The Pipeline

I scan about 45,000 physics articles a year. I bookmark and think carefully about around 4,500 of them a year. I read the underlying article's body text for about 450 of them a year. I blog about 150 of them a year.

This is post 3,001 at this blog.

A Meta Post

Today is the 160th day of the year, and I am on track at 80 posts at this blog so far, the historically normal rate of about one post every two days. I have, however, had proportionately more physics posts and proportionately fewer non-physics posts, than usual, and my posts have had somewhat less depth than I'd ideally like them to, on average. There have been 2,981 posts at this blog over its entire duration.

The sister blog to this one, Wash Park Prophet, has 51 posts so far this year, which while far from being a dead blog, is the lowest posting rate there that I've had of all time (a bit more than 2.2 posts per week). I just can't maintain both blogs at my usual pace at my current job (and have shifted some of my output of hit and run posts to Facebook). I have made 9,696 posts at that blog since its inception.

I've made 12,677 posts at these two blogs combined since their inception.

Combined, I've made 131 posts in 160 days, a pace of about four posts every five days. Again, this is nothing to sniff at, but less than I've posted historically.

A Belated 14th Birthday For This Blog

The first post on this blog was made on May 22, 2011. In the first 14 years of this blog, which ended on May 21, 2025, I made 2805 posts, which is just slightly more than 200 posts per year. 

Unlike its sister blog, Wash Park Prophet, the number of posts per year has been fairly consistent for this entire time period.

I have made minor updates to my two conjectures pages to reflect new developments and correct errors of spelling, grammar, and style, and to enhance clarity.

2801 Posts (And A Question)

My previous post was number 2800 at this blog, which is one week short of 14 years old today, so I'm averaging just slightly over 200 posts a year, which is not quite 4 posts a week.

The question, which I'm musing over and want to post now so I don't let it slip my mind, because it's interesting (even though I'm not yet ready to answer it) is:

What would be the most shocking and revolutionary scientific discovery you can think of that is possible, but currently seems unlikely to you?

To be clear, I mean scientific discoveries and not technological break throughs with existing scientific knowledge or highly foreseeable and expected new scientific discoveries. So, for example, vast improvements in quantum computing, or discovering a cure for some major kind of cancer, don't count.

Also, the answer to this question has a subjective element. 

For example, the majority view among astrophysicists is that some form of dark matter particle which is beyond the Standard Model exists, so discovering one wouldn't be all that surprising to them. But this would be much more surprising to me, as I believe that dark matter phenomena are much more likely to have a cause rooted in some sort of gravitational effect.

Perhaps the most shocking discovery, to me, in the last few years, has been the discovery of human footprints in New Mexico dated to 22,000 years ago (well inland, close in time to but prior to the Last Glacial Maximum that was a barrier to settlement further south, and 8,000 years earlier that the southern migration of the primary human population of the Americas). These Progenitors, however, failed to thrive and left very few definitive traces of their presence.

Feel free to add you own answers to this question in the comments.

Most Viewed Posts Of 2024

Many of my most viewed posts this year are from prior years, but the ten most viewed posts at this blog from this year were:

10. East Asian Historical Population Genetics Reviewed (December 20, 2024),

9. The Languages of Europe, West Asia, and North Africa Ca. 600 CE (June 3, 2024),

8. Beginnings And What We Don't Know In Physics (October 18, 2024),

7. The Turkic Origins Of The Tang Dynasty (August 31, 2024),

6. Does Gravity Screen UV Divergences? (October 8, 2024),

5. Exact Unit Conversions (August 1, 2024),

4. A Higgs Boson Anomaly? (February 6, 2024),

3. Connecting Denisovan DNA To Bones (May 7, 2024), 

2. Uralic And Yeniseian Origins (April 25, 2024), and

1. Dark Matter Is Not Made Up Of Primordial Black Holes (March 6, 2024).

In some cases, the large number of views was probably due to lively off-topic comment threads. In all there have been 559 comments at this blog in the last year.

Also, FYI, I have removed a couple of blogs that have had no new posts for more than a year, from my blog roll.

I Am Not Deur

I have apparently written so much about Dr. Deur's work that Google Scholar sent me an email asking me to claim his Google Scholar profile. Of course, I didn't do that.

Turtle

 

Regular posting will resume soon.

A Physics Blog Of Note (And Hiatus Note)

Manuel Urueña, physicist focused on theoretical gravitation, has an interesting physics blog entitled "Thoughts in theoretical physics" that you may want to check out. 

He has recent posts on the modified inertia formulation of MOND (particularly in light of Mach's principle), gravitomagnetism, gravitational shielding, and other physics conjectures. The blog focuses a bit more on personal conjecture and a bit less on physics "current events" than this one does, but there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm a bit out of pocket for time at the moment, so I haven't carefully analyzed any of his posts yet, but I may do so in the future. If they look good and the blog gets updated with any regularity (which if you look at my blog roll, you know that I define leniently), I may add it to my blog roll when I have the presence of mind to do that.

