Pots Are People

New research confirms an identity between an exclusively Neanderthal community and the last archaeological cultures of Europe at the time of modern human-Neanderthal transition (the Châtelperronian), before the first archaeological culture in of most Europe definitely linked to modern humans alone (the Aurignacian). 

This makes it possible to use stone tool relics to identify when and where Neanderthals were present and when and where the first modern humans were present at this critical transition moment, without having to rely on far more scarce skeletal remains, extending the scope of precision archaeology.

Direct Searches For Dark Matter Come Up Empty

The latest direct search for dark matter particles, based on muon neutrino observations of the sun conducted since 1978 in the Caucasus Mountains (the BUST Experiment at Baksan) have continued to come up empty and to place stringent limits on the properties of dark matter in the solar system vicinity if it exists at all.

Direct searches for dark matter particles of 10 GeV and up of a type called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) have ruled out such particles by a robust variety of methods down to very low cross-sections of interaction (on the order of 3*10^-4 picobarns which is equivalent to 3*10^-40 cm^2 and 3*10^-44 m^2). 

Implications

This is a bad thing for physicists who hope to understand the universe with existing theories. 

Unequivocal evidence from astronomy observations for the phenomena now attributed to dark matter has existed since 1933.  See F. Zwicky, “Die Rotverschiebung von extragalaktischen Nebeln,” 6 Helv. Acta 110 (1933). 

The intervening 80 years revealed all sorts of particles we weren't looking for.  Nobel laureate I. I. Rabi famously quipped, upon the discovery of the muon, "Who ordered that?"  But, we have yet to detect a single particle responsible for a huge share of the mass in the universe, if it exists at all, despite looking very hard for it.

Plain vanilla cold dark matter and warm dark matter WIMPS are incompatable with experiment

Standard cold dark matter theory, the leading (but increasingly experimentally obsolete) theory of dark matter, needs dark matter particles of 10 GeV or more, that interact weakly (i.e. WIMPS) and it needs them at a fairly well specified density in the vicinity of the solar system. Many beyond the Standard Model theories, including SUSY, propose that dark matter candidates exist in that mass range. But, they are nowhere to be found unless they interact even less strongly than do particles like neutrinos, which only interact via the weak force (and lack electrical charge or strong nuclear force interactions), something that is not true of any known massive particle.

Crude calculations of neutrino elastic cross sections of interaction are 5*10^-44 cm^2, a range not yet excluded by current experiments, but the more elaborate calculation is one that is mass and momentum dependent, so this isn't necessarily a notable excuse for not detecting 10 GeV particles in experiments that could not detect sub-eV particles that were otherwise comparable. 

Some revised theoretical expectations as of 2008 for SUSY WIMPS can be found here and are below current detection limits.  But, from the same link "to quote a particle physicist,"

The most appealing possibility - a weak scale dark matter particle interacting with matter via Z-boson exchange - leads to the cross section of order 10^-39 cm2 which was excluded back in the 80s by the first round of dark matter experiments. There exists another natural possibility for WIMP dark matter: a particle interacting via Higgs boson exchange. This would lead to the cross section in the 10^-42-10^-46 cm2 ballpark (depending on the Higgs mass and on the coupling of dark matter to the Higgs).

In other words, "plain vanilla" Cold Dark Matter WIMPS have been experimentally excluded in the vicinity of the solar system at the expected densities.  One needs "exotic WIMPS" or WIMP distributions for Cold Dark Matter theory to work, and measurements 2 to 6 orders of magnitude more precise (just a few decades off at current levels of progress in improving experimental accuracy) would exclude them as well.

Lighter dark matter particles, such as the KeV rest mass particles of "warm dark matter" are problematic in their own very different ways. High precision W and Z boson decay measurements strongly suggest that there are no weak force interacting fundamental particles with less than 10 GeV of rest mass (or for that matter, of less than 45 GeV of rest mass). So again, "plain vanilla" warm dark matter particles that interact via the weak force are experimentally excluded.

Are there loopholes?

Certainly, each of these searchers are subject to a variety of assumptions. 

For example, the BUST experiment is actually directly searching for the remnants of the annihilation of massive dark-matter particles in the sun (where gravity ought to be drawing them), and that once there is an annihilation of massive dark-matter particles that the resulting energy produces decays into exotic particles in the Standard Model do.

But, the wide variety of experimental methods that have produced consistent results makes the conclusions robust to many of these assumptions.  One has to have a quite exotic BSM dark matter particle to escape the experimental limits now in place.

Alternatives to WIMPS: Sterile Neutrinos or MOND

"Sterile neutrinos" (i.e. massive fundamental particles that act like neutrinos except that they don't interact via the weak force) could fit the bill because they wouldn't be produced in weak force decays and hence can't be ruled out by them.  But, how do you go about directly detecting something that has no non-gravitational interactions? 

Sterile neutrinos would also need to obtain their masses via something other than the Higgs mechanism that accounts for the masses of all of the other fundamental particles, or the strong force mechanism that accounts for the masses of mesons and hadrons (such as protons and neutrons), i.e. in an entirely unprecedented manner (e.g. a purely or almost purely Majorana mass).

Of course, another possibility is that exotic fundamental particles are not the source of the dark matter effects observed which might instead be due to something such as modifications to the laws of gravity.

Reference

The ultimate source article for the discussion above is here.

Update (January 11, 2013)

A recent Science New feature misleadingly suggests that the likelihood that direct dark matter detection experiments will discover something are just around the corner, but does accurately note that the non-detection of heavy WIMPS so far disfavors SUSY theories.

Was The Flood A Semite Immigration Metaphor?

Maju made this comment as part of a larger comment on January 8, 2013 12:03 AM at Ethio-Helix:

[I]n the 4th millennium BCE, at the edge of History, they expanded quite suddenly into the agricultural regions around their semi-desertic econiche (the mythical "flood", which is probably a wordplay in Sumerian between amaru=flood and a-maru=semites, also known as amurru). I can only imagine that climatic conditions were at play but whatever the case this is pretty much documented archaeologically and, in the case of Sumer, also in text (only "after the flood" Semitic names begin to appear).
 

