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...
View ArticleTheory 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),...
View ArticleMixing 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...
View ArticleWhat 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...
View ArticleChirality, 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....
View ArticleSymmetry 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...
View ArticleSymmetry 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...
View ArticleAll 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...
View ArticleSymmetry 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...
View ArticleHow 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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