tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73152367077287595212024-03-17T21:03:53.073-06:00Dispatches From Turtle IslandObservations That Transcend Law and PoliticsAndrew Oh-Willekehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537151821869153861noreply@blogger.comBlogger2555125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-16730685891442433512024-03-06T17:41:00.004-07:002024-03-06T17:52:04.313-07:00Dark Matter Is Not Made Up Of Primordial Black Holes<div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">We find that compact objects in the mass range from 1.8×10^−4M⊙ to 6.3M⊙ cannot compose more than 1% of dark matter, and compact objects in the mass range from 1.3×10^−5M⊙ to 860M⊙ cannot make up more than 10% of dark matter. This conclusively rules out primordial black hole mergers as a dominant source of gravitational waves.</span></blockquote></div><span style="font-size: large;">From: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02386 Confirmed from the same data at https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02398</span><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-87691673363826808062024-02-21T18:53:00.003-07:002024-02-21T18:54:11.488-07:00The Population Genetics Of India<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">A new preprint has no really shocking results, but provides many refinements to our previous understanding of historical genetics in India. Credit where credit is due for acknowledging the existing of early waves of modern humans in India even though they haven't left much of a genetic trace in modern populations. It also seems that there was secondary Neanderthal admixture in South Asia in addition to the admixture that took place in the Middle East.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">India has been underrepresented in whole genome sequencing studies. We generated 2,762 high coverage genomes from India––including individuals from most geographic regions, speakers of all major languages, and tribal and caste groups––providing a comprehensive survey of genetic variation in India. With these data, we reconstruct the evolutionary history of India through space and time at fine scales. </span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">We show that most Indians derive ancestry from three ancestral groups related to ancient Iranian farmers, Eurasian Steppe pastoralists and South Asian hunter-gatherers. </span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;"><b>We uncover a common source of Iranian-related ancestry from early Neolithic cultures of Central Asia into the ancestors of Ancestral South Indians (ASI), Ancestral North Indians (ANI), Austro-asiatic-related and East Asian-related groups in India. </b></span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">Following these admixtures, India experienced a major demographic shift towards endogamy, resulting in extensive homozygosity and identity-by-descent sharing among individuals. </span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">At deep time scales, Indians derive around 1-2% of their ancestry from gene flow from archaic hominins, Neanderthals and Denisovans. By assembling the surviving fragments of archaic ancestry in modern Indians, <b>we recover ∼1.5 Gb (or 50%) of the introgressing Neanderthal and ∼0.6 Gb (or 20%) of the introgressing Denisovan genomes, more than any other previous archaic ancestry study.</b> Moreover, <b>Indians have the largest variation in Neanderthal ancestry, as well as the highest amount of population-specific Neanderthal segments among worldwide groups. </b></span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">Finally, we demonstrate that <b>most of the genetic variation in Indians stems from a single major migration out of Africa that occurred around 50,000 years ago, with minimal contribution from earlier migration waves</b>. </span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">Together, these analyses provide a detailed view of the population history of India and underscore the value of expanding genomic surveys to diverse groups outside Europe.</span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Elise Kerdoncuff, et al., "50,000 years of Evolutionary History of India: Insights from ∼2,700 Whole Genome Sequences" (February 17, 2024). https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.15.580575v1</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-78964299490260831772024-02-21T18:36:00.006-07:002024-02-22T04:35:41.628-07:00Aztec Human Sacrifice<div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">"For the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs reported that they killed about 80,400 prisoners over the course of four days. According to Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony."</span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice">Wikipedia</a>.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Recall that this city had a population of 200,000 non-prisoner residents, which while huge for the time, is only about three times greater than the number of people sacrificed.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-63469257669214899382024-02-19T13:41:00.004-07:002024-02-19T13:41:50.580-07:00The XENONnT Dark Matter Experiment<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The XENONnT dark matter experiment will have <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10446">about ten times more sensitivity to WIMPS</a> (a type of dark matter candidate) than the previous XENON1T. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">I fully expect that it will produce a null result without detecting any traces of dark matter that don't turn out to be false positives in the end.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-40838504523607816012024-02-19T13:36:00.001-07:002024-02-19T16:14:40.262-07:00The Black Hole - Galaxy Mass Correlation<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The mass of the central supermassive black hole of a galaxy and the inferred mass of its dark matter halo (and the total mass of a galaxy) <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10740">are correlated</a>, although not terribly tightly. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Some of the scatter in the relationship may be due to measurement error as central supermassive black hole mass, inferred dark matter halo mass, and galaxy total mass are all challenging to measure.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-26701175731596953842024-02-19T12:46:00.006-07:002024-02-19T13:14:34.600-07:00Orichalcum<div style="text-align: justify;"></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi27icNRQg3N2IPlaujUy5F9w5TrG3fgV0QL20JVrMr8vN8EfCSA3Bxf5EMovHpeeVgVdLP-HqhNhkbRut1pEfVQGcFwlpbv4fORwfntCBu3RVVZBs5uYdcsAPbgNhQQMnlUBh6BVuoKSdIgKiyuvydEut34P9Md8jx0vL4BLDLnWZHk90tr62momkN5KfA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="488" data-original-width="650" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi27icNRQg3N2IPlaujUy5F9w5TrG3fgV0QL20JVrMr8vN8EfCSA3Bxf5EMovHpeeVgVdLP-HqhNhkbRut1pEfVQGcFwlpbv4fORwfntCBu3RVVZBs5uYdcsAPbgNhQQMnlUBh6BVuoKSdIgKiyuvydEut34P9Md8jx0vL4BLDLnWZHk90tr62momkN5KfA=w640-h480" width="640" /></a></span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Archaeologists have finally found examples of and deciphered a Bronze Age alloy associated with the lost city of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis">Atlantis</a> called "Orichalcum."</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">This insight, in my view, this is quite consistent with my leading candidate for Atlantis which is the capital city of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartessos">Tartessos</a>. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartessian_language">Their Paleo-Hispanic language</a> is by default an isolate but seems closer to Basque than to any Indo-European language, despite some Celtic borrowings and the use of a Phoenician derived script and their culture's adoption of Phoenician religious practices.</span></p><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">A group of naval archeologists has uncovered two hundred ingots spread over the sandy seafloor near a 2,600-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Sicily. The ingots were made from orichalcum, a rare cast metal that ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote was from the legendary city of Atlantis.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">A total of 39 ingots (metal set into rectangular blocks) were, according to Inquisitr, discovered near a shipwreck. BBC reported that another same metal cache was found. 47 more ingots were found, with a total of 86 metal pieces found to date.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The wreck was discovered in 1988, floating about 300 meters (1,000 ft) off the coast of Gela in Sicily in shallow waters. At the time of the shipwreck Gela was a rich city and had many factories that produced fine objects. Scientists believe that the pieces of orichalcum were destined for those laboratories when the ship sank.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Sebastiano Tusa, Sicily’s superintendent of the Sea Office, told Discovery News that the precious ingots were probably being brought to Sicily from Greece or Asia Minor.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Tusa said that the discovery of orichalcum ingots, long considered a mysterious metal, is significant as “nothing similar has ever been found.” He added, “We knew orichalcum from ancient texts and a few ornamental objects.”</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">According to a Daily Telegraph report, <b>the ingots have been analyzed and found to be made of about 75-80 percent copper, 14-20 percent zinc and a scattering of nickel, lead, and iron.</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The name orichalucum derives from the Greek word oreikhalkos, meaning literally “mountain copper” or “copper mountain”. <b>According to Plato’s 5th century BC Critias dialogue, orichalucum was considered second only to gold in value, and was found and mined in many parts of the legendary Atlantis in ancient times.</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Plato wrote that the three outer walls of the Temple to Poseidon and Cleito on Atlantis were clad respectively with brass, tin, and the third, which encompassed the whole citadel, “flashed with the red light of orichalcum”.</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The interior walls, pillars, and floors of the temple were completely covered in orichalcum, and the roof was variegated with gold, silver, and orichalcum. In the center of the temple stood a pillar of orichalcum, on which the laws of Poseidon and records of the first son princes of Poseidon were inscribed.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">For centuries, experts have hotly debated the metal’s composition and origin.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>According to the ancient Greeks, orichalcum was invented by Cadmus, a Greek-Phoenician mythological character. Cadmus was the founder and first king of Thebes, the acropolis of which was originally named Cadmeia in his honor.</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Orichalcum has variously been held to be a gold-copper alloy, a copper-tin, or copper-zinc brass, or a metal no longer known. However, <b>in Vergil’s Aeneid, it was mentioned that the breastplate of Turnus was “stiff with gold and white orachalc”</b> and it has been theorized that it is an alloy of gold and silver, though it is not known for certain what orichalcum was.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Orichalcum is also mentioned in the ‘Antiquities of the Jews’ (1 st century AD) – Book VIII, sect. 88 by Josephus, who stated that the vessels in the Temple of Solomon were made of orichalcum</b> (or a bronze that was like gold in beauty).</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Today, some scholars suggest that <b>orichalcum is a brass-like alloy, which was made in antiquity the process of cementation, which was achieved through the reaction of zinc ore, charcoal and copper metal in a crucible.</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The latest discovery of the orichalcum ingots that had laid for nearly three millennia on the seafloor may finally unravel the mystery of the origin and composition of this enigmatic metal.</span></div></blockquote><p><span style="font-size: large;">From <a href="https://archaeology-world.com/orichalcum-the-lost-metal-of-atlantis-may-have-been-found-on-a-shipwreck-off-sicily/"><i>Archaeology World</i></a>. </span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-51266095356124951882024-02-15T13:20:00.002-07:002024-02-15T13:27:01.563-07:00A Combined LHC Top Quark Mass Measurement<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">A new combined LHC top quark mass measurement, the excludes the latest highest energy LHC runs, however, is available. The two sigma range for the top quark pole mass in this combination is 171.86-173.18 GeV with a best fit value of 172.52 GeV. This result is <a href="https://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.com/2023/11/a-new-top-quark-pole-mass-analysis.html">essentially the same as the Particle Data Group value</a>, but cuts the uncertainty in half.