whatever proves mortal. Even aspirin gets a lousy press from time to time; if you are Japanese it's likely to kill you. In the end it's a lottery; you have good genes or bad ones but infact science will infact prolong your life regardless of any placebo effect based upon philosophy or religion.
Early on in this thread I mentioned that with regard to the Standard Model of particle physics and extensions to it, such as a master symmetry to U1 and SU's 2 and 3 there was no other game in town, regardless of the invective about stringers string theories or membranologists which I don't intend as a derogatory comment. The Standard Model is incomplete, nevertheless it's more complete this month than ever so before. Three years ago I mentioned that the Higgs Boson was 90% or 99% certain to exist and to be discovered. Within the last year the Cern director was a worried man, as the exclusion zones broadened it looked like they wouldn't find it, so how would they disclose this news to the public who had forked some10 billion euros? Susy particles as well faired badly. Paradise was regained when it is now apparent there could well be a standard model Higgs discovery. Nothing is certain, it could be Radion!
Particle physics, and I may add also in the development of cosmolgy, is and was awash with triple A brains. Not all. Peter Higgs has taken a lot of flack in the last 45 plus years. He is a very modest man, and that is unusual. You all know he wasn't the first in the game etc. , there were others , three in mind and at least half a dozen other contributors, and much much odium and strife in the ensuing years. However, he was the first to mention what the others omitted, namely that quantum field theory implied with every field, that there was an associated force carrier and as an excitation of the field, that there was a real particle associated with it, a spinless scalar boson, Goldstone's 4th boson. Some claim it was obvious at the time. Infact, this was all before people were writing SU(3) maths. Quantum field theory was in the doldrums at the time, some Nobel Laureates, perhaps the most famous one you are familiar with so I'll not mention his name(s) rubbished it and the idiot perpetrators of such theories. If you publish enough papers some you will get right and others will be wrong. The bad ones are forgotten.Folk remember your best stuff.
There's one paper I published in '74 in Chemical Geology but I never mention until now; it had a huge error I should have realised at the time but didn't. The empirical results revealed that the isotope ratios for two metals nickel and chromium were of solar and meteoritic abundance. The conclusion was that >ca. 3 billion years ago huge astrobleme impacts had reset the terrestrial ratios, that were hugly different. This was 1974, well before any iridium anomalies in the Cretacous Tertairy boundary were mentioned. I was eventually correct about the implications to theory, but many months later some South African geologists redid the experiments on the South African Cherts from Swaziland and proved my results were erroneous. I redid the analyses with another procedure and lo and behold they [South African ] were correct. The new theory that there were major astrobleme impacts that caused the arcuate geological structures in the Early Precambrian was regarded as wrong. Instead they were vindicated as accepted volcanic dogma. Of course I got the theory right in hindsight but based upon a lousy procedure for these metalextractions. This is the first time I have ever admitted to it. Folk do forget your bad papers, but you can't and closet them for years.
In the development of the Standard Model and Peter Higgs huge contribution, apropo hidden symmetries and the mantra of spontaneous symmetry breaking to it, amidst the arrogance abrasiveness and agression of all participants to it over the years, regardless of whether it exists or not, and post the discovery of the top quark it almost assuredly does exist, then Peter Higgs thoroughly deserves that Nobel award, above all others as soon as possible. It is not awarded posthumously and the shame that would ensue otherwise is and would be immeasurable.
You know too much science, not too little. A strange comment perhaps. It is axiomatic and an axiom is a rigorous term to a mathematician that particles are produced in pairs. Weinberg applied the principle to cosmology during the infancy of what became the Standard Model not just of particle physics but of Big Bang cosmology. It is not easy to forget what you have learned. Time travel back to Hubble's day when he elaborated upon what Vespto Slipher had noted for misidentied galaxies. They were receeding from each other. Hubble's law was based upon locally distant galaxies and his plot I commented on before was pathetic. OK- fast forward ; his theory was correct although his observations had they been appropriate for planetary motions would have left one screaming for Ptolomy's system. I tend to think that were he here now he would observe that all those filamentous structures and triple junctions were not what he envisaged, except that once one gets to 100 fold his original distances then yes they all appear to be receeding from one another out to what is observable. Out beyond 100-200 megaparsecs then yes it's expansion even though there's the odd group still being incorporated into large clusters.
