Author: Wanpeng Tan

I share my ideas and thoughts mainly about mirror matter theory and open science on this blog. Under the new theory, we live in the universe with a mirror (hidden) sector of particles. A perfectly imperfect (minimally broken) mirror symmetry is the key to unlock the beauty and elegance of our universe. Click on the menu links for a popular introduction, a technical summary, and list of my papers on the new mirror matter theory.

Old Wine in New Bottles – How does science advance?

A lot of times science advances by incorporating or interpreting old ideas under new scenarios.

For example, Lorentz first proposed the so-called Lorentz transformation, but it was Einstein who correctly interpreted and applied it in his theory of special relativity. Yang and Mills first came up with the SU(2) gauge theory idea for studying nuclear isospin. But it was Glashow, Weinberg, Salam , and ‘t Hooft who found the best application of the idea to the electroweak interaction eventually leading to the most celebrated unification theory (called the Standard Model) for all three gauge interactions of the known elementary particles.

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Does the Universe Have a Mirror Sector?

[This is a repost of the popular introduction page on the new mirror matter theory]

Modern physics is pillared by Einstein’s theory of general relativity (that defines spacetime and the gravitational force) and the Standard Model as the best known quantum theory (that governs quantum particles and the other known interactions). Despite tremendous successes of the two theories and decades of more scientific efforts, there remains a wide range of puzzling phenomena in fundamental physics and the dream of unification of general relativity and quantum theory has never come true.

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Invisible decays and equivalence of CP violation and mirror symmetry breaking scales

COVID-19 pandemic has hindered my scientific production quite a bit. But finally my new paper on “invisible decays of neutral hadrons” is finished though it should have been done months ago. It provides precise predictions on invisible decay branching fractions of long-lived neutral hadrons that can be readily measured at existing collider facilities. The idea is that CP violation can be considered as a direct result of spontaneous mirror symmetry breaking at staged quark condensation (e.g., at temperatures of 100GeV – 100 MeV in the early Universe). For a neutral kaon system, it means that the CP and mirror breaking scales, i.e., the mixing strength and mass splitting parameters should be the same.

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How to avoid a war between US and China?

The tension between two superpower nations (US and China) is getting more and more severe these days. Obviously, the worse relationship between these two countries is especially bad for chinese americans and to a certain extent, all asian americans. A war between the two, in particular, if escalated to be of nuclear type, will be a disaster to the human race on Earth. Too bad, we are watching a trade and tech war between them now. Yet a hot war, especially in south China sea or around Taiwan, could not be completely ruled out in the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made things even worse. The two biggest economies are going down. It is convenient for politicians to play the blame game and turn attention of the population elsewhere, especially against the other nation. Nationalism, fueled by politicians, could be the trigger to a hot war. It is time to test if our education systems have been robust or not. In other words, we’ll see if the overall competence level of the general public is over the “stupidity” hump(s) of the Dunning-Kruger effect or not regarding wars.

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A dream world and society

I had been totally immersed in further development of my supersymmetric mirror models early this year. The COVID-19 pandemic did not draw my attention until about a month ago when it hit the US really hard. Then all of a sudden it really changed me, not only my life but also my way of thinking. I could not focus well on my favorite mirror-matter projects. I should have finished my invisible-decay paper weeks earlier. Instead it has made me pondering more on what a dream world or society should or could be like. With an open universe of physical objects in mind, what an open world of creatures and an open society of human beings could we imagine?

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My new paper on black holes

I am a little bit late to celebrate Einstein’s birthday. But here is my new paper that extends Einstein’s 4-d General Relativity to a 2-d spacetime model with new understanding and studies the black hole as a genuine 2-d object. Unfortunately,  arXiv did not help again this time and put my submission on hold one more time. Most likely, they are going to reject it again like my last paper in a few weeks.

The new model predicts a neutron/quark star mass limit of less than 2.5 solar mass that is compatible with observation. For more massive stars, the ever softer equation of state in 4-d spacetime will eventually cause a core collapse to a temperature above 1016 GeV. The 4-d spacetime then undergoes phase transition to 2-d spacetime with much reduced degrees of freedom to re-stabilize the star as a true 2-d black hole.

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From quantum indeterminism to open science, open society, and open world

I just submitted a paper for the essay contest held at FQXi. I focused on topics from quantum indeterminism to no theory of everything, to a dynamic Universe with hierarchical underlying laws, all the way to the justification of our pursuance of open science, open society, and open world.

Gödel’s undecidability results (incomplete theorems) demonstrate that no consistent math system is complete, i.e., one can always construct statements that can not be proved or disproved within the same system. Hilbert’s dream of unification of all mathematics may be busted. Similarly, quantum indeterminism indicates that physics and the Universe may be indeterministic, incomplete, and open in nature, and therefore demand no single unification theory of everything. All my recent works on mirror matter theory and supersymmetric mirror models seem to support such an open world ideology.

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How risky or controversial is my work on mirror matter theory?

To demonstrate the risky or controversial aspects of my work on mirror matter theory, I’d like to share more comments extracted from various review reports from the expert physicists when refereeing my work. See here for early comments on my work. Clearly, the controversies are getting escalated on my new work on a dynamical view of the Universe as even relatively open-mined arXiv decided to deny my submission (see here). The list of the following review comments is sort of in the order from positive to negative.

  • Example 1:

This subject is a hot topic, and the results are very interesting in light of future experimental measurements for the light quark sector.

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No theory of everything

Here is my new paper that provides a dynamic view on theory of everything. Normally arXiv should have it posted online on Feb. 4 but instead has put it on hold for nearly two weeks. So I have to submit it as an OSF preprint and to the archive of “crackpottery”[viXra:2002.0262] since arXiv is probably considering the paper a crackpot. It can also be downloaded from this page with all my papers on mirror matter theory (A persistent link of my mirror papers is also on the side menu). Below is the popular summary of this paper:

No single unification theory of everything. The universe is dynamic and so are the underlying physical models and spacetime. As our 4-d spacetime evolves dimension by dimension in the early universe, consistent yet different models emerge one by one with different sets of particles and interactions. A new set of first principles are proposed for building such models with new understanding of supersymmetry, mirror symmetry, and the dynamic mechanism – spontaneous symmetry breaking. Under this framework, the arrow of time is naturally explained and the Standard Model of physics is elegantly extended to time zero of the universe.

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Are we losing the last piece of pure land – arXiv.org?

Not long ago, I posted one article on how to improve arXiv.org and make it the best science publication system. One of my concerns about arXiv I pointed out was about the issue of over-regulation. Now I feel the issue is more serious than I thought.

I submitted my last paper to arXiv a week ago for the little celebration of the anniversary of my first mirror matter paper. But the administrators decided to put it on hold for an announcement. I don’t know what I did in the paper to trigger such a cautionary action. But it is just a pure scientific paper and probably one of the most important of my works. Apparently they have no interest in solving the issue soon. I have no choice but have also submitted it to a traditional journal. At this moment, I am not sure who will publish it first if they do in the end.

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