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">A combination of fifteen top quark mass measurements performed by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC is presented. The data sets used correspond to an integrated luminosity of up to 5 and 20^−1 of proton-proton collisions at center-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV, respectively. The combination includes measurements in top quark pair events that exploit both the semileptonic and hadronic decays of the top quark, and a measurement using events enriched in single top quark production via the electroweak t-channel. The combination accounts for the correlations between measurements and achieves an improvement in the total uncertainty of 31% relative to the most precise input measurement. <b>The result is m(t) = 172.52 ± 0.14 (stat) ± 0.30 (syst) GeV, with a total uncertainty of 0.33 GeV.</b></span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">CMS and ATLAS Collaborations, "Combination of measurements of the top quark mass from data collected by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at s√=7 and 8 TeV" <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08713">arXiv:2402.08713</a> (February 13, 2024).</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-23574746042457752072024-02-15T13:09:00.001-07:002024-02-15T13:09:36.082-07:00Mach's Principle Considered<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The possibility that inertia could be an emergent phenomena derived from gravity, and that gravity itself might even be an emergent phenomena from quantum physics and thermodynamics, is seductive but elusive.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">The question of where the inertial properties of matter come from has been open for a long time. Isaac Newton considered inertia an intrinsic property of matter. Ernst Mach held a different view whereby the inertia of a body comes from its interaction with the rest of the universe. This idea is known today as Mach's principle. We discuss Mach's principle based on transactional gravity, the recently developed completion of the entropic gravity program by the physics of quantum events induced by transactions. A consequence of the analysis is a fundamental relation between the gravitational constant G and the total mass in the causal universe, derived by means of entropic principles. </span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">A. Schlatter, R. E. Kastner, "A Note on the Origin of Inertia" <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09365">arXiv:2402.09365</a> (February 14, 2024).</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-58534810507391355502024-02-15T12:45:00.002-07:002024-02-15T12:58:12.524-07:00Galaxy Formation Was Underway 600 Million Years After The Big Bang<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has seen proto-galaxy formation about 600 million years after the Big Bang (about 13.2 billion years ago), which is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe">shortly after galaxy formation should be possible</a>.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;"><b>The most distant galaxies detected by JWST are assembling in a Universe that is less than 5% of its present age.</b> At these times, the progenitors of <b>galaxies like the Milky Way are expected to be about 10,000 times less massive than they are now, with masses quite comparable to that of massive globular clusters seen in the local Universe</b>. Composed today primarily of old stars and correlating with the properties of their parent dark matter halos, the first globular clusters are thought to have formed during the earliest stages of galaxy assembly. </span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">In this article <b>we explore the connection between star clusters and galaxy assembly by showing JWST observations of a strongly lensed galaxy at zspec = 8.304, exhibiting a network of massive star clusters (the 'Firefly Sparkle') cocooned in a diffuse arc.</b> </span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">The Firefly Sparkle exhibits the hallmarks expected of a future Milky Way-type galaxy captured during its earliest and most gas-rich stage of formation. The mass distribution of the galaxy seems to be concentrated in ten distinct clusters, with individual cluster masses that straddle the boundary between low-mass galaxies and high-mass globular clusters. The cluster ages suggest that they are gravitationally bound with star formation histories showing a recent starburst possibly triggered by the interaction with a companion galaxy at the same redshift at a projected distance of ∼2 kpc away from the Firefly Sparkle. The central star cluster shows nebular-dominated spectra consistent with high temperatures and a top-heavy initial mass function, the product of formation in a very metal poor environment. Combined with abundance matching that suggests that this is likely to be a progenitor of galaxies like our own, t<b>he Firefly Sparkle provides an unprecedented case study of a Milky Way-like galaxy in the earliest stages of its assembly in only a 600 million year old Universe</b>.</span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Lamiya Mowla, et al., "The Firefly Sparkle: The Earliest Stages of the Assembly of A Milky Way-type Galaxy in a 600 Myr Old Universe" <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08696">arXiv:2402.08696</a> (February 12, 2024).</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-52341647167455974812024-02-14T01:41:00.002-07:002024-02-14T01:44:31.524-07:00New Cosmology Bounds On Neutrino Mass<p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">In <span style="font-family: inherit;">V. Ghirardini<span style="background-color: white;">, et al.,</span></span><span face=""Lucida Grande", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;"> </span>"<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08458">The SRG/eROSITA All-Sky Survey: Cosmology Constraints from Cluster Abundances in the Western Galactic Hemisphere</a>" arxiv.org/abs/2402.08458 (Feb. 13, 2023), a major new dataset constrains the possible range of the sum of the three neutrino masses. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The best fit value of the lightest neutrino mass eigenstate (considering both cosmology and oscillation data) is 1 meV, with a range of 0-5 meV at the 95% confidence level.</span></div><blockquote><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">7.3. Constraints on the νCDM Cosmology </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Albeit their small size and mass, the left-handed neutrinos influence the formation of large-scale structure by hindering the formation of small-scale haloes and leaving their imprints on the gravitational collapse process. The relative number of low-mass haloes in cluster abundance measurements can shed light on the summed masses of three left-handed neutrino species. With the discovery of neutrino oscillations between different flavors, electron, muon, and tau neutrinos, it has become clear that neutrino eigenstates must have non-zero mass (Fukuda et al. 1998; Ahmad et al. 2002). The theoretical predictions indicate a hierarchical relation between the mass eigenstates of the three species of neutrinos; however, their ordering in mass remains elusive. Based on the normal neutrino mass hierarchy model, the third neutrino mass eigenstate, associated with the tau neutrino, is the heaviest among the three. This is followed by the eigenstate of the muon neutrino, which has an intermediate-mass, and that of the electron neutrino, i.e., mτ >mµ >me. The ordering is swapped in the inverted mass hierarchy model such that mτ < mµ<me. Recent constraints of their summed mass show that the lower limit provided by the oscillation experiments depends on the assumed underlying hierarchy model (Qian &Vogel 2015; Esteban et al. 2020), with a lower limit of mν >0.059eV for normal mass hierarchy and mν>0.101eV for the inverted hierarchy models (Tanabashi et al. 2018; Athar et al. 2022). Constraining the summed mass to <0.1eV implies that the inverted model is excluded. The ground-based experiments through beta decay of tritium imply the sum to be mν <1.1eV at 90% confidence level, a narrow range for the allowed summed mass (Aker et al. 2019). The space-based Planck CMB measurements provide a similar upper limit of mν<0.26 eV at 95% confidence level (Planck Collaboration et al. 2020a). As we probe the largest collapsed objects in the Universe, galaxy clusters, the cluster number counts can be used to constrain the summed masses of the neutrinos. To do so, we allow the sum of neutrino masses to be free in the cosmology pipeline, with a uniform prior of U(0eV,1eV). We stress that our lower limit is set to 0eV instead of a value of 0.059eV (Tanabashi et al. 2018) adopted by the PlanckCMB 2020 analysis. As the lower limit on the neutrino mass depends on the assumptions of the neutrino mass model, we do not make any prior assumptions about its value and adopt uniform priors on its value to avoid this parameter from affecting our posterior distributions. The cosmological constraints with free neutrino mass components are; </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Ωm=0.29+0.01 −0.02 </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">σ8=0.87±0.02 </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">S8=0.86±0.01 </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">mν<0.22eV (95% CL) (36) </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">These results are visualized in Fig.11. The upper limit to the sum of neutrino masses is mν <0.22eV. Our results represent the tightest limits on the sum of neutrino masses from cluster abundance experiments; for instance, the SPT-SZ sample results in an upper limit of <0.74eV(95% confidence interval) (Bocquet et al. 2019). The eROSITA upper limits on the neutrino masses are competitive and informative at a similar precision with thePlanckCMB2020 measurements, mν < 0.26eV (95%CL) (Planck Collaboration et al. 2020a). We verify that the values of the Ωm and σ8 remain statistically consistent when mν is allowed to be non-zero, see Fig.B.4. We find that eRASS1 and PlanckCMBνCDM parameters are consistent at the 2.0σ level.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Given the excellent agreement with PlanckCMB measurements, the resulting cosmological parameters of two probes can be combined in a statistically meaningful way, enabling a much tighter measurement of the impact of massive neutrinos on both the formation and evolution of the large-scale structure and on the primordial density field. As performed in the ΛCDM analysis, we combine our results with the PlanckCMB constraints to break the degeneracy between Ωm and σ8. We obtain;</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Ωm=0.32±0.01 </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">σ8=0.83±0.01 </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">S8=0.85±0.01 </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">mν<0.11eV (95% CL) (37) </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Simultaneously fitting our measurements with Planck CMB 2020 likelihood chains yield an upper limit of mν < 0.11eV, consistent with the results in the literature results with marginally consistent with the inverted mass hierarchy model, which requires mν > 0.101eV. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">As a final step, we combine eRASS1 cluster abundance measurements through importance sampling with PlanckCMB and with the lower limits from ground-based oscillation experiments (Tanabashi et al. 2018). <b>In the case of a normal mass hierarchy scenario, the summed masses of mν=0.08 +0.03 −0.02eV, while assuming the inverted mass hierarchy model, we obtain summed masses of mν =0.12 +0.03 −0.01eV. </b></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">It is interesting to point out, from Fig.C.1, that the constraints on the mass of the lightest neutrino eigenstates are similar: for both mass hierarchy we obtain <b>m(light) = 0.01 +0.020 −0.005 eV (68% confidence intervals) or with an upper limit of 0.04 eV.</b></span></p></blockquote><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-66069702067449531442024-02-13T11:40:00.004-07:002024-02-13T11:40:43.403-07:00Easter Island May Have Independently Developed A Written Script<div style="text-align: justify;"></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The people of Easter Island may have independently developed their own written script in a language that is now lost. The script is undeciphered.