Let's go back to the mid seventies and Weinberg's Big Bang model at the time of the eight fold way or before what has become the Standard Model of Particle physics. There were two flavours not three, the strange quark has been discovered but not the charm, far more massive and much longer lived; half the eventual cluster of quarks. In Weinberg's model there are two neutrinos and these are massless. The Standard Model treats massless left handed neutrinos; but does it? Already there were doubts; could neutrinos have restmass in the same manner if I might ask today, do gluons have a mass charge? Try answering that one or why is the electron mass what it is? The quarks inhabit a nuclear region down at 1000 to 10000 fold of the atom radius. So as per orbiting electrons why don't quarks do likewise. Pauli had his exclusion principle. These are fermions and it couldn't happen. Counterintuitively, colour charge, three of them, was introduced so they could accommodate themselves. Furhermore, and weird , unlike the screening problem for electrons the quarks displayed what was called asymptotic freedom mathematically or anti screening. This wasn't simple and it took a then mathematician who was rapidly morphing into a particle physicist , Frank Wilczek, to do it; renormalised Yang Mills equations with a negative force function. Gerard 't Hooft, a young post doctorate did it previously but didn't know or realise the implications that would have won him a second Nobel much earlier in his career. Counterintuitive and complex, not simplicity itself that put field theory back on the map in a maths backwater of U1 SU(2) SU(3) symmetries, a rag bag of chalk and cheese symmetries, U1 is not on killing's list, not the beauty of Dirac's visions.
Weinberg treated massless neutrinos that as per photons lose energy as an expanding universe evolves. A hot beginning, a cooling evolution; there should be thermal imprint of stretched photons and neutrinos in the hereafter.; a CMB neutrino temperature lagging ca. 40% below a photon temperature background, but we can't measure it yet. Remember real particles don't stretch; their rest mass remains constant. Weinberg treats particle pair production for electrons and positrons but beyond heavier mesons there are just too many particle types to treat. Effectively, he starts with a hot universe at ca 4 light years in extent at ~10
11Kelvin, although the universe could be infinite in extent and follows pair production temperatures and equilibrium conditions of photon abundances and particle pairs in a continuum of energies, a black body distribution of radiation that the particle physicists are aware of. There are non equilibrium events; eg. electron positron pair instabilities or gamma ray bursts where you expect to see discrete energies and not thermalised continuae in our current cold universe. There are the three problems I alluded to that inflation settles although one has to accept an immense alternative, the singularity of almost infinite density. Well the Vatican goes along with it but I don't suppose they understand the second law.
There's counterintuitive stuff here. Just why is there this huge photon abundance and a smattering of baryonic stuff left after annihilations. Why is the electron mass and charge what it is? Thee fold higher and there's no existence; everything collapses into neutrons fast; there are no atoms. Threefold less mass and charge and yes there are atoms but they are sluggish and bigger. Today we have small stars half our sol's mass that will burn for another 300 billion years; ours another 5 billion and before that the Goldilocks zone has disappeared. But we need heavy elements for our existence and without rapidly burning heavies there's no carbon , no oxygen etc that makes our example of sentient life possible.
However, neutrinos were speculated to have mass and were given mass, a very small mass. Let me add that the measured mass squared differences that were predicted by Carl Brannen's extension to Koide's remarkably accurate theory for the three flavours of lepton masses, despite our inability to understand its deeper meaning as per a Balmer's formula analogy, predicts the neutrino masses. Or rather the phase angle analogy to Weinberg's angle for quarks predicted a phase called delta =2/9 + Pi/12 for neutrinos. Minos produced a strange result in June 2010 as well for the antineutrinos that agreed with Brannen's theory were the phase angle 2/9 - Pi/12. Let's say d=a +b . Marni Sheppeard shrewdly noted that for phase angle d=a-b the antineutrino mass squared difference value conformed to the Minos measurement . From this thread I was familiar with such low energies and/or rest mass energies and chiralities. Neutrinos had mass, low mass at that and quick calculations as per Weinberg revealed an answer, impossible initially to comprehend. Photon neutrino pair production meant it was axiomatic that these real and not virtual particles would be produced from the vacuum and cosmologically observable at current temperatures of a few orders of magnitude. I'm an atheist, most days, but I pondered why a creator would choose a +b and then a-b; why not counterintuitively since it has to accord with that Standard Model axiom, why not plus or minus a and plus or minus b? Infact not just one or two but four per flavour making twelve in all. It is not simple and it is not Occam at all. Marni's mirror particles were born which I continue to propose allo. Meanwhile Minos remains silent, and hopes it is an anomaly and will go away since nobody likes Koide's representations. Why should a radically different interpretation challenge cosmological dogma? I do not believe that this continuum pair production temperature is coincidence. It predicts an antineutrino photon continuum temperature of 2.73 Kelvin! for the first flavour electron antineutrino for parity conserved L and R spins. It will take a long time for the penny to drop perhaps for cosmologists with litlle particle physics knowledge. It's more likely a particle physicist will take note. You may be familiar with Popper; it's no virtue on my part to claim I have never read his books. Marni represents the predicted maths in her form; I see it as a physical chemist or an organic chemist would, well 24 order tetrahedral chirality is pushing it perhaps; that was my graduate and postgraduate background for many years. Is it correct? If it is verified our present understanding of cosmology will be akin to Ptolomaic epicycles of cosmology.
