American public education, from McGuffey's 1836 First Eclectic Primer through the early 1950s, successfully educated into employability pretty much every ghastly immigrant's English-depauperate child no matter how willfully other-directed (stupid). It inculcated a plebeian mythos of culture and community so that even Irish and Italians embraced a mutual social symbiosis (a superposition of cops and criminals until somebody saw a badge). Then, sputnik orbited.
Oodles of folks spouting Greek oratory proved singularly incapable of helping expatriate Nazis save democracy after Russkies seized the high ground. On 02 September 1958 the National Defense Education Act mandated creation of Uncle Als. (So great was the inevitable cumulative horror that on 11 April 1965 the Elementary and Secondary Education Act terminated all public education competence, forever.) A half-century later, what have these now middle-aged excrescences wrought?
Venture into a narthex of knaves, a wholly of academic holies, a strategic guided missal criminality of five-sigma mentalities: contemporary physical theory. What can we learn about the Standard Model, quantum gravitation, and cosmology that would make Bernie Madoff smile? Lenny Susskind teaches us that rather than carry, some folks steal with a pencil.
is a searchable compilation of "pre-prints." If a scholarly physics publication has any merit, there is probably a copy of it free to see in arxiv, mounted by a credentialed author (who raw formats in LaTeX). Look! Discover that contemporary physical theory is a crock of crap wrapped in impenetrable jargon bearing no empirical significance.
Gentle reader may demur, "that was an unduly harsh statement." We herein present statistically validated proof, 3/4 million examples, that folks skilled in the art cannot tell crapola from Shinola. Behold the mighty truth of
arxiv.org is a scholarly gusher of professionally indecipherable bloviation. snarxiv.org is a grammatically selective computer reshuffling of papers' titles' words, the MadLibs of scholarly discourse. Snarxiv is highfalutin' bilge. Enter the site, behold pair after pair of titles, log in at the bottom to register your running score. Can folks skilled in the art discern which title is slit latrine inventory? Make your choice, receive your updated score, try and try again.
"Ed in da house" got 502/502 correct in 1:22:26, less than 10 seconds/decision including reading time. This is too fast to cheat, er, Google one title. Mike B. got 885/885 correct in 0:27:14, 1.85 seconds/decision including reading time! He may have hacked the system, but no matter. As of 21 March 2011, 589,258 correct answers in 1,020,272 dynamically diddled title pairs were accumulated. Voluntary participants scored cumulative 57.75% correct. The snarxiv bin for that degree of success is labeled "Better than a monkey."
http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/highscores/
Put 58% correct into perspective. Click on the longer title each time and score about 63% correct in 100 tries. Assuming you are not "No Child Left Behind," think about that versus 58% with study. Humor plays close to the big, hot fire that is Truth.
Herein presented is a little bump in the physical theory road. A neutrino is an elementary subatomic particle with 1/2 unit of spin. Never mind what is spinning, for they are point particles. If you curl your right-hand fingers in the direction of quantum spin your upright thumb points as the angular momentum vector. Wasn't that easy? The direction of travel is the linear momentum vector. Those two vectors must be in-line; no other angles are possible. Here we go...
Given rest mass-equivalent not exceeding 0.2 eV, only Big Bang neutrinos red-shifted by cosmic inflation to 1.945 °kelvin or 1.68x10-4 eV are non-relativistic, possessing helicity but not chirality. Neutrinos decoupled about one second after the Big Bang at 2.5 MeV temperature. Photons decoupled about 377,000 years after the Big Bang at 0.5 eV temperature. Primordial neutrinos are colder than cosmic microwave background at 2.725 K because the neutrino transparency point came earlier in the expansion.There are 336/cm3 Big Bang neutrinos: 56 each neutrinos and antineutrinos each in three flavors. 2.1/cm3 solar neutrinos are hosing in at lightspeed, 62.97 billion/cm2-sec or 1.70 curies/cm2 in a plane normal to the sun at Earth's orbit. Neither is a bump in the road.
Isotope Abundance Half-life Decay Energy atom-% years MeV =========================================== 48Ca 0.187% 4.3 ·1019 4.271 76Ge 7.83% 1.78·1021 2.039 82Se 8.73% 1.08·1020 2.995 96Zr 2.80% 3 ·1019 3.350 100Mo 9.67% 8.5 ·1018 3.034 110Pd 11.72% 1.3 ·1020 2.013 116Cd 7.49% 3.8 ·1019 2.809 124Sn 5.79% 2.2 ·1018 2.288 128Te 31.74% 2.2 ·1024 0.868 130Te 34.08%, 7.9 ·1016 2.533 136Xe 8.86% 2.4 ·1021 2.479 150Nd 5.6% 6.7 ·1018 3.667 238U 99.27% 2.23·1021 obscured by other decays
(1) is observed - neutrinos and antineutrinos are different; (2) is theoretically inescapable - neutrinos and antineutrinos are identical. (1) and (2) cannot both be true. That is the bump in the road. "More studies are needed."
The Standard Model arrives massless, then requires 26 empirical quantities inserted to work. The Higgs boson, the diddle conferring mass, refuses to appear in particle accelerators. Supersymmetry partners are inescapable, and ridiculous for also being 100% AWOL. That the universe is matter to the preponderant absence of antimatter violates a pile of strong conservation laws. No quantum gravitation predicts anything observable. Dark matter, dark energy, dark fudge.
Einstein's elevator assumes isotropic vacuum, as does all of physics. Conservation of angular momentum from isotropic vacuum plus Noether's theorems would otherwise fail. Remember that bump in the road? Physics is quaintly incapable of ab initio modeling chirality's effects. Socks and left shoes cannot detect a left foot - that requires a right shoe. Here is another bump in the road, fellas:
Metaphoric opposite shoes must locally fall wholly identically, at the same rate and with parallel-displaced trajectories! Really? Nothing prevents macroscopically and chemically identical (e.g., solid single crystal spheres), inverse geometric parity atomic mass distributions from locally violating the Equivalence Principle. Theory predicts what observation tells it to predict. Physics' failures could arise from a chiral vacuum footnote at which nobody will look. That teaches us a lot.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/erotor1.jpg
Sensitive to 1 part in 20 trillion divergence.
The worst it can do is succeed.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz4.htm
with pictures!
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