</span></p><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">A tablet of wood inscribed with the undeciphered "rongorongo" script from the Eastern Pacific island Rapa Nui, also called Easter Island, predates the arrival of Europeans there, strengthening the likelihood that the script is one of the few independently invented writing systems. <b>The wood from one of four rongorongo tablets preserved in a collection in Rome dates to between 1493 and 1509 — more than 200 years before the first recorded arrival of Europeans on the island in the 1720s</b>[.] . . . the results support the idea that rongorongo was an original invention by the Rapa Nui islanders rather than being influenced by the writing they'd seen used by Europeans.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Rapa Nui</b>, which sits nearly 2,400 miles (3,800 kilometers) off the coast of Chile, <b>was settled by humans between 1150 and 1280.</b> Although Europeans arrived in the 18th century, they didn't notice the local glyph-based script until 1864, which now exists on only 27 wooden objects, none of which are still on the island. Catholic missionaries took four of these tablets in 1869 and sent them to the bishop of Tahiti, who later sent them to Europe.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Ferrara and her colleagues conducted <a href="https://www.livescience.com/scientists-dating-methods.html">radiocarbon dating</a> on tiny samples of the four rongorongo tablets held by a congregation of Catholic nuns based in Rome. The radiocarbon dates suggested that three of the tablets were made from trees felled in the 18th or 19th centuries, but <b>the radiocarbon date of a fourth indicated it came from a tree felled in the 15th century</b>, Ferrara said. <b>That predates the arrival of Europeans on Rapa Nui and suggests that the rongorongo script was in use before then</b>, she said.</span></div></blockquote><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikmmHLXjTZUZP33gDMJqtCU6dS8qMLBIW7qtKNI7e7CDTKP-ovuHfHgqbKuP7CyaftYpo3y3NkUVL2naKnLciu8oAYDqVehCqZMbkeGfS3A4DE-0grSEqVghLjdX-eTy1mO-3G-3OA7F0wfw_rSuGz0sNv7AB2Oe1HWkXo72qGT1-H7-t4gO8cVsfZoN2O/s1200/qXnH96B8ZVvCWAe9kTBT8C-1200-80.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikmmHLXjTZUZP33gDMJqtCU6dS8qMLBIW7qtKNI7e7CDTKP-ovuHfHgqbKuP7CyaftYpo3y3NkUVL2naKnLciu8oAYDqVehCqZMbkeGfS3A4DE-0grSEqVghLjdX-eTy1mO-3G-3OA7F0wfw_rSuGz0sNv7AB2Oe1HWkXo72qGT1-H7-t4gO8cVsfZoN2O/w640-h360/qXnH96B8ZVvCWAe9kTBT8C-1200-80.jpg" width="640" /></a><i style="text-align: justify;">(Image credit: INSCRIBE and RESOLUTION ERC Teams) </i></span></div><p></p><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">In this case, however, <b>the inscription was probably made about the time the wood was obtained, because the alternative explanation — that the wood had been stored for more than 200 years before it was used — seems unlikely</b>, she said. The new analysis also suggested the wood from the oldest tablet came from a tree species not native to Rapa Nui, and <b>the researchers think it was probably a piece of driftwood</b>.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Rapa Nui is famous for its <a href="https://www.livescience.com/63321-easter-island-collapse-myth.html">many archaeological mysteries</a>, including the <a href="https://www.livescience.com/24021-easter-island-rapa-nui.html">giant stone heads known as moai</a>, and <b>many people have tried — without success — to decipher the rongorongo script.</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Ferrara said <b>more than 400 different rongorongo glyphs have been recognized among the roughly 15,000 surviving characters, and none correspond to any other known system of writing.</b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=SQ4nf3AAAAAJ&hl=de">Rafal Wieczorek</a>, a chemist at the University of Warsaw who was not involved in the latest study but has investigated <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=de&user=SQ4nf3AAAAAJ&citation_for_view=SQ4nf3AAAAAJ:UebtZRa9Y70C">other</a> <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=de&user=SQ4nf3AAAAAJ&citation_for_view=SQ4nf3AAAAAJ:5nxA0vEk-isC">rongorongo</a> <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=de&user=SQ4nf3AAAAAJ&citation_for_view=SQ4nf3AAAAAJ:lvd772isFD0C">tablets</a>, said that while the new research isn't conclusive, it is a strong indication that the script was an independent invention — perhaps one of only a handful of times when a writing system had been invented from scratch, without knowledge of other writing systems. . . . "I actually believe that rongorongo is one of the very few independent inventions of writing in human history, like the writing of the Sumerians, the Egyptians and the Chinese," he said. "But belief is a different thing than hard data … so ideally, we would like to test all the tablets."</span></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">From <a href="https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/undeciphered-script-from-easter-island-may-predate-european-colonization">Live Science</a>.</span></div><div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Given that only sample on "old wood" was driftwood anyway, the possibility that the script is not as ancient as the date of the wood suggests is less of a stretch than it might seem. It wouldn't have to have been stored for 200 years. It would be enough for it to have lingered where it originally fell for decades and then for it to have drifted to Easter Island much later.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The fact that the script didn't spread elsewhere in Polynesia when it was known to have some level of trade with it is also a challenge to the notion that the script was developed independently in the late 15th or early 16th centuries.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">But, the age of the wood makes it at least possible that the script predates European contact, and the lack of any connection to other known scripts is also an important factor favoring its status as an independent script.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Wikipedia covers it at length <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo">here</a>. It notes that: "<span style="text-align: justify;">some calendrical and what might prove to be genealogical information has been identified, none of these glyphs can actually be read. . . . </span>Oral history suggests that only a small elite was ever literate and that the tablets were sacred." It states that the conventional view is that this is a proto-language mnemonic device, which students wrote on fragile banana leaves, rather than a true language. Unlike other proto-linguistic scripts, like the Harappan script (of the Indus River Valley) and Vinca script (of the Balkans), and early hieroglyphs, however, this one does not appear to have had a primarily economic purpose.</span></p></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The paper and its abstract are as follows:</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">Placing the origin of an undeciphered script in time is crucial to understanding the invention of writing in human history. <b>Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, developed a script, now engraved on fewer than 30 wooden objects, which is still undeciphered. Its origins are also obscure.</b> Central to this issue is whether the script was invented before European travelers reached the island in the eighteenth century AD. Hence direct radiocarbon dating of the wood plays a fundamental role. <b>Until now, only two tablets were directly dated, placing them in the nineteenth c. AD, which does not solve the question of independent invention.</b> Here we radiocarbon-dated four Rongorongo tablets preserved in Rome, Italy. <b>One specimen yielded a unique and secure mid-fifteenth c. date, while the others fall within the nineteenth c. AD.</b> Our results suggest that the use of the script could be placed to a horizon that predates the arrival of external influence.</span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Ferrara, S., Tassoni, L., Kromer, B. et al. "<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-53063-7">The invention of writing on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). New radiocarbon dates on the Rongorongo script</a>." 14 Sci Rep 2794 (Feb. 2, 2024) (open access) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-53063-7</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-50646119110172964642024-02-12T14:54:00.009-07:002024-02-12T15:39:48.565-07:00Cultural Diversity In The European Upper Paleolithic<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjkRqmkjZomAtuCnapCqjgbf_cMs0vbkEKiOY4q4TbTR8ZjGPOWBj3Z7y_LlIKgZtDu8xZuiBuY8FGBvGPUouZxMwHWFquxnfjpigX0OUJ0HjhX78bFO1EUXTZEJEGP1j03V0KZdeCbHJRz3nIpOXEuph3w2AWUa4BfdhwFTkXDvBoZEcCEhpaG2krVzwig" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="804" data-original-width="1216" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjkRqmkjZomAtuCnapCqjgbf_cMs0vbkEKiOY4q4TbTR8ZjGPOWBj3Z7y_LlIKgZtDu8xZuiBuY8FGBvGPUouZxMwHWFquxnfjpigX0OUJ0HjhX78bFO1EUXTZEJEGP1j03V0KZdeCbHJRz3nIpOXEuph3w2AWUa4BfdhwFTkXDvBoZEcCEhpaG2krVzwig=w640-h424" width="640" /></a></div><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The earliest modern humans in Europe were not monolithic culturally. Similar studies examined Neolithic Europe.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">Mechanisms governing the relationship between genetic and cultural evolution are the subject of debate, data analysis and modelling efforts. Here we present a new georeferenced dataset of personal ornaments worn by European hunter-gatherers during the so-called Gravettian technocomplex (34,000–24,000 years ago), analyse it with multivariate and geospatial statistics, model the impact of distance on cultural diversity and contrast the outcome of our analyses with up-to-date palaeogenetic data. We demonstrate that Gravettian ornament variability cannot be explained solely by isolation-by-distance. <b>Analysis of Gravettian ornaments identified nine geographically discrete cultural entities across Europe.</b> <b>While broadly in agreement with palaeogenetic data, our results highlight a more complex pattern, with cultural entities located in areas not yet sampled by palaeogenetics and distinctive entities in regions inhabited by populations of similar genetic ancestry.</b> Integrating personal ornament and biological data from other Palaeolithic cultures will elucidate the complex narrative of population dynamics of Upper Palaeolithic Europe.</span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Jack Baker, Solange Rigaud, Daniel Pereira, Lloyd A. Courtenay & Francesco d’Errico, "<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01803-6">Evidence from personal ornaments suggest nine distinct cultural groups between 34,000 and 24,000 years ago in Europe</a>", Nature Human Behaviour (January 29, 2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01803-6</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Science</i> magazine <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/landmark-paper-shows-why-ice-age-europeans-wore-jewelry">discusses the paper</a>:</span></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">For ice age hunters in Europe some 30,000 years ago, styles of ornaments including amber pendants, ivory bangles, and fox tooth beads may have also signaled membership in a particular culture, researchers report <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01803-6">today in Nature Human Behaviour</a>. The study, which compared thousands of handcrafted beads and adornments from dozens of widespread sites, suggests at least nine distinct cultures existed across Europe at this time.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">“It’s a landmark paper,” says archaeologist Peter Jordan, a professor at Lund University and Hokkaido University who was not involved with the study. For centuries, archaeologists have tried to distinguish ancient peoples based on similarities in their artifacts. In recent years, however, sorting populations by <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-dna-upends-european-prehistory">ancient genetic group</a> has at times overshadowed the archaeology. Here, “The archaeology strikes back,” Jordan says. “[It’s] showing that we can generate new narratives that also use a very rigorous, quantitative approach to the study of material traditions.”</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-oldest-known-beads-found-morocco">earliest known ornamental beads</a>—seashells punched for stringing—come from early Homo sapiens sites dated to between 150,000 to 70,000 years ago in Africa and the eastern Mediterranean coast. Unlike knives or awls, ornaments offer no obvious survival functions. Instead, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440305002682">anthropologists think</a> they likely communicated one’s traits and achievements, such as reaching adulthood, hunts completed, or family lines. “It’s a kind of common language or common discourse with other individuals in that group,” Jordan says. Many scholars think the invention of beads indicates that our ancestors had also evolved the <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1095905">capacity for symbolism</a> and <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248404001307">language</a>.