The vacuum is not just a seething mass of virtual particles striving to become real but is real particles of photons and neutrinos, even at the present day low temperature. What Penzias and Wilson measured is not a relic radiation but a here and now living vacuum of real particle pairs with differing mass charges that can annihilate amongst themselves as neutrinos and antineutrinos but also their allo or mirror pairs. They don't cross annihilate. Why? because we would observe a hybrid temperature not at 2.73Kelvin and as a an axiom , they don't carry electric charge or the colour charge. Instead if we accept Minos initial results that were prtrayed as the end of physics at the time they carry different mass charges so they cannot annihilate.This equilibrium continuum as implied as an implication is continually generated in an expanding universe with a density of ca. half an electron mass per cubic metre, much smaller than ~6GeV of baryonic particles/m
3. Weinberg's worry or enigma disappears, lepton number is conserved and the tiny baryon to photon ratio comes from the misidentification of the CMB with relic radiation, is now seen as a 1:1 correspondence of neutrino pairs with photons. This isn't conjecture it is a proof. Neutrinos have mass, they are real particles and have a pair production temperature threshold. Were we not to know of Penzias and Wilson's result nor even the Higgsy diphoton result we would predict that there is a true present day excess thermal noise equivalent to a black body spectrum at 0.89Kelvin or 2.73Kelvin derived from the continuous creation and annihilation of these now massive neutrinos. Now go find this CMB radiation. Thus I jest. The Penzias and Wilson and WMAP experiments did perform. Almost 14 billion years later the radiation never thermalised but still retained its Planck black body profile to better than 1 part in 10
5. That took some swallowing and is still infact accepted. That is what you and everyone bought , most passively- there was no alternative; neutrinos didn't have mass and if so were much heavier, or at least<20eV.
Without a knowledge of neutrino masses there was no other interpretation of the origin of it other than as relic radiation that was never thermalised. It had to keep its distribution as a relic effect in which a universe expanded faster than it could thermalise. If you play it according to Popper then the conventional interpretation of the CMB radiation has been falsified by particle physics data that could scarce have been dreamed on some 50 years ago. The Steady State model attempt to thermalise this so called relic radiation was forlorn hope and still remains so. Neutrino oscillation and photon pair production provides a new cosmology radically different from the Big Bang. We live in an ageing universe but it is still being created, everywhere in every nook and cranny! That's what the Minos mass squared interpretations allude to. The second law tells us that this mass balance of creation must be balanced by a concomitant destruction of space and its ancient baryon contents. The only place for it to disappear appears to be in black holes. Protons don't evaporate below immense time scales of 10
32 years.
There's real beauty here and a much richer and newer cosmology predicted for a halfway universe between an infinite existence of mostly eventual heat death and one of non existence at all, where sentient life can never evolve, where heavier elements never get forged. 1/alpha or 137 (137.036 that runs) and tiny neutrino masses appear as midway constants and not fine tuning, fuzzy , middling values conducive for life in our observable part. The potential vacuum energy at up to 10
120 the cosmological measured density at 2.73K is cancelled out to leave us with a virgin spacetime vacuum of close to half an electron mass 250,000 eV/m
3 compared with the critical density of ca. 6 GeV(6 thousand million eV0/m
3; ~1/28000 . I envision it as a Halfway Universe as in halfway home. We may speculate it doesn't have a beginning nor an end, nor is it cyclical in the currently accepted sense. Existence versus non existence, end members of philosophical torture. We live in the here and now with the 2.73 Kelvin glow of new growth around us. Elsewhere for some it's 0.89Kelvin. Space has to collapse somewhere for the glow from the other neutrino flavours. There has to be compression elsewhere and indeed from where comes the new baryons to replace the old. That's a hard nut to crack. We do need Weinberg's 4 light year continuum conflagrations ~10
11K , not bremsstrahlung gamma ray bursts with redshifted high energy neutrinos, the very types the Ice Cube expected to detect. At supercosmological distances events, such as enormous energy production as gamma ray bursts at near light velocity in its own reference frame , would to us in our reference frame for an event that takes several seconds might take years (up to~4 light years?) to develop in that far distance reference frame. A lesser effect is noted with closer supernovae at cosmological distance( not to be confused with super cosmological distance). About 150 events or grb's are registered here each year. In the Weinberg model, in this epoch the high energy neutrinos are in equilibrium and are thermalised. Volcanic eruptions herald the creation of new crust in a constantly rejuvenated Earth. I don't intend to rid the universe of Big Bangs at all. No-within our own universe, not a multiverse is required, it appears likely that these represent Weinberg type conflagrations, happening once every two days
, there's one born every day in our reference frame, and not a once and for all time event that only ever happened once some 14 billion years ago.