The Semites who did this are commonly known today as the Akkadians, and at about the time indicated by Maju their language replaced Sumerian as the language of the string of city-states along Mesopotamia.  There are about 1500 years of Sumerian language writing before this language shift in Mesopotamia (ca. 3500 BCE to 2000 BCE), after which Sumerian survived solely as a liturgical language until about the 1st century CE.  But, the transition took time an preceded the unification of the Akkadian Empire:

Speakers of the Akkadian language seem to have already been present in Mesopotamia at the dawn of the historical period, and soon achieved preeminence with the first Dynasty of Kish and numerous localities to the north of Sumer, where rulers with Akkadian names had already established themselves by the 3rd millennium BC. Sargon has often been cited as the first ruler of a combined empire of Akkad and Sumer, although more recently discovered data suggests there had been Sumerian expansions under previous kings, including Lugal-Anne-Mundu of Adab, Eannatum of Lagash, and Lugal-Zage-Si.

The linguistically Akkadian period was interrupted by a period of rule by Kassites from the neighboring moutains, which lasted about four centuries until roughly the point of Bronze Age collapse (ca. 1200 BCE).

The Neo-Assyrian Empire that emerged after Bronze Age collapse, and the Neo-Babylonian empire that followed, were apparently run by Akkadian language speakers although Aramic began to emerge around this time.  In the 6th century BCE, much of Mesopotamia came under the rule of Cyrus the Great, a linguistically Indo-European Persian King, but apparently the common people of that time and place spoke the Semitic Aramaic language thathad  superceded earlier Akkadian dialects within a century or three of Bronze Age collapse.

Arabic, of course, became the language of Mesopotamia, around the 7th and 8th centuries CE with the rapid expansion of the Islamic empire and has remained so ever since then. 

Some languages closely related to Akkadian are attested in written form in what is now Syria, more or less, which had a somewhat less elaborate level of political organization at the time and is often viewed as the place of origin of the Akkadians in Mesopotamia.  These are the earliest Semitic languages attested in writing.

Many of the stories in the Jewish Torah (much of Genesis and some of Exodus) have antecedents in earlier Mesopotamian myths.  The deluge myth in the Torah closely parallels the language of the Mesopotamian myths and the adoption of Moses by a princess as an infant found in a basket in a river, for example, are among them.  So too are close antecedents to the Biblical Creation myth and the story of Cain and Abel. 

Modern biblical scholarship sees these parts of the Torah entering the canon during the 6th century BCE during a period of Babylonian exile for the Jewish people, but a deeper link via legends assimilated by Semitic peoples in the Akkadian empire are also plausible.

I am skeptical of Maju's suggestion that the mythical flood may have been exclusively a metaphor of Semitic immigration, although this secondary meaning may have attached to the term as an intentional double meaning at some point.  The possibility that a major Sumerian river flood was the tipping point event that opened its doors to Semitic immigration, however, and that their arrival gave birth to a new culturally meaningful historical era, however, is plausible.

I do believe that Maju's take on the time that the flood myth appears may be approximately correct.  Efforts to link early Mesopotamian accounts to archaelogy point to Mesopotamian floods ca. 2900 BCE as particularly attractive candidates as the source for the Mesopotamian-Biblical flood story.  As Wikipedia explains (in the link on Mespotamian myths above):

In the WB-62 Sumerian king list recension, Ziusudra, or Zin-Suddu of Shuruppak is recorded as having reigned as both king and gudug priest for 10 sars, or periods of 3,600. In this version, Ziusudra inherited rulership from his father Šuruppak (written SU.KUR.LAM) who ruled for 10 sars. The line following Ziusudra in WB-62 reads: Then the flood swept over. The next line reads: After the flood swept over, kingship descended from heaven; the kingship was in Kish. The city of Kish flourished in the Early Dynastic period soon after an archaeologically attested river flood in Shuruppak (modern Tell Fara, Iraq) and various other Sumerian cities. This flood has been radiocarbon dated to ca. 2900 BCE. Polychrome pottery from the Jemdet Nasr period (ca. 3000–2900 BCE) was discovered immediately below the Shuruppak flood stratum, and the Jemdet Nasr period immediately preceded the Early Dynastic I period.

The significance of Ziusudra's name appearing on the WB-62 king list is that it links the flood mentioned in the three surviving Babylonian deluge epics of Ziusudra (Eridu Genesis), Utnapishtim (Epic of Gilgamesh), and Atrahasis (Epic of Atrahasis) to river flood sediments in Shuruppak, Uruk, Kish et al. that have been radiocarbon dated to ca. 2900 BC. This has led some scholars to conclude that the flood hero was king of Shuruppak at the end of the Jemdet Nasr period (ca. 3000–2900) which ended with the river flood of 2900 BC.

Ziusudra being a king from Shuruppak is supported by the Gilgamesh XI tablet (see below) making reference to Utnapishtim (Akkadian translation of the Sumerian name Ziusudra) with the epithet "man of Shuruppak" at line 23.
 

The oldest surviving written account of the Ziusudra epic is from the 17th century BCE.  After Akkadians arrive, but before the events purportedly recounted by about 1200 years.  As explained in the link related to the Sumerian King lists above:

The earliest listed ruler whose historicity has been archaeologically verified is En-me-barage-si of Kish, ca. 2600 BC. Reference to this individual in the Epic of Gilgamesh has led to speculation that Gilgamesh himself may be historical. Three dynasties are notably excluded from the list: the Larsa dynasty, which vied for power with the (included) Isin dynasty during the Isin-Larsa period; and the two dynasties of Lagash, which respectively preceded and ensued the Akkadian Empire, when Lagash exercised considerable influence in the region. Lagash in particular is known directly from archaeological artifacts dating from ca. 2500 BC. The list is important to the chronology of the 3rd millennium BC. However, the fact that many of the dynasties listed reigned simultaneously from varying localities makes it difficult to reproduce a strict linear chronology.
 

The legendary chronology as currently understood assigns 16,455 years between En-me-barage-si of Kish and the deluge flood, a conversion rate of 54.85 legendary years +/- to 1 archaeologically inferred year (about one week per legendary year).