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Between 34,000 and 24,000 years ago, foragers in Europe fashioned beads from a diverse array of materials including ivory, bone, human and animal teeth, and flashy stones. These communities also painted caves and crafted <a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-6-most-iconic-ancient-artifacts-that-continue-to-captivate">so-called Venus</a> figurines resembling voluptuous women, while coping with the glaciers and frigid temperatures of the last ice age. Despite the “horrendous” conditions, their artistic expressions suggest these people “weren’t just surviving—they were thriving,” says University of Bordeaux archaeologist and doctoral student Jack Baker.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">As part of his dissertation, Baker aimed to find out. In 2020, he began to comb the literature for every ornament reported from 112 Gravettian burial and habitation sites excavated between the mid-1800s to 2010s. He classified thousands of beads into 134 types based on their raw materials and other design elements.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Next, he compared bead types between sites and found that places with similar accoutrements clustered geographically. Nine distinct groups emerged. People at the easternmost sites, such as Kostenki along the Don River in Russia, seemed to prefer ornaments made of stone and red deer canines, whereas those in northwest Europe wore tube-shaped shells of Dentalium mollusks.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Because of the widespread locations of figurines and similarly fashioned spearpoints, archaeologists traditionally clumped all these people into a single culture known as the Gravettian, spread from what is now Portugal to Russia. More recently, though, analyses of subtle differences in stone toolmaking, funerary practices, and ancient DNA have suggested more than one group <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05726-0">roamed the continent</a> at this time. Could the diverse beads found from this period result from different cultures?</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Gravettian was not “one monolithic thing,” Baker says, but instead included several culturally distinct groups, each hewing to their own ornamental traditions. His team thinks these groups crossed paths: The team’s computer simulations suggest the patterns of bead differences most resemble a scenario in which neighboring groups occasionally swapped styles or territories. Perhaps ivory-adorned people gazed across a river and spotted a band decked in vibrant seashells: “They would have been like, ‘Oh my God! Someone completely different!’” Baker imagines. Despite those differences, some cultural and genetic exchange seems to have occurred.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">DNA from human remains excavated from Gravettian sites identified two major genetic lineages in Europe at the time: one situated around the Pyrenees Mountains, and another in central and Eastern Europe. The bead-based groups mostly accorded with these populations, but added more subdivisions and a few twists, including data for places that have yet to yield ancient DNA, such as Moldova and southern Spain.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">For groups for which genetic data are available, being closely related didn’t necessarily mean they wore matching jewelry. Ancient groups living in modern-day Italy, for example, shared ancestry but some buried their dead with cowrie shells and others put fish vertebrae and ivory beads into graves. In contrast, in what’s now France and Belgium, individuals with different ancestry sported similar ornaments. These results imply somewhat porous, shifting cultural boundaries, and perhaps some adornment differences for people with special social roles.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">It makes sense that some peoples with shared ancestry may develop different cultural identities, reflected by their fashions and other behaviors—and conversely, that distinct genetic groups can blend culturally, says Cosimo Posth, a paleogeneticist at the University of Tübingen who was not involved with the new study. “It’s expected that genes don’t always match the culture that you’re carrying.”</span></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-14988008905782565802024-02-06T12:05:00.001-07:002024-02-06T12:05:43.250-07:00A Higgs Boson Anomaly?<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Scientists analyzing all available Higgs boson data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) observe a 2 sigma tension between the Standard Model prediction for the coupling of quarks and leptons to the Higgs boson and the observed values of those couplings, but see no tension between the predicted and observed couplings of W and Z bosons to the Higgs boson.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">This isn't all that significant. Two sigma tensions disappear all the time with later more precise measurements. But it is something to be on the lookout for in future measurements of Higgs boson properties.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">We perform global fits of the Higgs boson couplings to the full Higgs datasets collected at the LHC with the integrated luminosities per experiment of approximately 5/fb at 7 TeV, 20/fb at 8 TeV, and up to 139/fb at 13 TeV. Our combined analysis based on the experimental signal strengths used in this work and the theoretical ones elaborated for our analysis reliably reproduce the results in the literature. </span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">We reveal that the <b>LHC Higgs precision data are no longer best described by the SM Higgs boson</b> taking account of extensive and comprehensive CP-conserving and CP-violating scenarios found in several well-motivated models beyond the SM. Especially, in most of the fits considered in this work, we observe that <b>the best-fitted values of the normalized Yukawa couplings are about 2σ below the corresponding SM ones with the 1σ errors of 3-5%. On the other hand, the gauge-Higgs couplings are consistent with the SM with the 1σ errors of 2-3%.</b> Incidentally, <b>the reduced Yukawa couplings help to explain the excess of the H→Zγ signal strength of 2.2±0.7 recently reported by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations.</b></span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Yongtae Heo, Dong-Won Jung, Jae Sik Lee, "Higgs Precision Analysis of the Full LHC Run 1 and Run 2 Data" <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02822">arXiv:2402.02822</a> (February 5, 2024).</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-71043801319756323972024-02-06T11:55:00.009-07:002024-02-06T12:19:10.875-07:00Ratio Of Proton Mass To Electron Mass Unchanged For 11.5 Billion Years<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01983">A recent paper</a> observed that the proton-electron mass ratio has been unchanged since at least z=3.025 (about 11.5 billion years ago). The observed ratio of the difference in this ratio to the ratio itself at that redshift is<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="mo" face="STIXGeneral-Regular" id="MathJax-Span-20" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; display: inline; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0.337em; position: static; text-align: left; text-wrap: nowrap; transition: none 0s ease 0s; vertical-align: 0px;">(</span><span class="mn" face="STIXGeneral-Regular" id="MathJax-Span-21" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; display: inline; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: static; text-align: left; text-wrap: nowrap; transition: none 0s ease 0s; vertical-align: 0px;">0.120</span><span class="mo" face="STIXGeneral-Regular" id="MathJax-Span-22" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; display: inline; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0.241em; position: static; text-align: left; text-wrap: nowrap; transition: none 0s ease 0s; vertical-align: 0px;">±</span><span class="mn" face="STIXGeneral-Regular" id="MathJax-Span-23" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; display: inline; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0.241em; position: static; text-align: left; text-wrap: nowrap; transition: none 0s ease 0s; vertical-align: 0px;">0.144</span><span class="mo" face="STIXGeneral-Regular" id="MathJax-Span-24" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; display: inline; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: static; text-align: left; text-wrap: nowrap; transition: none 0s ease 0s; vertical-align: 0px;">)</span><span class="mo" face="STIXGeneral-Regular" id="MathJax-Span-25" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; display: inline; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0.241em; position: static; text-align: left; text-wrap: nowrap; transition: none 0s ease 0s; vertical-align: 0px;">× 10<sup>8</sup></span></span><span style="text-align: left;">. This is consistent with null hypothesis of zero at the one sigma level. All previous efforts to determine changes in physical constants in the distant past using astronomy observations have likewise seen no statistically significant difference.</span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Here is a chart converting redshift z to look back time (i.e. how long ago that z occurred). Note the shift from z amount in the left body of the table, to look back time in billions of years in the right body of the table, starting at z=6.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIxjcpGqWDf0UnkaHOWri0JlVtM9smfmcT4PHHLRqK3B9E4pRkf3bE6e-lC3RR8iMXyC5FqBW-pD-dJ4bSdFE3jIv-sHjAMIY_5dbrUhW8oqmPDljZEGMsMftnSd1wgV17TupymvvBwKhfLQPpvAY0PpU-MMJvzMJwPfiJniIX4x8YnTfKIPTeO06Nud-Y/s440/Look-back_time_by_redshift.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="348" data-original-width="440" height="506" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIxjcpGqWDf0UnkaHOWri0JlVtM9smfmcT4PHHLRqK3B9E4pRkf3bE6e-lC3RR8iMXyC5FqBW-pD-dJ4bSdFE3jIv-sHjAMIY_5dbrUhW8oqmPDljZEGMsMftnSd1wgV17TupymvvBwKhfLQPpvAY0PpU-MMJvzMJwPfiJniIX4x8YnTfKIPTeO06Nud-Y/w640-h506/Look-back_time_by_redshift.png" width="640" /></a></div></span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-61628074959575499682024-02-06T11:48:00.000-07:002024-02-06T11:49:11.145-07:00How Many Atomic Isotopes Are Possible?<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The chemical properties of and element classification of an atom, i.e. composite structures made out of protons and neutrons bound in a nucleus by the residual strong force, is determined by the number of protons it has, but its isotopes depend upon the total number of protons and neutrons in its nucleus.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">There isn't an obvious maximum number of isotopes. But isotopes with more nucleons (i.e. protons plus neutrons) decay because the residual strong force has limited range and can only bind so many nucleons.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Theorists have now calculated, at least in the case of isotopes with an even number of protons (i.e. how many even-Z nuclei are possible), how many different possible bound isotopes there are and have found that there are 4829 possible bound even-Z nuclei with 8 to 120 protons, of which we have experimentally measured masses for about a quarter of them. The atomic element with the most protons ever observed <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/5-ways-heaviest-element-periodic-table-really-bizarre">as of 2018</a> was element 118, called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oganesson">Oganesson</a> (which is in the noble gas column of the periodic table even though it is a solid at room temperature), with a mass in atomic mass units of about 300. It has a half-life of 0.7 ms. This study didn't examine the number of possible isotopes with more than 120 protons.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Assuming that there are an order of magnitude similar number of odd-Z nuclei that are possible, and adding in the isotopes with Z=1 to Z=7, there are about 10,000 possible atomic isotopes with bound nuclei and 120 or fewer protons.