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My symmetries are broken

The Standard Model has a mixture of broken and unbroken symmetries, but I don’t understand why. In the real world, all symmetries are broken, always. At best, symmetry can be approximate. So I don’t...

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Theory Of Totally Everything, Man

Wow, wasn’t SU(3,2) a sensation? Theory Of Totally Everything, Man! TOTEM, for short. To recap, the Georgi-Glashow model of 1974 proposed embedding the gauge group of the Standard Model into SU(5),...

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Mixing angles update

I am now able to calculate 8 of the 9 mixing angles that are in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The only one I can’t do (yet) is the down/bottom quark mixing angle, which is a tiny angle of...

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What is CP-violation?

CP-violation is a subtle property of elementary particle physics that is both puzzling and hard to explain. The C symmetry is called charge conjugation, and it means changing the sign of the electric...

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Chirality, chirality, chirality

The three most important things in physics are chirality, chirality and chirality. Chirality means the difference between left-handed and right-handed spinors, as representations of the Lorentz group....

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Symmetry 101

The simplest of all the Lie algebras is the three-dimensional algebra of type A1. It is well-known to physicists in many different guises (and some dis-guises as well). It is the “cross product” or...

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Symmetry 102

In Symmetry 101 we learnt that there are four basic types of particles, with four different symmetry groups, being all four real forms of A1. The groups are called SO(2,1), SO(3), Spin(2,1) and...

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All things bright and dark

In standard cosmology, the universe consists of four things, namely bright matter and bright energy, dark matter and dark energy. Bright matter is the stuff we can see: stars, planets, galaxies, gas...

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Symmetry 103

We established in Symmetry 102 that the only group that can explain the polarisation of photons and the oscillation of neutrinos is the binary tetrahedral group. We only need the “binary” part for...

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How to lie with mathematics

About 50 years ago, I read a book called “How to lie with statistics”. Some of the tricks presented in that book have stuck with me ever since. There are, of course, many ways to lie with statistics,...

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