Identification of this particular flood with the Sumerian flood myth, of course, requires many other global flood myths to be essentially independent in origin, or for this particular version of the flood myth fossilized in the earliest written legends to have been embedded and individualized within in a deeper flood myth tradition superimposing the 2900 BCE flood on a myth based on an earlier event recounted in deep oral histories.

The oldest of surviving the Sumerian King lists are dated to about 2000 BCE, about the time at which the Akkadians arrive in Mesopotamia (Sargon of Akkad's reign has been estimated at 2270 BCE in the Wikipedia entry on the Sumerian King lists).

Thus, the case for an origin of this myth (or at least the Sumerian-Akkadian-Biblical version of it) in events sometime in the Copper Age or early Bronze Age, rather than in the early Neolithic era or the Mesolithic era, is strong.

If the primary Semitic expansion out of Africa and into Southwest Asia begins perhaps about 3000 BCE, give or take a century or two, perhaps vitalized by the rise of ancient Egyptian civilization's effects on Afro-Asiatic language speakers generally, then the Afro-Asiatic languages might have been confined to Africa before then. 

Of course, earlier dates for a Semitic emergence from Africa are possible and this still doesn't explain how Egyptians and other African beneficiaries of the Fertile Crescent Neolithic revolution managed to escape superstrate linguistic assimilation with incoming Neolithic Levantine populations.  (Maju suggests that the Levant adopts Afro-Asiatic languages prior to the Neolithic revolution.)

Genetic Data Disfavor Levant Origin For Afro-Asiatic

A new study on East African population genetics argues that it supports the finding that the Afro-Asiatic languages (e.g. ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabic, many Ethiopian languages (from multiple Afro-Asiatic language families), Hasua, Berber), have a Northeast African rather than an Levantine origin.

The Essence of the Afro-Asiatic Urheimat Debate

The analysis that goes into resolving this ancient question of historical lingustics is quite involved.

The biggest argument for a Levatine origin for these languages is that language families have tended to expand with the migrations of the first farmers.  Farming undeniably arose in Jericho in the Levant, a thousand years or so before it spread to Africa, most notably in the civilization of ancient Egypt.  The Egyptian Neolithic revolution involved domesticated species of plants and animals that mostly derived from the Fertile Crescent Neolithic (the donkey is an Egyptian domestic exception that proves the rule).  Historically, although far less so these days, the Levantine hypothesis carried with it notion of Eurasian racial superiority relative to Africans.

The biggest arguments for an African origin of the Afro-Asiatic languages are that all but one of the six major sub-families of the Afro-Asiatic language family were exclusively African in geographic extent at historically known points in time (the six families are Semitic, Coptic, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic).  The expansion of Hebrew and Arabic beyond Southwest Asia are historically documented phenomena. 

African has greater historic linguistic diversity within the language family than Southwest Asia.  Also, the Levatine branch (Semitic) does not appear to harbor any genetic component shared by all Afro-Asiatic language family speakers, while Semitic language speaking populations do have some African genetic component.  This last point is underscored by the latest study.  Many supporters of African origins for Afro-Asiatic languages are motivated more by an ideological commitment to Afrocentric perspectives than by the strong but not unequivocal linguistic, genetic and archaeological evidence that supports this perspective.

It doesn't help that there is no linguistic consensus on the relationship of the six major Afro-Asiatic linguistic families to each other.  Genetic arguments are complicated by differing patterns of paternal and matrilineal descent in the relevant populations. 

The only real point of consensus in this pitched debate on matters that aren't historicallly documented is that the Ethio-Semitic languages have a common Levantine origin in a single Semitic proto-language sometime near the boundary between when ancient history and prehistory meet, and that the local ancestors of the Ethiosemites spoke some manner of Cushitic language. 

But, the Ethio-Semitic layer genetically may have been thinner that early estimates looking merely at Eurasian and African contributions to Ethio-Semitic population genetics would have suggested, because many Cushitic populations also have substantial Eurasian genetic components.

More Complex Scenarios

The trouble with all of the simple arguments is that they may oversimplify a complex process. 

For example, it could be the case that Egypt received agriculture from the Levant substantially via technology transfer that included a mass language shift, rather than by demographic replacement, and that other Afro-Asiatic languages derive from an ethnically Egyptian Neolithic expansion.  In this scenario, for example, Semitic languages might be Egyptian derived even though Egyptian itself could have a Levantine origin; in this scenario Chadic and Cushitic respectively might be Blue Nile and White Nile offshoots of ancient Egyptian (a.k.a. the Coptic language) speaking pioneers.  A Levatine pro-Afro-Asiatic language might be lost entirely, replaced by a backmigrating wave of Afro-Asiatic language speakers who transmitted the Semitic languages.

Populations that are linguistically Berber are a quite pausible case, given their genetic makeup, for genetic continuity despite language shift to an Afro-Asiatic family language. 

Linguistically Chadic populations, in contrast, are quite genetically distinctive, for example, having high frequencies of Y-DNA haplogroup R1b-V88, relative to neighboring non-Afro-Asiatic populations and relative to other Afro-Asiatic populations.  Their relative lack of admixture with neighboring populations until the 20th century suggests a fairly recent origin for this language family relative to other Afro-Asiatic language families.

Linguistically Omotic populations (the smallest of the major Afro-Asiatic language families) could conceivably have arisen from areal influences and creolization between Cushitic speakers who border them on the East, and Nilotic language speakers who border them on the West.  

Pioneer Anomaly Solved

A 2012 study last April determined quite definitively that the discrepancy between the actual motion of the Pioneer space probes at the solar system fringe and their predicted movement was due to thermal effects from its power sources and not from gravitational anomalies.

Gravito-Weak Unification?

A new preprint submitted earlier this month by a group of authors including one of the leading loop quantum gravity scholars suggests a deep link between gravity and the fact that the weak force acts only on left parity particles.