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The model used also predicts the mass of each isotope, and for the 1244 isotopes for even-Z atoms for which experimental data is available, the root mean square difference between the experimental data and the predicted values is 1.477 MeV which is very good considering that the mass of a proton is about 938.3 MeV, the mass of a neutron is 940.6 MeV, the mass of an electron is 0.511 MeV (atoms are a bit heavier than the sum of the masses of their protons, neutrons, and electrons due to their binding energy). An atomic mass unit has a mass of about 931.5 MeV.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">For example, Gadolinium with Z=64 in the middle of the range studied has an average mass of 157.25 amu which is about 146,478.4 MeV. So the model is predicting the masses of nuclear isotopes to a precision of about ten parts per million.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">In all, about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability">3300 atomic isotopes</a> (a.k.a. nucleotides) have been observed, of which 251 are stable (i.e. having no observed decays). Attempts to synthesize atomic elements 119 to 127 have so far been unsuccessful.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">The mass table in the deformed relativistic Hartree-Bogoliubov theory in continuum (DRHBc) with the PC-PK1 density functional has been established for even-Z nuclei with 8≤Z≤120, extended from the previous work for even-even nuclei [Zhang et al. (DRHBc Mass Table Collaboration), At. Data Nucl. Data Tables 144, 101488 (2022)]. The calculated binding energies, two-nucleon and one-neutron separation energies, root-mean-square (rms) radii of neutron, proton, matter, and charge distributions, quadrupole deformations, and neutron and proton Fermi surfaces are tabulated and compared with available experimental data. A total of 4829 even-Z nuclei are predicted to be bound, with an rms deviation of 1.477 MeV from the 1244 mass data. Good agreement with the available experimental odd-even mass differences, α decay energies, and charge radii is also achieved. The description accuracy for nuclear masses and nucleon separation energies as well as the prediction for drip lines is compared with the results obtained from other relativistic and nonrelativistic density functional. The comparison shows that the DRHBc theory with PC-PK1 provides an excellent microscopic description for the masses of even-Z nuclei. The systematics of the nucleon separation energies, odd-even mass differences, pairing energies, two-nucleon gaps, α decay energies, rms radii, quadrupole deformations, potential energy curves, neutron density distributions, and neutron mean-field potentials are discussed.</span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">DRHBc Mass Table Collaboration, "Nuclear mass table in deformed relativistic Hartree-Bogoliubov theory in continuum, II: Even-Z nuclei" <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02935">arXiv:2402.02935</a> (February 5, 2024) (392 pages).</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Another study (admittedly not a terribly credible one given that it is a pre-print on the Social Science Research Network by authors not affiliated with universities or chemical/physics research institutions) argues from a different perspective, that there can be no more than 137 possible chemical elements:</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">Using the particle-wave dualism of microparticles and the Bohr model of the atom, it is strictly shown that the maximum number of chemical elements in the periodic table cannot be more than 137. Since, starting from element 138, the speed of a 1S-electron when moving around the nucleus of an atom must be higher than the speed light in a vacuum. Therefore, Feynmanium (Z=137) is the last chemical element. It was also shown that a decrease in the half-life of chemical elements correlates with an increase in the 1S-electron relativism.</span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Volodymyr Bezverkhniy, Vitaliy Bezverkhniy, "The Speed of Light and the Number of Chemical Elements" <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3709471">SSRN</a> (December 4, 2020). </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">A <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3545839.3545861">2022 paper</a> has questioned the reasoning behind this calculation, however.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_periodic_table#Electron_configurations">Another study</a> has predicted properties of atomic nuclei with up to 174 nucleons plus one with 184 nucleons.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-82869699102952677892024-02-06T10:43:00.004-07:002024-02-06T12:15:20.692-07:00How Hot Is Quark Gluon Plasma?<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Quarks and gluons are normally "confined", i.e. they can be observed only within hadrons and not "free" of a composite particle (except for top quarks with decay via the weak force before they have time to hadronize). But if you add enough energy, hadrons fall apart and their quarks and gluons from a quark gluon plasma (QGP).</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">At temperature does this happen? </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">A <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01998">recent measurement</a> says (3.40 ± 0.55) × 10<sup>12</sup> degrees Kelvin.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">This is about 150 MeV in electron-volt units, and corresponds to 10<sup>-12</sup> seconds after the Big Bang in the standard <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe">chronology of the universe</a>.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-9728719067512594752024-01-29T09:50:00.003-07:002024-01-29T09:51:39.285-07:00An Organic Neutrino Telescope<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The idea of just hooking up instruments to trees in a forest is the most novel approach to developing a high energy neutrino telescope I've seen.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The primary challenge in detecting ultrahigh energy (UHE) neutrinos with energies exceeding 10^16 eV is to instrument a large enough volume to detect the extremely low flux, which falls as ∼E^−2.</span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span></div></blockquote><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">We explore in this article the feasibility of using the forest as a detector. Trees have been shown to be efficient broadband antennas, and may, without damage to the tree, be instrumented with a minimum of apparatus. A large scale array of such trees may be the key to achieving the requisite target volumes for UHE neutrino astronomy.</span></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Steven Prohira, "The forest as a neutrino detector" <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14454">arXiv:2401.14454</a> (January 25, 2024).</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-5191284516292446452024-01-23T19:29:00.007-07:002024-01-23T19:37:55.399-07:00Which Came First? Canals Or Cities<div><a href="https://thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/art/2022/06/13/new-discoveries-in-iraq-upend-story-of-mesopotamia/"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></a><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Irrigation canals arose so long before cities did that these canals and the agriculture that they are a testament to, couldn't have been the reason that cities came to be. So, maybe religion and not agriculture is the key factor.</span></p><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/art/2022/06/13/new-discoveries-in-iraq-upend-story-of-mesopotamia/">The latest data from Ancient Mesopotamian city of Girsu</a> shows that agriculture built around system of irrigation canals existed for a 1000 years before the first city was built.</span></blockquote><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">From the <a href="https://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2024/01/apkallu.html">Old European Culture blog</a>. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The excerpt below is from the body text of the linked article (an educated layman's level publication, not a scientific journal):</span></p><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Rey and his team used new technologies to understand the development of the city, flying drones over the vast, 250-hectare site. The images they gathered show the extent to which the irrigation system was embedded throughout the city and its surrounds.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Heavy rainfall, a product of climate change, also washed away the top layer of the soil, making the outlines even more apparent.</span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span></div></blockquote><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Working with archaeologists from five universities in Iraq, led by Jaafar Jotheri of Al Qadisiyah, the British Museum team dug out shells and other material from the bottom level of the canals to be carbon-dated. The results were startling: the canals seem to have been dug in the fifth millennium BC. .</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">“The big surprise is that the largest irrigation canals date to the prehistory of Mesopotamia. That means they are much, much older than the birth of the city, by about 1,000 years," says Rey. "Traditionally, what you read is that development in Mesopotamia begins at the end of the fourth millennium, around 3300 BC. That’s when there was an important transition from pre-urban to urban and the invention of writing.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">"But the canals that we have dated recently sets the date back to the fifth millennium, which means that irrigation is not the key, the spark that triggered the urban construction and the invention of writing. And that's a really important discovery.”</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Before, archeologists believed that once the ancient Sumerians learnt to irrigate their crops, they were able to move from subsistence farming to the social and religious hierarchy that the elaborate temples of Girsu attest to.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">But the Girsu Project’s discoveries, which Rey has written up for a paper that has passed peer review but which is still to be published, show that the Sumerians were living with well-watered plains for a full millennium before they began to build the temple complexes.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">What changed? What moved the needle towards a more complex society?</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Rey speculates that the shift was unrelated to the environment but rather owed to the pattern of thinking of those living in Girsu: an ideological transformation. Temples and administrative buildings allowed the powers ascribed to the gods to reside in one site, which was embedded into a larger social and political structure.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">“It was a domestication of the power of the gods,” Rey says, in an adaptation of the phrase usually used for Sumerian development of the domestication of water.</span></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"></div></div> <div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-1453212457634697422024-01-17T22:17:00.011-07:002024-01-18T18:22:58.431-07:00New Historical Linguistics Paper Get IE Languages Badly Wrong<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">A <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-44430-5">new paper</a> in <i>Nature Communications </i>on historical linguistics fails disastrously by claiming that the Indo-European languages had a Neolithic dispersal time from Anatolia. This utterly undermines the credibility of the methodology as a whole, and makes it not worth even bothering to read carefully in any other respect. Mountains of work in myriad papers considering ancient DNA, linguistics, and archaeology, done by far more competent researchers, contradict this paper. This paper never should have cleared peer review.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>The idiots who wrote this fatally flawed paper are </span>Sizhe Yang, Xiaoru Sun, Li Jin, and Menghan Zhang.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-59798037118305638122024-01-12T13:26:00.003-07:002024-01-12T13:49:38.114-07:00Why Did The Amazonian Upano Civilization Collapse?<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Upano civilization in the foothills of the Andes Mountains in Eastern Ecuador had a city the size of Roman era London at about the same time as Roman era London, the discovery of which was <a href="https://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.com/2024/01/a-lost-city-in-amazon.html">just published yesterday</a>, in the journal Science.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">This archaeological civilization collapsed in approximately 300-600 CE, and the area was only repopulated by the Huapula culture, ca. 800 CE, two centuries or more later.