Reality Therapy

2011 Nobel Prize in Physics

2011-12-06T14:48:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I sent a brief letter to the Nobel Committee for Physics and the three recipients of the 2011 Prize. This letter and the accompanying referenced material are available here: http://bit.ly/NP2011

Re: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

2011-05-08T09:54:00.000-07:00

Leopold Mozart in a 1768 letter written to friend, landlord, and business partner, Lorenz Hagenauer, about his 12-year-old son, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:

“[He is] a miracle, which God has allowed to see the light in Salzburg ... And if it is ever to be my duty to convince the world of this miracle, it is so now, when people are ridiculing whatever is called a miracle and denying all miracles ... But because this miracle is too evident and consequently not to be denied, they want to suppress it. They refuse to let God have the honor.”

Quoted from Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (1995) p. 5.

Gravitational analog to the magnetic field

2011-04-22T20:09:00.000-07:00

When a 1-gram magnet picks up a small metal object, thus overcoming the gravitational force of the entire mass of the Earth (~10^28 grams) on that same object, one gets a sense of the relative strength of gravitation and electromagnetism per unit mass. Because of the extreme relative weakness of gravity, gravitational phenomena that are more subtle than the terrestrial field in which we live and the visible ocean tides driven by the Moon are difficult to experience.

Magnetism is not a fundamental force; it is produced exclusively by a time-varying electric field produced by the motion of charged particles. Similarly, the simulation shown in this Java applet shows forces that exist exclusively due to a time-varying gravitational field produced by the relative motion of mass. It is apparent that gravity has an analog to the magnetic field, although this phenomenon is essentially impossible to observe directly (or at least extremely difficult and expensive to observe because one would need a special orbiting spacecraft).

The beginning of the end for 'dark energy.'

2010-11-30T07:44:00.000-08:00

I have prepared an important paper for review by the participants of the December 2010 workshop, "Experimental and Theoretical Challenges to Probing Dark Energy" sponsored by the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT (1.5 MB PDF).

First Blog Post

2010-09-16T05:55:00.000-07:00

I'm busy completing the book, so don't expect too much activity here until that project is completed.