Also, while there is some chance that I'll post tomorrow or on Thanksgiving Day, I'll be taking a brief hiatus to take a 30th wedding anniversary trip and will be off the grid for that. But, unless my plane crashes, or I'm murdered, or eaten by wild animals, or World War III starts, or the blogger host goes out of business, I'll probably be back afterwards in due course.

Graviton Mass And The Cosmological Constant

Meta Note: This post is my 2,700th post on this blog (over a little less than thirteen and a half years). It is my 12,080th post on this blog and my Wash Park Prophet blog combined (over a little less than nineteen and a half years).

Gravitons gravitate in proportion to their mass-energy which is a function of their gravitational wave frequency in the case of a massless graviton, even if they have no rest mass. But this effect is usually ignored. 

Exploring massive graviton theories, involving low mass, relativistic gravitons can reveal some of these effects which shouldn't actually depend on gravitons having rest mass. 

The biggest problem with massive graviton theories is that they qualitatively and not quantitatively change how gravity works, by giving rise to different numbers of degrees of freedom than are found in general relativity.

Relations between the graviton mass and the cosmological constant Λ have led to some interesting implications. We show that in any approach which leads to a direct correlation between the graviton mass and Λ, either through direct substitution of gravitational coupling in dispersion relations or through the linearization of Einstein equations with massive spin-2 fields, the Compton wavelength of the graviton lies in the superhorizon scale. As a result any gravitational approaches where the graviton mass is related directly to the cosmological constant are of no observational significance.

Oem Trivedi, Abraham Loeb, "On the Cosmological Constant-Graviton Mass correspondence" arXiv:2411.12757 (November 15, 2024).

Eclipse Fun On Turtle Island

 

Not Posting Much

I guess I haven't been posting much this month. I'll get back to it when I have the energy, but quite a long time after testing COVID negative, I'm still really, really tired most of the time. Posts here take more thought and energy than posts at its sister blog or quick shares with a little quip or two on Facebook. 

I'm trying to scan for new notable scientific journal articles and bookmark them as they come out, for future reference, with the little energy that I have.

How Do People Decide Which Scientists To Believe?

Examining and resolving in my own mind disputes between scientists is pretty much the essence of what I do on a daily basis, especially, but not only, at this blog. So, this study caught my attention. I suspect that my methods are more analytical and sourced than average, and view myself as kindred to "superforecasters" in my methods.

Uncertainty that arises from disputes among scientists seems to foster public skepticism or noncompliance. Communication of potential cues to the relative performance of contending scientists might affect judgments of which position is likely more valid. We used actual scientific disputes—the nature of dark matter, sea level rise under climate change, and benefits and risks of marijuana—to assess Americans’ responses (n = 3150). 

Seven cues—replication, information quality, the majority position, degree source, experience, reference group support, and employer—were presented three cues at a time in a planned-missingness design. The most influential cues were majority vote, replication, information quality, and experience. Several potential moderators—topical engagement, prior attitudes, knowledge of science, and attitudes toward science—lacked even small effects on choice, but cues had the strongest effects for dark matter and weakest effects for marijuana, and general mistrust of scientists moderately attenuated top cues’ effects. 

Risk communicators can take these influential cues into account in understanding how laypeople respond to scientific disputes, and improving communication about such disputes.

Branden B. Johnson, Marcus Mayorga, Nathan F. Dieckmann, "How people decide who is correct when groups of scientists disagree" Risk Analysis (July 28, 2023).

Blogroll Purge

Many of the "notable links" in the sidebar are dead or go to defunct blogs. I am purging them from the sidebar, but saving the names of the linked sites and the links that aren't dead for dormant blogs here for future reference to access the existing posts at those links, and also, in case the links are restored or the blogs are revived. I've also resorted the sidebar links alphabetically. The links removed were:

• Arcadian Gravity (author deceased)
• Archaeobotany and Domestication (deactivated account)
• Dienekes' Anthropology Blog (last activity January 1, 2021)
• Ethio Helix (last activity July 31, 2015)
• For What They Were . . . We Are (last activity December 21, 2018, closure announced in last post)
• Gauge Connection (last activity August 13, 2019)
• Linear Population Model (open to invited readers only)
• NJ's arya blog (last activity May 26, 2018)
• A Replicated Typo (last activity May 26, 2021)

Keeping Up With The AI Competition

My method is a little different, and I have no patience for podcasts, but still, our robot overlords will catch up someday.

 

Happy Friday!

 

A New Post With A Weird Date

I recently resurrected a lengthy draft post that blogger has, for some reason that I have never seen before, given the date of February 2, 2021, which is when the draft was initiated, rather than today, which is when it was finally revised and published. 

It is entitled: "Harappan, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan Legacies" and disputes some conjectures made by Razib Khan about South Asian and Brahui prehistory. 

I encourage you to click through to read it.

Looking For Blogroll Suggestions

Every now and then I pay attention to the layout of this blog.

Many of the links in my blogroll are stale, and I plan on migrating them to a permanent "page" of stale science blogs.