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Why did it collapse?</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Several possibilities suggest themselves.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">1. The Roman empire was brought down, in significant part, by a <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-fall-rome-180967591/">major climate event</a> that was global in scope. It could be that the same climate event caused the Upano civilization to collapse halfway around the world. As explained at the link:</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">Work by dendro-chronologists and ice-core experts points to an enormous spasm of volcanic activity in the 530s and 540s CE, unlike anything else in the past few thousand years. This violent sequence of eruptions triggered what is now called the ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Antique_Little_Ice_Age">Late Antique Little Ice Age,</a>’ when much colder temperatures endured for at least 150 years.</span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">But we don't know much about the climate impact of this event in Ecuador or its vicinity. We do know, however, that <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/abrupt-climate-change-drove-early-south-american-population-decline-1419013">an extreme climate event did cause a massive population collapse</a> in South America, including the Amazon region, around 6200 BCE. We also know that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period">Medieval Climate Anomaly</a>, a warm period of the Northern Hemisphere from ca. 1000 CE -1200 CE was <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040618218308322">matched by similar effects in South America</a>:</span></div><div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The vast majority of all South American land sites suggest a warm MCA. Andean vegetation zones moved upslope, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/glaciers">glaciers</a> retreated, biological productivity in high altitude lakes increased, the duration of cold season ice cover on Andean lakes shortened, and trees produced thicker annual rings.</span></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://phys.org/news/2018-07-ice-age-affected-south-american.html">Similar comparisons have been made</a> to South America for Europe's Little Ice Age from 1500 CE to 1850 CE. In that time period, "the <a href="https://phys.org/tags/climate/">climate</a> of southwestern Brazil was wetter than it is now, for example, while that of the country's Northeast region was drier."</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The correlations seem to be driven, in part, <a href="https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2021jd035832">by ocean temperatures</a>.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">2. After a thousand years, soil exhaustion similar to the soil exhaustion that was an important cause of the <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/quaternary-research/article/abs/neolithic-population-crash-in-northwest-europe-associated-with-agricultural-crisis/11F405EB351C8A86020C17A647C1C001">late Neolithic population crash in Europe</a> could have made the civilization unviable. As the abstract of the 2019 paper linked in this paragraph explains that event:</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">The focus of this paper is the Neolithic of northwest Europe, where a rapid growth in population between ~5950 and ~5550 cal yr BP is followed by a decline that lasted until ~4950 cal yr BP. The timing of the increase in population density correlates with the local appearance of farming and is attributed to the advantageous effects of agriculture. However, the subsequent population decline has yet to be satisfactorily explained. One possible explanation is the reduction in yields in Neolithic cereal-based agriculture due to worsening climatic conditions. The suggestion of a correlation between Neolithic climate deterioration, agricultural productivity, and a decrease in population requires testing for northwestern Europe. Data for our analyses were collected during the Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe project. We assess the correlation between agricultural productivity and population densities in the Neolithic of northwest Europe by examining the changing frequencies of crop and weed taxa before, during and after the population “boom and bust.” We show that the period of population decline is coincidental with a decrease in cereal production linked to a shift towards less fertile soils.</span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">3. They could have been defeated militarily by a neighboring civilization such as the <b>Muisca confederation</b> which was well established in the Northern Andes by the 8th century CE, the <b>Tairona civilization</b> thrived in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range in northern Colombia from the 1st century CE until the Spanish arrival in the 16th century, the <b>Moche civilization</b> that thrived on the north coast of Peru from about 100 to 800 CE, the <b>Wari Empire</b> was located in the western portion of Peru and existed from the 6th century to the 11th century, or the <b>Tiwanaku empire</b> was based in western Bolivia and extended into present-day Peru and Chile from 300 to 1000. See generally <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_era">here</a>.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">4. They could have fallen to a wave of Old World diseases brought to South American through <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_transoceanic_contact_theories">pre-Columbian first contact</a> with Polynesian seafarers, albeit, a wave of diseases less severe (or overcome and recovered from with more time to do so) than in the Columbian European first contact case.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">5. They could have not actually collapsed, but relocated. Precedents for this kind of mass migration include the Na-Dene people of Canada who migrated to the American Southwest (around 1000 CE), and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloans">Ancestral Puebloans</a> (around 800-900 CE). For example, the geographically nearby <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca%C3%B1ari">Cañari</a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca%C3%B1ari"> civilization</a>, whose capital is reputed to be the source of the mythical city of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Dorado">El Dorado</a>, that existed contemporaneous with the 13th to 16th century Inca civilization, could have been derived from the descendants of the Upano people.</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-44900184208354349642024-01-11T23:42:00.009-07:002024-01-12T11:06:10.195-07:00A Huge Lost City In The Amazon<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">The archaeological culture associated with this lost city, the same size as Roman era London, is so obscure that it didn't even have its own Wikipedia page and wasn't mentioned in the Pre-Columbian History of Ecuador page on Wikipedia.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZx3ulPaSV99knYINE32DBmz_TxCD_-XoYyeLJfG09dq2iHOoD8c8A0MqCU-2IBChnNfRcsXg73uBYAfz2h-CCyd6QpyHJlisYy1Qv5-4MoNtiO7MY2LnYyHJtkNCnrTPokUUAotMMr2rAVj2nKWZ7P9UC5rWtd8_Xnq46gYkvSJ8cLsYzqPMjHx6LQUsC/s1498/_132280009_lost_amazon_city_v4_2x640-nc.png.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1498" data-original-width="1280" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZx3ulPaSV99knYINE32DBmz_TxCD_-XoYyeLJfG09dq2iHOoD8c8A0MqCU-2IBChnNfRcsXg73uBYAfz2h-CCyd6QpyHJlisYy1Qv5-4MoNtiO7MY2LnYyHJtkNCnrTPokUUAotMMr2rAVj2nKWZ7P9UC5rWtd8_Xnq46gYkvSJ8cLsYzqPMjHx6LQUsC/w546-h640/_132280009_lost_amazon_city_v4_2x640-nc.png.webp" width="546" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span>LIDAR has discovered a city that was once home to </span><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67940671">100,000 people in eastern Ecuador</a><span>, in a time period roughly contemporaneous with the Roman Empire, that was ultimately reclaimed by the Amazon jungle. As </span><a href="https://boingboing.net/2024/01/11/lost-city-found-in-amazon-may-have-housed-100000-before-being-abandoned-and-reclaimed-by-rainforest.html">Boing Boing explains</a><span>:</span></span></div><div><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">Other reports <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/11/amazon-archaeology-lost-cities-ecuador">describe it as a "valley of lost cities"</a> spread throughout the region. The implications appear to be quite spectacular: a sprawling urban civilization larger than nearby Mayan cultures.</span></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The linked report isn't quite as generous in estimating the number of people who lived there, but provides further details:</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The settlements were occupied by the Upano people between about 500 BC and AD 300 to 600 – a period roughly contemporaneous with the Roman empire in Europe, the researchers found.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Residential and ceremonial buildings erected on more than 6,000 earthen mounds were surrounded by agricultural fields with drainage canals. The largest roads were 33 feet (10 meters) wide and stretched for 6-12 miles (10-20km).</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">While it is difficult to estimate populations, the site was home to at least 10,000 inhabitants – and perhaps as many as 15,000 or 30,000 at its peak, said archaeologist Antoine Dorison, a study co-author at the same French institute. That is comparable to the estimated population of Roman-era London, then Britain’s largest city.</span></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><p><span style="font-size: large;">The article and its abstract are as follows: </span></p></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">A dense system of pre-Hispanic urban centers has been found in the Upano Valley of Amazonian Ecuador, in the eastern foothills of the Andes. Fieldwork and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) analysis have revealed an anthropized landscape with clusters of monumental platforms, plazas, and streets following a specific pattern intertwined with extensive agricultural drainages and terraces as well as wide straight roads running over great distances. Archaeological excavations date the occupation from around 500 BCE to between 300 and 600 CE. The most notable landscape feature is the complex road system extending over tens of kilometers, connecting the different urban centers, thus creating a regional-scale network. Such extensive early development in the Upper Amazon is comparable to similar Maya urban systems recently highlighted in Mexico and Guatemala.</span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Rostain, et al., "<a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi6317?adobe_mc=MCMID%3D75470974684613446334993648347645513518%7CMCORGID%3D242B6472541199F70A4C98A6%2540AdobeOrg%7CTS%3D1705022942">Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon</a>," <i>Science</i> (2024).</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">According to the <a href="file:///Users/andrewoh-willeke/Dropbox/My%20Mac%20(Andrew%E2%80%99s%20MacBook%20Air%20(2))/Desktop/science.adi6317_sm.pdf">Supplemental Materials</a>:</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><blockquote>Based on radiocarbon dating mentioned above and on the stylistic and stratigraphic classification
of the remains discovered during our excavations, a cultural chronology of 2700 years could be
established for the region. This sequence was recently revised and will be presented in a
subsequent paper. It presents the succession of four or five cultural assemblages: </blockquote><blockquote>1. Sangay culture: from around 700 to 500 BCE. This first occupation left few remains. </blockquote><blockquote>2. Kilamope Culture: from 500 BCE. These were the first mound builders. Pottery of Kilamope
culture is characterized by curvilinear incised decorations, the use of reddish slip and various
fine prints and incisions. </blockquote><blockquote>3. Upano Culture: probably from 500 BCE to 300/600 CE. They built earthen mounds and they
were contemporaneous or successors of the Kilamope groups. Pottery of the Upano culture is
mainly characterized by rectilinear incisions and painted decorations. </blockquote><blockquote>4. Huapula Culture: from 800 to 1200 CE. After the disappearance of the Upano, Huapula groups
reused the mounds abandoned by their predecessors. Huapula ceramic is characterized by
decorations based on the corrugated modality using wavy patterns, and marks the appearance of
modern Jivaroan-speaking populations in the region. </blockquote><blockquote>5. Shuar Culture: They follow the Huapula of whom they are the direct heirs.