 

http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.5246  Gravitational origin of the weak interaction's chirality Stephon Alexander, Antonino Marciano, Lee Smolin (Submitted on 20 Dec 2012)

We present a new unification of the electro-weak and gravitational interactions based on the joining the weak SU(2) gauge fields with the left handed part of the space-time connection, into a single gauge field valued in the complexification of the local Lorentz group. Hence, the weak interactions emerge as the right handed chiral half of the space-time connection, which explains the chirality of the weak interaction. This is possible, because, as shown by Plebanski, Ashtekar, and others, the other chiral half of the space-time connection is enough to code the dynamics of the gravitational degrees of freedom.  

This unification is achieved within an extension of the Plebanski action previously proposed by one of us. The theory has two phases. A parity symmetric phase yields, as shown by Speziale, a bi-metric theory with eight degrees of freedom: the massless graviton, a massive spin two field and a scalar ghost. Because of the latter this phase is unstable. Parity is broken in a stable phase where the eight degrees of freedom arrange themselves as the massless graviton coupled to an SU(2) triplet of chirally coupled Yang-Mills fields. It is also shown that under this breaking a Dirac fermion expresses itself as a chiral neutrino paired with a scalar field with the quantum numbers of the Higgs.
21 pages 

The conceptual connection is particularly attractive because fundamental particle mass is deeply linked to weak force interactions.  All massive fundamental particles interact weakly, all fundamental particles that lack rest mass do not interact weakly, and the Higgs boson often described as the source of fundamental particle mass is at the heart of electro-weak unification.  It would make sense if interial mass via the Higgs field and gravitational mass, which general relativity states is equivalent to intertial mass, have a deep common source.

The unification apparently gives rise to a sterile neutrino which is an analog to the Higgs boson in the gravitational sector, and a U(1) field that acts on the dark matter sector.

Now, to be clear, this is just a theoretical Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) notion that someone is putting out there, like hundreds of other papers by theoretical physicists (if not thousands) each year, no one is claiming that it is the truth, just that the truth about Nature could conceivably look something like this.  What makes it notable is that I've never seen a BSM theory taking this approach before - it is exploring relatively virgin theoretical territory at a time when the more well trodden paths of BSM theories are increasingly looking like dead ends in light of new experimental data.


 

 

Is There A Common Origin For Don't Eat It Myths?

Two separate legendary traditions, the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone, and the European notion of the land of the Fae, share a common notion. Those who eat or drink anything in the the Underworld, and the Faerie world, respectively, may never return from it. Are there other legendary traditions that share this mythological feature? Do they have common origins?

There are indeed many traditions that share elements of these myths, suggesting that they do have a common origin that is pre-Indo-European and has its oldest attested roots in Sumerian legends tied to some of the most ancient Sumerian kings.  And, the element of not eating or drinking anything in the Underworld or Otherworld may be reinterpretations of the way in which the Sumerian god's rites were was ritually observed (with a taboo of not eating ground food during the ritual period in honor of the fact that a god's very bones were ground in the Sumerian myth).

Both of these legendary traditions are pre-Christian, and both were parts of the cultures of linguistically Indo-European people at some point. But, they seem somewhat remote from each other. While the story of Hades and Persephone is deeply rooted in a polytheistic pantheon, the notion of Faerie can be almost animistic. 

Animistic religions are sometimes seen as a stage of religious development often seen as associated with a "tribe or a band society," before it reaches the kind of chiefdom society (and in particular, the somewhat federal late chiefdom phase "complex chiefdoms") which parallel the organization of dieties polytheistic ruling band in early Greco-Roman mythology and Norse mythology and were prevailling when these polytheistic schemes originated.  Monotheism, in turn, can be associated with formative eras in some of the earlier centralized bureaucratic states - the Jewish state in the iron age Levant, the Egyptian state during the reign of King Tut, and the emergence of Christianity during a dominant Roman Empire, and the emergence of Islam as the tribal peoples of Arabia expanded by conquest to form a bureaucratized, urban empire.

The legendary culture of Faerie seems to live mostly in places that were once Celtic (Ireland, Britain, Normandy) and is sometimes described as Celtic folklore, although the word "Fairy" comes to English via Old French. It has its root in the Latin word for one of the Fates, but derivatives in other Romance languages apparently do not have the same connotations that they do in French and English. There also seems to be some sort of faerie tradition in Germanic Northern Europe. Wikipedia (linked above) notes that:

Folklorists have suggested that their actual origin lies in a conquered race living in hiding,^[4] or in religious beliefs that lost currency with the advent of Christianity.^[5] These explanations are not necessarily incompatible, and they may be traceable to multiple sources. Much of the folklore about fairies revolves around protection from their malice, by such means as cold iron (iron is like poison to fairies, and they will not go near it) . . .

[Citing [4] Silver, Carole B. (1999) Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. Oxford University Press. p. 47. and [5] Yeats, W. B. (1988) "Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry", in A Treasury of Irish Myth, Legend, and Folklore. Gramercy. p.1.]
 

The pivotal role of iron in the fairy myths suggest an origin of the myths in current form not earlier than the Bronze Age to Iron Age transition, which roughly coincides with the point in time at which Indo-European Celts and Germanic people emerge and expand in Western and Northern Europe, perhaps carred by these cultures, but perhaps as a legacy of a substrate pre-Celtic Bell Beaker culture.  The notion of fairies as a conquered race living in hiding likewise fits with the notion of this lore a being the legacy of a conquered substrate people whose storytellers and holy priests who preserved these legends might have had to keep hidden and might have had to practice their Old European beliefs in private.

 

Basque mythology, which is the most solid continuous cultural link to the pre-Indo-European culture of Western Europe is arguably closer to the model of the Faerie legends than those of Classical Greco-Roman and Norse pantheons of Gods.  For example, Basque mythology unlike Greco-Roman and Norse pantheons is a chtonic one "all its characters dwell on earth or below it, with the sky seen mostly as an empty corridor through which the divinities pass," in contrast to the Greco-Roman tradition situating its Gods on a sky oriented Mount Olympus and a comparable arrangement in Norse mythology.  The mythological figure Mari in Basque mythology, likewise seems more of a faerie queen than a Hera to a male Zeus.  This argues (weakly) for Faerie as a pre-Indo-European substrate absorbed into Celtic culture, and perhaps also into Germanic culture in a parallel cultural transmission.

