26 January 2011

Metaphysics

No, this post is not about natural philosophy. It is about a few meta observations about the field of physics as opposed to its substantive discoveries about the world.

The physics blog Résonaances concludes that based on the author's downward trend in posting that:

As you can read from the plot of my posting activity versus time, the end is expected in late 2012. The end of the blog, or the of the world, don't know which.


Another post at the same blog concludes that the shutdown of Tevatron (the main particle accelerator in the United States, which may be close to discovering a Higgs boson also being pursued by Europe's Large Hadron Collider) is a natural consequence of Pauli's other exclusion principle:

Fermions are discovered in the US, whereas bosons are discovered in Europe. . . . This law has been tested in multiple instances, and has been established beyond all doubt.


This result is particularly unfortunate for Asian physicists, but perhaps they can still get dibs on discovering extra-dimensions, or tachyons, or properties of the vacuum, and it isn't entirely clear how the rule would apply to superpartners if SUSY and String theory pan out. ;)

Also, congratulations are in order for Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong physics blog, which just made post 1000 (+0/-1).

1 comment:

nige said...

Bose was Indian, i.e. on the Euro-Asian continent. Apart from his theory of beta decay, Fermi did his best work (building the nuclear reactor) in the USA. It's therefore entirely unsurprising that bosons be discovered in Europe and fermions in the USA. ;-)