The cultural evolution of this region is comparable with that known in other Amazonian areas:
after sparse occupation, appearance of dense societies during the first phases (Kilamope and
Upano cultures) while around 800 CE, the archaeological record indicates a fragmentation of the
system with the emergence of smaller and dispersed groups. </blockquote><blockquote>Since the European contact and
until the end of the 19th century at least, the Upano basin has been occupied by Shuar groups of
the Chicham-Aents culture (recent self-naming to replace the previous inadequate term “Jivaro”).
Then came the Spaniards and, later, settlers coming from the Andean high plateaus.</blockquote><p>The Supplemental Materials also mention and briefly describe four other ancient Amazonian urban centers that have been located in Cotoca, Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia; Hertenrits, Western coastal plain, Suriname; Kuhikugu, Upper Xingu, Brazil; and El Gaván, Llanos de Barinas, Venezuela.</p></span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-49429115063591953312024-01-11T12:35:00.002-07:002024-01-11T12:35:54.915-07:00The Hubble Constant Tensions And Related Tensions<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkD4wrNlQMJO9ZfM2Mz0PQ65uNUx2gD_HKjEVZhbJYGEo-wDrXAbUhh0PxWWZcQkxG2OlTZUJHAPK01MgnH9FaOBtcAUeSxM2C63Yx2DaFB2e0xCFMCLdUlf80wZbZygo809JxmDB8r2Dl5DVPIeb-Z7r9m1pQi0hVNAoZprK0rrIYXJHg6qPWJKNip4FX/s1214/Screenshot%202024-01-11%20at%2012.26.20%20PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1214" data-original-width="986" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkD4wrNlQMJO9ZfM2Mz0PQ65uNUx2gD_HKjEVZhbJYGEo-wDrXAbUhh0PxWWZcQkxG2OlTZUJHAPK01MgnH9FaOBtcAUeSxM2C63Yx2DaFB2e0xCFMCLdUlf80wZbZygo809JxmDB8r2Dl5DVPIeb-Z7r9m1pQi0hVNAoZprK0rrIYXJHg6qPWJKNip4FX/w520-h640/Screenshot%202024-01-11%20at%2012.26.20%20PM.png" width="520" /></a><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">This screenshot is from <a href="https://tritonstation.com/2023/12/20/holiday-concordance/">this recent blog post</a> at Triton Station.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">In the year 2007, there were as sweet spot where a lot of cosmology measurements seemed to line up consistently. But, seventeen years later, as a result of new and improved data, this is no longer true, because the cosmic microwave background data from Planck show that the Hubble constant was too small in the early universe and that the cluster baryon fraction was too high. </span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Hubble constant measurements (straight horizontal bar) and the Planck cosmic microwave background constraints (which includes an early after the Big Bang Hubble constant measurement) are flatly inconsistent, which is the "Hubble tension."</span> </p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-57841989028003357132024-01-11T11:52:00.004-07:002024-01-11T11:52:52.188-07:00Another Take On The Wide Binary Debate<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">While I'll need to look more carefully to see if the external field effect/stronger gravity regime effects (which normally makes MOND irrelevant at the solar system level) have been considered appropriately, this is a new paper looking at a different set of wide binary data in a different way that the GAIA data driving the main wide binary-MOND debate.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), postulating a breakdown of Newtonian mechanics at low accelerations, has considerable success at explaining galaxy kinematics. However, the quadrupole of the gravitational field of the Solar System (SS) provides a strong constraint on the way in which Newtonian gravity can be modified. In this paper we assess the extent to which modified gravity formulations of MOND are capable of accounting simultaneously for the Radial Acceleration Relation (RAR) -- encapsulating late-type galaxy dynamics -- the Cassini measurement of the SS quadrupole and the kinematics of wide binaries in the Solar neighbourhood. We achieve this by extending the method of Desmond (2023) to infer the location and sharpness of the MOND transition from the SPARC RAR under broad assumptions for the behaviour of the interpolating function and external field effect. We constrain the same quantities from the SS quadrupole, finding that it requires a significantly sharper transition between the deep-MOND and Newtonian regimes than is allowed by the RAR (an 8.7σ tension under fiducial model assumptions). This may be relieved by allowing additional freedom in galaxies' mass-to-light ratios -- which also provides a better RAR fit -- and more significantly by removing galaxies with bulges. We show that the SS quadrupole constraint implies, to high precision, no deviation from Newtonian gravity in wide binaries in the Solar neighbourhood, and speculate on possible resolutions of this incompatibility between SS and galaxy data within the MOND paradigm.</span></blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Harry Desmond, Aurélien Hees, Benoit Famaey, "On the incompatibility of the Radial Acceleration Relation and Solar System quadrupole in modified gravity MOND" <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04796">arXiv:2401.04796</a> (January 9, 2024).</span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-40365710199217381402024-01-11T11:31:00.007-07:002024-01-16T09:24:55.499-07:00Forty Physics Conjectures<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">T</span><span style="font-size: large;">hese are some conjectures about physics that are floating around in my head:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">1. Sphalerons, the only Standard Model process in which baryon number and lepton number are not separately conserved, although baryon number minus lepton number is conserved, do not exist, because baryon number and lepton number conservation have the effect of making the energy density necessary for a sphaleron interaction physically impossible.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">2. The baryon number of the universe minus the lepton number of the universe is zero, which in turn, implies that the number of neutrinos in the universe is extremely close to the number of anti-neutrinos in the universe.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">3. Neutrinos are not Majorana particles and do not have Majorana mass.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">4. There are no right handed neutrinos and there are no left handed anti-neutrinos.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">5. Neutrinos do not acquire mass via a see-saw mechanism.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">6. The Big Bang is at the center of the universe's time dimension. We are on one side of it in time. There is a mirror universe before the Big Bang in time, where due to entropy, time appears to flow in the opposite direction and the universe is anti-matter dominated rather than matter dominated.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">7. Cosmological inflation does not exist.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">8. Matter-energy conservation is absolute. Thus, the total mass-energy of the universe is constant and finite, although what this means in a global sense as opposed to a local sense is subtle and tricky due to the variations in the rate at which time passes and spatial contraction due to special and general relativity.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">9. CPT (combined charge-parity-time) conservation is absolute.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">10. The particle set of the Standard Model of Physics includes all fundamental particles except a massless spin-2 graviton that couples in proportion to mass-energy with a coupling constant that is a function of Newton's constant G. Quantum gravity does exist.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">11. Dark matter effects are a non-perturbative effect of the self-interaction of gravitons, which are largely a function of the total mass-energy of the system and the extent to which the system is not spherically symmetric. Dark matter effects confine gravitons to within a gravitationally bound, non-spherically symmetric system to an extent greater than they would be if the system was spherically symmetric. The appearance that the amount of dark matter in the universe is constant is a function of early galaxy and structure formation. This implies that the tendency of satellite galaxies to be in the same plane of space is not a coincidence. This explains why the amount of apparent dark matter in a galaxy is related to the extent that it is non-spherical. This explains why there is relatively more apparent dark matter in galaxy clusters than in galaxies. Because gravity is so weak, these non-perturbative effects not considered in general relativity as conventionally applied, are negligible in systems smaller than galaxies. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">12. Dark energy phenomena are due to systems with apparent dark matter not exerting a gravitational pull on mass-energy outside the system to the same extent that these systems would if they were spherically symmetric. The notion that dark energy is a substance created as space-time expands is an illusion. The Hubble constant and cosmological constant are merely approximations of this effect which are not fundamentally constant and are a product of dark matter phenomena over time.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">13. Self-interaction of gravity effects lead to earlier galaxy formation than would occur in their absence.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">14. MOND is a phenomenological approximation of self-interaction of gravity effects. Gravitational self-interactions give rise to the external field effect predicted by MOND. The strong equivalence principle of general relativity is not a true hypothesis. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">15. There are no dark matter particles and there is no such thing as dark energy.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">16. The sum of the square of the fundamental particle masses is equal to the square of the Higgs vacuum expectation value, which is a largely function of the weak force coupling constant. This sets the overall mass scale of the massive fundamental particles (i.e. the fundamental particles other than gluons, photons, and gravitons).</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">17. All neutrinos have a non-zero mass, even though the smallest neutrino mass eigenvalue is very small (on the order of 1 meV or less).</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">18. The three Standard Model neutrinos have a "normal" mass hierarchy.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">19. The relative masses of the charged leptons, and the relative masses of the quarks, respectively, are dynamically balanced through W boson interactions, by a formula that is an extended Koide's rule formula. This inherently links the quark masses to the CKM matrix and the lepton masses to the PMNS matrix.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">20. Koide's rule for charged leptons and charged lepton universality work because the neutrino masses are so tiny relative to the charged lepton masses, and so much more similar to each other than the charged lepton and quark masses, that the deviations from Koide's rule and charged lepton universality that they cause are negligible and undetectable with current technological means.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">21. The masses of the neutrinos arise partially from their self-interactions via the weak force and partially from their W boson interactions with the charged leptons and the other neutrinos.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">22. The point-particle paradox of the Standard Model is resolved because fundamental particles are fundamentally narrow waves, call them field excitations, and are not actually points.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">23. There are no "extra dimensions" of space-time beyond the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">24. It is most accurate to describe the fact that quantum entanglement cannot be simultaneously respect causality, locality, and reality, as a causality violation. Thus, when one entangled particle's state is determined, that information goes backward in time to the point of entanglement and then forward in time to the other entangled particle.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">25. The CKM matrix and the PMNS matrix completely describe the transition probabilities of the W boson, and the CP violating parameter in each of these matrixes is the sole source of CP violation in the universe. Forces with massless carrier bosons, i.e. electromagnetism carried by the massless photon, the strong force carried by massless gluons, and gravity carried by massless gravitons, can't violate CP because they travel at the speed of light and don't experience time, while Higgs bosons can't violate CP because it has no electromagnetic charge and has even parity, leaving only the weak force carries by the W and Z bosons as a potential source of CP violation. See also <a href="https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/114417/what-is-the-parity-of-a-w-boson">this Physics.SE post</a> which observes that: </span><span style="font-size: large;">"parity violating weak interactions forced the model to have massive vector and axial vector exchange bosons."