 

On the other hand, folktale accounts of faerie in the English speaking world, at least, are generally situated in the era of conversion to Christianity in the early Middle Ages.  However, to the extent that faerie represents an early iron age Indo-European Celtic and Germanic incorporation of a Western and Northern European substrate, perhaps with origins in Bell Beaker traditions, a placement of key tales at the point when Celtic and Germanic pagan cultures were superseded by Christianity is not necessarily inconsistent with this hypothesis.

 

Persephone's myth was incorporated into the polytheistic Indo-European pagan tradition and has been compared to similar myths "in the Orient, in the cults of male gods like Attis, Adonis and Osiris, and in Minoan Crete."  But, this particular myth's origins seem to have roots that predate the arrival of Indo-Europeans in the Aegean.

 

The cult of Attis, the consort of Cybele is sourced in Phrygian mythology ca. 1250 BCE and later adopted from it into Greek mythology.  Osiris has origins in Egytian legend.  He "was at times considered the oldest son of the Earth god Geb,^[1] and the sky goddess Nut, as well as being brother and husband of Isis."  Both of these cases parallel the Basque pairing of chtonic Mari and her consort Sugaar, and the story of Persephone and Hades could be seen as a gender reversed version of the tale for a patriarchal society displacing one in which women played a more dominant role.  The origins of the Adonis myth are hotly disputed and there are contradictory accounts.

 

But, the existence of something similar to the Persephone myth in Minoan Crete also points to an origin of the core of this myth in a pre-Greek substrate rather than as a shared part of the Indo-European tradition.  Its presence in the myth of Egyptian Osiris likewise suggests its place in a pre-Indo-European tradition that spanned the Mediterranean basin.  Adonis and the other gods in this cluster of thematically similar dieties likewise shows strong similarities with the Sumerian God Tammuz:

In Babylonia . . . Tammuz, who originated as a Sumerian shepherd-god, Dumuzid or Dumuzi, the consort of Inanna and, in his Akkadian form, the parallel consort of Ishtar. The Levantine Adonis ("lord"), who was drawn into the Greek pantheon, was considered by Joseph Campbell among others to be another counterpart of Tammuz, son and consort. The Aramaic name "Tammuz" seems to have been derived from the Akkadian form Tammuzi, based on early Sumerian Damu-zid. The later standard Sumerian form, Dumu-zid, in turn became Dumuzi in Akkadian.

Beginning with the summer solstice came a time of mourning in the Ancient Near East, as in the Aegean: the Babylonians marked the decline in daylight hours and the onset of killing summer heat and drought with a six-day "funeral" for the god. Recent discoveries reconfirm him as an annual life-death-rebirth deity: tablets discovered in 1963 show that Dumuzi was in fact consigned to the Underworld himself, in order to secure Inanna's release, though the recovered final line reveals that he is to revive for six months of each year . . .  Locations associated in antiquity with the site of his death include both Harran and Byblos, among others. A Sumerian tablet from Nippur (Ni 4486) reads:

She can make the lament for you, my Dumuzid, the lament for you, the lament, the lamentation, reach the desert — she can make it reach the house Arali; she can make it reach Bad-tibira; she can make it reach Dul-šuba; she can make it reach the shepherding country, the sheepfold of Dumuzid

"O Dumuzid of the fair-spoken mouth, of the ever kind eyes," she sobs tearfully, "O you of the fair-spoken mouth, of the ever kind eyes," she sobs tearfully. "Lad, husband, lord, sweet as the date, [...] O Dumuzid!" she sobs, she sobs tearfully.

The cult of Tammuz is referenced in the Hebrew Bible as part of pre-Jewish pagan practice at the door of the Temple in Jerusalem.  Ezekiel 8:14-15.  Dumuzi, in turn, can be associated with some of the earliest kings in Sumerian king lists, suggesting that legends around real historical figures in Sumeria may have spawned these myths.

A Sumerian source in the Semitic tradition is a good fit to the fact that much of the Books of Genesis and Exodus in the Hebrew Bible borrow from Sumerian myths of people who adopted Semitic languages.  The centrality of Tammuz in Sumerian/early Semitic mythology may have facilitated the incorporation of this myth into neighboring non-Semitic forms of paganism, a religous structure well suited to borrowing myths from other peoples.

Thus, the myth of Persophone, may have made its way in the Pre-Jewish Semitic and ancient Egyptian traditions by way of Sumeria, whose copper age civilization gave rise to the oldest written documents and some of the earliest city-states before it underwent language shift to the Semitic Akkadian language.  This same source myth could also have been a source for the Mari-Sugaar consort pair of Basque mythology, which in turn could have spread throughout much of Western Europe and Northern Europe as part of a Bell Beaker expansion if one accepts my own admittedly disputable identification of the Basque culture and language's ethnogenesis with the Bell Beaker culture.

The legendary element of not partaking of food or drink in the underworld does not appear to be part of the original Sumerian myth.  But, it may related to the observed practice as late as the 10th century CE in Mesopotamia in which "Women bewailed the death of Tammuz at the hands of his master who was said to have 'ground his bones in a mill and scattered them to the wind.' Consequently, women would forgo the eating of ground foods during the festival time." 

A prohibition of eating ground foods in Mesopotamia may have morphed into a prohibition on eating any foods in the underworld in the Mediterranean retellings of the story as it spread in a commom form (probably in a form close to the older Basque legends of Mari and Sugaar) that were absorbed independently from substrate cultures in Greece, in Germanic Europe, and by the Celts, in the latter two cases as part of a not quite polytheistic pantheon faerie tradition.

 

A Review of Fundamental Physics in 2012

LHC Discovers Standard Model Higgs Boson

The biggest story in physics in 2012 was the official discovery of a Higgs-like boson which over the course of the year has increasingly been confirmed to have the properties of the Standard Model Higgs boson with a mass of about 126 GeV.  Experimental data in 2012 has confirmed that it has a even parity and intrinsic spin of zero (as predicted), and that the decays that it produces are so far within the range of reasonable statistical and experimental error of the Standard Model Higgs boson (almost all within two sigma, properly calculated, and many closer), although not all of the data are precisely on the money of the Standard Model prediction (which they shouldn't be unless the data has been faked). 