This would also be a natural time for me to add new blogs or webpages to my blogroll at the same time.

I'd welcome any suggestions in the comments for active (at least a few posts a year) blogs or reference webpages that regularly address the subject matter of this blog.

Hiatus Notice

My day job includes tax law. The tax deadline this year is May 17, 2021. You won't be hearing from me until that deadline has passed and then I've had a chance to decompress and resolve backlogs in other work after that. 

Possibly, I may not be able to blog until mid-June, due to some exciting developments as my young adult children are growing up, that call for my full attention.

Physics In 2020

I made 90 posts about physics at this blog in 2020. A few topics dominated the discussion, and I collect some of those posts.

There were many increasingly accurate measurements of Standard Model physical constants. I tracked these results against some speculative theoretical expectations, but the uncertainties in the top quark mass measurement which won't be dramatically better for the foreseeable future, and to a lesser extent, some of the other measurements limited the extent to which these expectations could be meaningfully confirmed.

* Top quark mass (Tevatron)

* Top quark mass

* Charm quark mass

* Higgs boson mass

* Higgs boson self-coupling

* Tau lepton mass

* CKM Matrix elements

* W boson properties 

* Annual Particle Data Group summary

* Standard model constants overview

The neutrino data, in particular, strongly disfavors the sterile neutrino hypothesis although it hasn't quite put a nail in the coffin of that conjecture and continues to favor a "normal mass hierarchy" for neutrinos with no evidence of Majorana neutrinos such a neutrinoless double beta decay. Efforts to determine the CP violating phase in neutrino oscillation have confirmed that there is some CP violation in this process and favors near maximal CP violation in neutrino oscillation, but has large margins of error. These measurements are likely to improvement meaningfully in the coming year.

* Reactor data disfavors sterile neutrinos

* Neutrino properties from astronomy

* Number of neutrino species

* Neutrino properties overview 

* Neutrino CP violation

* Neutrinoless double beta decay

Modified gravity approaches to explaining dark matter and dark energy continued to be successful, while the paradigmatic lambdaCDM theory of cosmology continued to fall short. Demonstration of violations of the strong equivalence principle towards the end of the year topped the list. Advances of modified gravity and dings for lambdaCDM in the area of early cosmology were also significant.

* MOND galaxy formation

* Supermassive black hole formation timing

* A new prediction from Deur 

* Galaxy shape impacts inferred amount of DM

* Deur on galaxy shape and inferred amount of DM

* The MOND constant in a solar system context

* MOND and out of equilibrium galaxies  

* Gravitational Wave Telescope Constraints

* MOND does CMB predictions

* Explaining DM phenomena with GR

* Explaining DM phenomena with GR II

* Strong equivalence principle violated

* Strong equivalence principle violated II

* Another modified gravity theory

* A testable quantum gravity prediction

* Newton's constant holds at short ranges 

* Massive gravity

* Sabine Hossenfelder splits the difference

* Wrong Mix of Dark Matter in CDM

* Galaxy formation simulations disfavor CDM

* DM simulation fails

* CDM can't explain satellite galaxy alignment

* Primordial black hole DM disfavored 

* You need a fifth force or modified gravity

* Unexpected Hubble lensing data in clusters 

* Constraints on thermal freeze out DM

* Any primordial gravitational waves are small

* LambdaCDM fails at cosmology scale

* Exclusions of BSM particles at the LHC

* WIMPs not detected

  

A variety of experimental anomalies and measurement tensions were explored. 

The biggest one that is that there will be two new muon g-2 measurements, the last of which was fifteen years ago and the next of which will be announced early this year. The new measurement (and the new theoretical prediction) will be much more accurate than the last, in which the measurement which differed by about three sigma (about 2 parts per million) from the theoretically expected value. The calculation of muon g-2 is sensitive in a global way to almost all aspects of Standard Model physics and can be calculated and measured with extreme precision. The closer that the experimentally measured value of muon g-2 is, the less room there is for new physics beyond the Standard Model. On the other hand, big differences would be strong evidence that scientists are missing something in the Standard Model.

* General discussion of muon g-2

* Summary of predictions of muon g-2

* Coming muon g-2 experiments

Another area where there have been tensions is in suggestions that premise of charged lepton universality (i.e., that the electron, muon and tau lepton are identical apart from mass) is violated. The tensions have appeared in B meson decays, but not in other kinds of decays that should implicate the same properties.

* Why they probably aren't real

* How big are the tensions

The Xenon1T experiment reported some anomalous outcomes that were almost immediately determined to be meaningless because the results failed to consider an important source of background contamination in its results, although that hasn't prevented theorists for coming up with esoteric and unlikely theoretical explanations for it. 

A Hungarian group has argued that there is a beyond the Standard Model X17 particle, but that hasn't been panning out either (see also a lengthy discussion with citations to journal articles in the comments to this post).

Citation and Quotation Conventions At This Blog

I have added a page regarding my citation and quotation conventions at this blog. It appears in the sidebar.