</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">26. It is possible that CP violation actually has a separate fundamental source than the other CKM and PMNS matrix elements that just manifest inseparably from each other in what we can observe, and it is possible that the three non-CP violating parameters of each matrix can actually be described with fewer than three parameters in a deeper theory.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">27. The probability of a two generation transition in either the CKM matrix or the PMNS matrix is equal to the product of the probabilities of each of the possible one generation transitions in those matrixes.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">28. The beta functions of the Standard Model are slightly wrong, in a manner only discernible at very high energies, because they fail to include the slight impact of gravity on the running of the Standard Model constants.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">29. There is no muon g-2 anomaly. The present anomaly is solely due to a miscalculation of muon g-2 because the experimental data that was used to substitute for first principles calculations of it are flawed.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">30. The reason that there can't be more than three generations of fundamental fermions is that no fundamental particle can have a mean lifetime of less than the W boson as a t' or b' quark would, and fermions must come in complete generations.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">31. The internal structure of the scalar mesons and axial vector mesons are basically isolated problems that will be solved one by one. There is not a single overarching cause that explains all of them. But all of them can be fully explained with existing QED and QCD, and the fundamental particles of the Standard Model. The full hadron spectrum is possible to calculate in principle from the Standard Model although this is challenging in practice and may require the development of new mathematical techniques.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">32. It is not impossible that the universe flowing from our Big Bang (both before it and after it) is not all that there is, but any other universes have effects that are difficult or impossible to observe, not just as a matter of astronomy observation technology limits, but because any observable effects of other universes on our universe that have reached us at the speed of light, are so far slight.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">33. The universe is not perfectly homogeneous and isotropic even at the largest observable scale, due to amplifications over time of effectively stochastic variation in the early instants after the Big Bang.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">34. Big Bang nucleosynthesis is fundamentally sound, and most of the differences between theory and observation (e.g. in Lithium abundance) are due to errors in how we model post-Big Bang nucleosynthesis and our failure to find elements that are indeed out there.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">35. The "Bang" of the Big Bang is due to matter-antimatter annihilation as matter tries to move forward in time from before t=0 and antimatter tries to move backward in time from after t=0.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">36. The space volume of the Big Bang at t=0 is not necessary zero.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">37. There was a maximum temperature and energy scale at t=0 in the Big Bang, which provides a <i>de facto</i> ultraviolet limit to the running of the fundamental constants of the Standard Model.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">38. Newton's constant runs with energy scale in the same way that the Standard Model constants do, but the running of Newton's constant has been slight since shortly after the Big Bang.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">39. There is probably a maximum mass-energy density equal to the mass per event horizon volume of the smallest possible stellar black hole, which is slightly higher than the maximum mass-energy density of the most dense possible neutron star.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">40. It is possible to devise a "within the Standard Model" theory that explains why the Standard Model has the particle content, particle properties, and experimentally measured physical constants that it does in a more reductionist manner than the Standard Model plus quantum gravity, but it is not string theory, it is not supersymmetric, and it is probably not a conventional grand unified theory that fits the Standard Model into a single overarching Lie group.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">BONUS:</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">41.<span> The Many Worlds Hypothesis is not correct.</span></span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7315236707728759521.post-53580341272946032052024-01-10T09:50:00.004-07:002024-01-10T09:57:32.027-07:00LambdaCDM Still Broken<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The dark galaxy "Nube", the largest low surface brightness galaxy of its kind, <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html">shouldn't happen in the LambdaCDM model</a>:</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">With a stellar mass of ∼4 × 10</span><sup style="background-color: white;">8</sup><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><i style="background-color: white;">M</i><sub style="background-color: white;">⊙</sub><span style="background-color: white;"> and a half-mass radius of </span><i style="background-color: white;">R</i><sub style="background-color: white;">e</sub><span style="background-color: white;"> = 6.9 kpc (corresponding to an effective surface density of ⟨Σ⟩</span><sub style="background-color: white;">e</sub><span style="background-color: white;"> ∼ 0.9 </span><i style="background-color: white;">M</i><sub style="background-color: white;">⊙</sub><span style="background-color: white;"> pc</span><sup style="background-color: white;">−2</sup><span style="background-color: white;">), Nube is the most massive and extended object of its kind discovered so far. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">The galaxy is ten times fainter and has an effective radius three times larger than typical ultradiffuse galaxies with similar stellar masses. Galaxies with comparable effective surface brightness within the Local Group have very low mass (tens of 10</span><sup style="background-color: white;">5</sup><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><i style="background-color: white;">M</i><sub style="background-color: white;">⊙</sub><span style="background-color: white;">) and compact structures (effective radius </span><i style="background-color: white;">R</i><sub style="background-color: white;">e</sub><span style="background-color: white;"> < 1 kpc). <b>Current cosmological simulations within the cold dark matter scenario, including baryonic feedback, do not reproduce the structural properties of Nube.</b></span></span></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-size: large;">In educated layman's terms:</span></p><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Nube is an almost invisible dwarf galaxy discovered by an international research team led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with the University of La Laguna (ULL) and other institutions.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The name was suggested by the 5-year-old daughter of one of the researchers in the group and is due to the diffuse appearance of the object. Its surface brightness is so faint that it had passed unnoticed in the various previous surveys of this part of the sky due to the object's diffuse appearance as if it were some kind of ghost. This is because its stars are so spread out in such a large volume that "Nube" (Spanish for "Cloud") was almost undetectable.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">This newly discovered galaxy has a set of specific properties which distinguish it from previously known objects. The research team estimate that Nube is a <a href="https://phys.org/tags/dwarf+galaxy/">dwarf galaxy</a> 10 times fainter than others of its type, but also 10 times more extended than other objects with a comparable number of stars. . . . this galaxy is one-third of the size of the Milky Way[.]</span></div></blockquote><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The authors, in the introduction, working from the dark matter particle paradigm, recounts some of the LambdaCDM model's problems:</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">Many cosmological observations at large scales suggest that dark matter can be well described as a cold and collisionless fluid (see e.g. <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R125">White & Rees 1978</a>; <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R16">Blumenthal et al. 1984</a>; <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R34">Davis et al. 1985</a>; <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R104">Smoot et al. 1992</a>). </span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;"><span>Nonetheless, the predictions of this model at galactic scales have faced an increasing number of challenges, such as the “cusp-core” problem, the “missing satellite” problem, and the “too-big-to-fail” problem (see e.g. <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R19">Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2011</a>; <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R124">Weinberg et al. 2015</a>; <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R36">Del Popolo & Le Delliou 2017</a>).</span> </span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Many of these problems can be mitigated by the effect of baryon feedback on the dark matter distribution</b> (see e.g. <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R35">Davis et al. 1992</a>; <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R51">Governato et al. 2010</a>; <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R39">Di Cintio et al. 2014</a>). <b>However, if the number of stars or their spatial density were low enough, it would be difficult to argue that stellar feedback could be responsible for affecting the dark matter distribution, because there would not be enough energy to change the location of the dark matter</b> (see e.g. <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R85">Peñarrubia et al. 2012</a>; <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R84">Oñorbe et al. 2015</a>). </span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">In parallel, while the direct detection of dark matter particles remains out of reach, other alternatives to the cold dark matter model have gained traction, and are being applied to solve the small-scale challenges. These include the warm dark matter scenario (see e.g. <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R105">Sommer-Larsen & Dolgov 2001</a>; <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R17">Bode et al. 2001</a>), self-interacting dark matter (<a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R108">Spergel & Steinhardt 2000</a>), and fuzzy dark matter (composed of ultralight axions with masses in the 10^ −23 – 10^−21 eV range; see e.g. <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R103">Sin 1994</a>; <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R57">Hu et al. 2000</a>; <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/01/aa47667-23/aa47667-23.html#R73">Matos & Arturo Ureña-López 2001</a>). </span></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: large;">For these reasons, <b>the search for objects with extremely low stellar surface densities (where the effect of baryonic feedback is not expected to be relevant) promises to probe the microphysical nature of dark matter, that is, the properties of the dark matter particle.</b></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-size: large;">I don't think that the dark matter particle paradigm is correct. Dark matter and dark energy phenomena are probably gravitational law phenomena that arise from our misunderstanding of how gravity works in galaxy scale and galaxy cluster scale systems. But, ruling out various dark matter particle scenarios does advance the cause of demonstrating that the LambdaCDM Standard Model of Cosmology is wrong, and narrows the task of showing that the cause of these phenomena is gravitational rather than particle based.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">It is frustrating that any professional astronomers still take the LambdaCDM model seriously, but paradigm changes like this take hold when the proponents of the old model die, not when new evidence rules them out, scientific method be damned. </span></p></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2012-2020)</div>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08172964121659914379noreply@blogger.com5