A year or two of additional LHC data should be able to much more definitively confirm that the observed Higgs boson decays match those predicted by the Standard Model and make the mass of the Higgs boson to plus or minus about 0.1 GeV or so, a settled matter.  An additional year or two of LHC data should also rule out (or find) any additional Higgs bosons over a very broad range of masses (i.e. for all masses up to perhaps 600 GeV to more than 1 TeV, perhaps as much as ten times the Higgs boson mass discovered so far).

The observed mass of the Higgs boson is consistent with a universe that is at least "meta-stable" (i.e. has a predicted lifetime arising from quantum instability at least as long as its actual lifetime), and allows Standard Model calculations to remain "unitary" (i.e. compute probabilities that always add up to one for any given computation) to arbitrarily high energy levels, something that would not have been true for all possible Standard Model Higgs boson masses.

Thus, while the Standard Model Higgs boson discovery doesn't solve many unsolved problems in fundamental physics with a "why is nature this way?" character, it does solve most of the unsolved "how can we do physics calculations at extreme energies in a rigorous way?" problems of the Standard Model.

SUSY Looking Less Likely

The two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have found no evidence of beyond the Standard Model physics despite the fact that the high energies it is testing are excluding many theories that had predicted new particles or new behavior of particles near the TeV scale.

Ongoing exclusions from collider physics, together with the tightening bounds of dark matter searches and neutrino physics, discussed below, in particular, are discouraging for proponents of Supersymmetry (SUSY) and string theory. 

While these theories have a variety of parameters and other "moving parts" that can be adjusted to put the new physics predicted by these theories beyond the range of experimental evidence, any supersymmetry theory that fits the LHC data must have a very high characteristic energy scale (e.g. in some high energy scale SUSY theories most superpartners of ordinary particles predicted under the theory might have masses of 8-20 TeV, with the lighest superpartners having masses of 1 TeV or more, and the theory may not conserve "R-partity" and hence lack the stable superpartner ground state which would otherwise have been a strong dark matter candidate).

SUSY theories with high characteristic energy scales should have theoretical consequences outside collider experiments (like a very heavy dark matter candidate and high rates of neutrinoless double beta decay) that don't seem to be supported by the new experimental evidence.  The non-collider experiment consequences of high energy scale SUSY may ultimately falisfy the theory entirely even though colliders themselves will never be large enough to rule out SUSY directly at all energy scales.

One can, of course, devise SUSY theories that have moving parts that evade these theoretical consequences, but the less "natural" a SUSY theory is, the less well motivated it is as a true theory of nature supported by experimental evidence.  Everyone who devised SUSY expected when the theory was first formulated that it would have been experimentally visible at the energies present at the LHC so far in the experiment, even if they have since revised their opinions.

The problems which motivated SUSY: like the hierarchy problem, the nature of symmetry breaking, and the issue of whether the coupling constants converge until they form a single common force at a "grand unification" energy level are problems that nature doesn't seem too concerned to answer anytime sooon.

Technicolor Dead

SUSY, of course, is not alone.  "Technicolor" models, for example, which were invented to create a Higgsless version of the Standard Model, are pretty much dead now due to the LHC discovery of a Higgs boson.  Technicolor was a theoretical Plan B that turned out not to be necessary.

Dark Matter And Modified Gravity

Dark Matter Effects Are Real, Whatever Their Source, And Unexplained

The universe we observe in our telescopes does not behave the way that the gravitational effects of General Relativity (which are mostly equivalent to Newtonian gravity to the level of precision we can observe with our telescopes) predict that it should.  Galaxies don't fling particles away as they should if their mass were close to the sum of the stars we can observe and central black holes and planetary stuff that we know is there but can't see.  The disparity between masses as measured via relativistic lensing effects and masses estimated from observed luminous material is even greater for galactic clusters.

There are only two possible solutions to this problem, one or both of which must be true.  Either there is a lot of exotic non-baryonic dark matter out there of a type never seen in particle colliders, or the laws of gravity must be different than they are in general relativity, particularly in weak gravitational fields.

New more powerful telescopes and computational capacity is making it possible to precisely quantify the discrepency between the laws of general relativity applied to luminous matter and what we observe in our telescopes.  But, these observations together with direct searches for particles that have the right properties, have ruled out the easiest dark matter theories.  These observations, particularly in galactic clusters, have also ruled out the simplest theories in which all of these effects come from modified gravitational laws.

Direct Searches Find No Dark Matter Particles And Colliders Exclude What Can't Be Seen Directly

Direct searches for dark matter have had contradictory results.  A couple of claimed to see something, but the somethings that they have seen have had different properties.  Other searches have seen nothing at all, effectively ruling out the existence of weakly interacting massive particles of dark matter in the 10 GeV and up mass range. 

Yet, collider tests such as the LHC and LEP have ruled out anything like a weakly interacting neutrino as masses of less than 45 GeV.  SUSY dark matter candidates have been ruled out by the LHC and other collider experiments at masses of 100 GeV and less, as a general matter, and at masses of 600 GeV and less for specific candidates in specific versions of SUSY (such as minimal SUSY). The LHC has also ruled out additional Higgs bosons of the types predicted by SUSY theories to relatively high masses.  No particle discovered so far in particle colliders like the LHC and its predecessors is a good fit to any dark matter particle that could fit the astronomy evidence.

Dark matter theories suffer the curse of being overconstrained. They need particles with properties that aren't found in any kind of matter we have ever observed despite considering extreme situations that have produced all sorts of exotic particles that don't exist in nature. 

Essentially all possible non-baryonic dark matter candidates (other than ordinary neutrinos or perhaps neutrino condensates) are strongly disfavored by some experimental evidence, and there aren't enough neutrinos in the universe to give rise to all of the effects attributed to dark matter.

CDM Models Simulations Don't Reproduce Observed Large Scale Structure In The Universe

Meanwhile, a variety of experimental results, most notably the large scale structure of the universe, appear to be inconsistent with a "cold dark matter" scenario in which dark matter effects observed in nature are due to heavy WIMPS.  Detailed simulations have established that if cold dark matter existed, the large scale structure of the universe would be far more fine grained with far more dwarf galaxies, for example.  The clarity with which this data proved that CDM is a false hypothesis reached critical mass in 2012, although it will take a number of years for this development to be widely assimilated by researchers in the field.

