by Wanpeng Tan for understanding the mirror sector of the Universe
Two websites are under construction: mirroruniverse.org and openarxiv.org. We need volunteers who are experienced in graphic and web design to join the team for building these two websites. Feel free to contact me at <wtan AT nd.edu> if you are interested or have further questions.
Continue reading “Volunteers are needed for graphic and web design of two websites”
This is the 2nd time I am participating in an essay competition held by FQxI.org. This time the topic is “how could science be different” and participants must be anonymous. Here is the link for all participating essays: https://qspace.fqxi.org/competitions/entries. Winning the competition is not exactly my goal, but attention gained via winning, which would hopefully lead to implementing my dream sketched in the essay into basic science fields such as physics in the real world, will be!
My first-time experience with FQxI was not great. I thought I wrote a pretty good article titled “No single unification theory of everything” about three years ago. Most of the comments under the article in the forum were very positive. Two of the participants even explicitly claimed that they gave me a full score (10 points), including one who was eventually one of the winners. But I don’t know how I could end up with a pretty despicable average score of about six. Hopefully, anonymity will help this time.
Some physicists have labeled me as a crack pot when considering my works on the new theoretical framework of mirror matter theory. However, I disagree in the spirit of scientific principles. With three papers published in esteemed journals, seven invited seminars by unrelated people (or more than 10 in total), and grant-seeking in collaboration with several different groups, I don’t think that it is fair to categorize my work on this topic as crackpottery. It is not, especially when considering the unique concrete predictions from my new model that can be readily tested in the laboratory using existing technologies.
Under enormous pressures, I had to close my former blog hosted at Notre Dame. This is my new blog site that contains all my previous posts and articles. And I will continue my advocacy of open science principles and studies on the new mirror matter theory. I wish that the right of academic freedom and freedom of speech would not have to be such a luxury, at least in the United States. Join me if you believe in freedom and openness in both science and society.
After decades of ever-increasing dominance, arXiv.org has become the largest and most popular storage space or eprint service for scientific publications in physics and other related fields. It would have been the most beneficial to the physics community had arXiv sticked to its original principles for sharing new ideas and works quickly. Sadly, arXiv.org is becoming more and more arrogant these days instead. Veiled censorship by arXiv is making it just like another giant refereed journal system but without any transparency.
Continue reading “Is arXiv a monopoly bully in scientific publication?”It is amazing that there exist quite some private foundations in the United States who care about science and are enthusiastic about funding scientific projects. However, a lot of them, if not all, don’t seem to know how they should support science in a complementary way when compared to government funding agencies like NSF and DoE.
Continue reading “How should private foundations support science?”
In a nostalgic review article titled “Twenty years of the Weyl anomaly” [Michael J Duff, Class. Quantum Grav. 11, 1387 (1994)], Duff recalled the history of his discovery of the Weyl or conformal anomaly in quantum theory with Derek Capper. Continue reading “How can a new idea be accepted by eminent physicists?”
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.
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?
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.