LHC bump

There were some events at 750 GeV, resembling a second Higgs boson. As we all know, the first Higgs boson, with a mass of 125 GeV, saturates a theoretical bound (vacuum stability), and so it is encouraging to read here of a scenario in which 750 GeV is the theoretical upper bound on the mass of a second Higgs. However, within that scenario, the upper limit is correlated with another parameter in a way that is ruled out empirically. Therefore, by numero-logic, this was a false alarm and we can all go back to sleep.

Today's vixra weather

The number-one reason I monitor vixra is physics numerology. However, a lot of other stuff happens there, and a few times I have remarked upon it here.

Today has an unusual surge of interesting activity. Most of this is due to a document dump by an independent researcher in Bangalore, who appears to combine some genuine expertise and originality in signal processing and device physics, with a commitment to a traditional cultural synthesis embracing music, metaphysics, and language, and then rounded out with general polymathic speculation.

But there's also just a higher-than-usual density of papers combining geographically diverse origins and professionalism above the vixra average. In particular, this paper on neutrino mixing from China has a quite professional look and exposition - until the author wants to motivate their ansatz for the mixing matrix, and then suddenly there's crazy talk [*] about fractals, Tsallis statistics, and M theory. Also notable is that this newly uploaded paper immediately acquired a comment by "Critic" purporting to explain its error. It makes me wonder if "Critic" is some colleague of the author's, who promised to publicly explain their criticism.

Finally, someone is using vixra to lampoon a notoriously self-promoting critic of modern physics, by writing preprints which assert that his work is vindicated by the most avantgarde trends of the mainstream. The first such paper was just silliness, but today's paper is sophisticated silliness, in that it shows a fluency in contemporary mathematical physics beyond what can be obtained by just copy-pasting snarxiv output. My guess is that the author is at PhD level.

[*] I may write a separate post about this paper. 

Constituent pions

I have stumbled upon an idea regarding the structure of a "constituent quark": a bare quark plus three pions. Now to see if it makes sense and if it would explain anything.

Today's crackpot synthesis

1. If one assumes that QCD embeds in a GUT group, then one can show that the proton mass m_p is proportional to a power of the top mass, m_t^2/27.

Today I realized that Brannen's reformulation of the Koide relation can be described as follows: the Brannen mass scale of e,mu,tau is m_p/3, and the Brannen phase is 3 * 2/27.

2. If the quark families (b,s,d and u,c,t) are treated as Koide triples, their phases are also (arguably) multiples of 2/27.

There is also a "waterfall" of Koide triples, descending from the top, which alternate between the families. One of these triples - s,c,b - has a Brannen mass of m_p, and a Brannen phase of 2/3.

3. In Rivero's sBootstrap, the leptons are superpartners of mesons made of the five light quark flavors, and the quarks themselves are superpartners of diquarks made of those five flavors.

I proposed to interpret this as similar to a Seiberg duality. The primordial theory is like six-flavor QCD with one heavy quark and five massless quarks, and N=1 supersymmetry. The other is the standard model, with the light quark masses, the leptons, and the electroweak sector all emerging from the duality.

The leptons would then be the mesinos of the primordial theory, and the phenomenological quarks would be a mixture of the primordial quarks and the diquarkinos.

4. This suggests a way of thinking about the numerology in 1 & 2.

The primordial fact would be that m_p ∝ m_t^2/27 is already true in the QCD-like theory on one side of the duality. The appearance of m_p and 2/27 in standard model numerology is then to be attributed to the duality. 1 comes from the "lepton-mesino duality", and everything in 2 from the "quark-diquarkino self-duality".

hep-dada #2

Another transparently fake paper, posted to vixra. Maybe they are coming from David Simmons-Duffin, the inventor of snarxiv, or even from Andrew Bulhak, who wrote the original Postmodernism Generator. Anyway, it gets old fast.

hep-dada

This blog was originally inspired by the parodies of arxiv abstracts produced by snarxiv. snarxiv in turn reminded me of the Postmodernism Server, which generated whole essays written in bland postmodernese. Now the wheel has turned further and someone has posted to vixra a whole "paper", expanding on a snarxiv-like abstract.

Coincidentally, the Italian net.artist Roberta Betti recently took to tweeting out the text of imaginary papers in mathematics, complete with the typographic mangling produced e.g. by viewing Google's cached copy of such a document. Behold "Canonically Stochastic Fibonacci Spaces Over Matrices", "Existence In Real Logic", and "On the Integrability of Universally Parabolic Lines". Could Betti (aka Stalagmathron) be behind the new vixra paper by "Baruch Seiberg and Claude Witten"? Has someone written a script which generates full-length snarxiv papers? Will vixra now be spammed with cheap machine dada? Time will tell.

edit: @Stalagmathron has disappeared, but some of Betti's earlier work lives on at archive.org.