Hot neutrino dark matter also seems inconsistent with the data as well.  Similar simulations show that hot dark matter would virtually eliminate the large scale structure of the universe and reduce it to a homogeneous, amorphous goo.

But "warm dark matter" in the KeV mass range remains consistent with the observed large scale structure of the universe.  If you simulate the formation processs of the universe after its initial moments in high powered computers and add the special sauce of warm dark matter (defined more by speed than the mass assumed to move at that speed in the model), then you get a level of large scale structure in the universe similar to what we actually see, not the goo you see with hot dark matter, or the excessive levels of fine scaled structure you see with cold dark matter.

But, while "warm dark matter" in the KeV range is a hypothesis that fits with the evidence from the large scale structure of the universe, collider experiments and neutrino mass experiments have come close to ruling out the existence of fundamental particles (or composite particles made up of fundamental particles) with masses in that range, or even remotely close.

There are also no good dynamical theories that explain the very consistent shapes of dark matter halos observed in galaxies with dark matter.  Why do galaxies of particular shapes always have the same shaped dark matter halos?  Dark matter theories that stuggle to explain halo shapes even with multiple parameters still perform worse than single parameter modified gravity models in predicting the behavior of observed galaxies.

In particular, cold dark matter theories do not, as a rule, predict that dark matter will be observed with the distribution that must be inferrred from how visible matter in galaxies acts.

Even if dark matter and not modified gravity models are correct, any successful dark matter theory needs to be able to explain the observed data with no more parameters than the modified gravity models, and no dark matter theory has successfully managed this so far.

Sterile Neutrinos?

The Standard Model would admit without great injustice, neutrinos that do not interact via the weak interaction because they have right handed partity, which are called "sterile neutrinos."

Since particles decay via the weak force, there would be no missing matter atributable to sterile neutrinos in collider experiments or radioactive decay experiments. Direct dark matter detection experiments aren't designed to see particles with masses of far less than 1 GeV and so couldn't see any form of warm or hot dark matter. Neutrino detection experiments would either ignore sterile neutrinos entirely, to the extent that they rely on weak force interactions, or would be unable to distinguish "fertile neutrinos" from "sterile neutrinos" to the extent that they rely on contact interactions. So there are reasons why sterile neutrinos would not have been detected directly so far.

But, there is also no positive experimental evidence for the existence of sterile neutrinos (as distinct from dark matter generally). And, there is no precedent for a fermion (or any massive particle, for that matter) that interacts via gravity but not via the weak force, the electromagnetic force, or the strong force. Also, all other Standard Model particles have the same mass regardless of their parity (left handed or right handed intrinsic spins). If this was true, sterile neutrinos would be too light to be the main source of dark matter which is the only experimental motivation for sterile dark matter to exist.

Non-interacting massive sterile neutrinos in the KeV range might help solve warm dark matter problems, but only if one could determine the nature of sterile neutrino leptogenesis and discern how they come to be arranged in the halos in which dark matter seems to arrange itself via gravity alone.

If sterile neutrino leptogenesis took place only a unification scale energies in the early universe, or perhaps also in extreme high energy interactions of the kinds found in galactric clusters, this could explain a relative absence of this kind of dark matter in our local solar system vicinity. And, perhaps the mechanisms that form them, or some analog to the weak force applicable only to right handed particles and much rarer than the observed weak force, could explain why the much lighter particles have KeV sized particle scale momentums. Still, on balance, 2012 ended with less support for sterile neutrinos than there was at the beginning of the year.

Controversial Observations And Calculations Claim Local Dark Matter Is Ruled Out.

One study looking for the gravitational impact of dark matter in the vicinity of the solar system claimed to rule it out, although another study cast doubt on those conclusions.

Controversial Papers Argue That General Relativity Effects Are Larger Than Usually Assumed.

There are also mixed opinions on whether the effects of general relativity are adequately reflected in common models of galactric rotation curves.  Errors in these calculations could significantly overestimate the amount of dark matter that the universe must have to fit astronomy observations.

Dim Matter Discoveries Continue

A steady trickle of results continue to show that material parts of what was previously assumed to be non-baryonic dark matter is, in fact, merely "dim" ordinary matter such as interstellar gasses, very dim stars, and very heavy gas giant planet like objects that aren't quite stars.  Ultra fast objects omitted from central black holes provide a mechanism that could explain some of the distribution of dim matter.

Mainstream dark matter scholarship had failed to catch up with the transfers from the exotic dark matter side of the universe's total mass-energy budget to the ordinary dim matter side of the universe's total mass-energy budget that results from these discoveries, thereby dramatically overstating the amount of dark matter present in the universe, which is closer to 50% than to 75% of all matter in the universe.

MOND Theories With Cluster Dark or Dim Matter Remain Viable

Several considerations have keept the alternative to dark matter, a modification to gravity, alive:

* Large quantities of "dim matter" in galactic clusters that is not present in ordinary galaxies reduces the need for larger quantities of dark matter; failure to account for general relativistic effects in galaxies could also reduce the need to find large quantities of dark matter.
* New theoretical motivations of a cutoff scale for modified gravity effects at levels on the order of the Hubble constant and cosmological constant have been proposed with inspiration for Verlinde's entropic formulation of gravity; essentially modified gravity effects in weak fields starting at just the critical point where modified gravity effects are observed, could arise from the absence of gravity waves longer than the size of the universe.
* Cold dark matter theories have failed to come up with anything approaching the parsimony with which modified gravity theories explain galactric rotation curves with a single parameter gravity modification theories, and cold dark matter theories have made inaccurate predictions about new data that gravity modification theories have accurately predicted.
* There are relativistically consistent formulations of gravity modification theories.
* Forms of baryonic or neutrino dark matter that can't explain rotation curves for a variety of reasons such as the matter budget of the universe, can explain dark matter in galactic clusters which make up a small part of the total amount of mass in the universe.

Evidence from the "bullet cluster" makes clear that modified gravity theories need dark or dim matter to be present in large quantities in galactric clusters where they underestimate dark matter effects.  But, given the large amounts of "dim matter" that improved observational techniques are revealing in galactric clusters that are not present in isolated galaxies, this proposition seems like less of a problem than it did in the past when we thought we understood the composition of galactric clusters better than we actually did.

If non-baryonic dark matter is found principally in galactric clusters with almost all galactic dark matter and some galactic cluster dark matter explained by gravity modifications in weak fields, non-baryonic dark matter only needs to make up something on the order of 3-4% of all of the matter in the universe, instead of 50%-75% of the matter in the universe, since galactric clusters make up only about 10% of the mass in the universe and gravity modifications and newly discovered dim matter in galactric clusters account for some of the deficits even there. 

Sources of non-baryonic dark matter like ordinary "fertile" neutrinos are far more viable in these quantities, given the known proportion of the universe's matter that is in the form of neutrinos, and that there are nuclear processes that take place in galactric clusters much more often than elsewhere that could explain why there might be an excess number of neutrinos there.

Dark Energy Is Still A Solved Problem

The conventional way of describing the matter-energy budget of the universe states that the universe is predominantly composed of "dark energy", a uniform distribution of energy throughout all of the universe that leads it to expand at the rate indicated by the Hubble constant.

All observed dark energy effects in the universe are fully described by the cosmological constant called lambda, a single constant of integration in the equations of general relativity that has been measured fairly precisely.  Experimental efforts to distinguish dark energy conceptualized as a uniformly distributed thin haze of energy in the universe from dark energy conceptualized as one more term in the equations of gravity, has


Dark energy is nothing more than a well understood and simple feature of the formulas of general relativity.  Reifying "dark energy" as a substance, rather than part of the law of gravity is at best a bit of heuristic subterfuge and at its worst, misleading.  It is only moderately tolerable at all because general relativity to some extent reifies the fabric of space-time itself in one common layman's interpretation of the theory.

Neutrino Physics

Mixing Matrixes

Neutrino physics experiments have now put positive non-zero values on all three of the neutrino mixing matrix angles (theta 12, theta 23 and theta 13) although they have not yet determined if there is a non-zero CP-violating phase in the PMNS matrix that governs neutrino oscillation.  These values are know to precisions on the order of 1% to 10%.

Evidence for more than three generations of neutrinos has been quashed by experimental evidence.

Absolute and Relative Neutrino Mass

Evidence regarding the relative and absolute masses of the three neutrino mass eigenstates has also been determined with considerable precision.  The difference in mass between the lighest and next lightest neutrino mass eigenstate is about 0.008 eV.  The difference in mass between second and third neutrino mass eigenstates is about 0.052 eV. 

One study puts the sum of the neutrino mass eigenstates at 0.28 eV or less, implying a electron-neutrino mass of about 0.073 eV or less in an "ordinary hierarchy" (or slightly more in an "inverted hierarchy" of neutrino masses), and improved cosmological observations may be able to pin this number to 0.2 eV of less in the near future (unless the total is between 0.2 and 0.28 eV).  This would imply a muon neutrino mass of about 0.081 eV and and tau neutrino mass of about 0.133 eV. 

But, the relative masses would be far less close to each other (i.e. less "degenerate") if the absolute mass of the electron neutrino were lower, which the experimental data does not rule out.  For example, if the electron-neutrino's mass were 0.001 eV, the muon neutrino mass would be about 0.009 eV, and the tau neutrino mass would be about 0.061 eV, for a sum of the three mass eigenstates of 0.071 eV.  The sum of the three neutrino masses can't be less than about 0.07 eV, so the maximum value of the sum and the minimum value differ by only about a factor of four and experimental evidence could narrow this to a factor of three within just a few years.

Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay Searches And Their Implications

Neutrinoless double beta decay experiments continue to fail to detect any such decays, placing an upper limit on the frequency of such decays (which aren't allowed by the Standard Model), and hence bounding the potential that the neutrino could be a Majorana particle with Majorana mass (in addition to "Dirac mass" of the type found for all other fermions). 

Experimental limits on the Majorana mass of a neutrino, from searches for neutrinoless double beta decays, are 0.140 eV to 0.380 eV.

Neutrinoless double beta decay will either be discovered, or will have an upper limit an order of magnitude or two lower, when the current round of experiments searching for it are completed within a decade or so.

In important consequence of these bounds on neutrino mass is that isolated neutrinos, having masses on the order of a fraction of an electron-volt, cannot be a source of warm dark matter.  Warm dark matter is hypothesized to have a mass on the order of a kiloelectron-volt, about 10,000 heavier than a tau neutrino and 100,000 to 1,000,000 or more times as heavy as the presumably most common electron neutrino.  Yet, warm dark matter is on the order of 100 times lighter than individual electrons.  No Standard Model particles or known composite Standard Model particles have masses anywhere close to the hypothetical warm dark matter mass (a proton or neutron is about 1 GeV) and this mass range is not constrained by the power of state of the art particle colliders which can explore masses in the hundreds of GeV or less.

The failure of credible experimental evidence of neutrinoless double beta decay also disfavors a wide variety of beyond the Standard Model theories in which lepton number is not a conservative quantity and instead baryon number-lepton number is a conserved quantity. Such models, generically predict beyond the Standard Model particles as well as lepton number violations, And, in these models the higher the energy scale of the beyond the Standard Model particles, the more common neutrinoless double beta decay should be. But, as the LHC increasingly pushes up the minimum masses of any beyond the Standard Model particles, and new neutrinoless double beta decay experiments push down the maximum rate of lepton number violations, lepton number violating models are increasingly disfavored.

The failure of models with strong lepton number violations is a big problem for cosmology, because it is quite a bit harder to devise theories that can explain the imbalance of matter and anti-matter in the universe without them.  But, apparently, cosmologists have been forced by collider physicists to deal with this inconvenient reality.

Neutrino Don't Break The Speed Of Light

Late 2011 reports of faster than light neutrinos from the OPERA experiment turned out to be a simple case of a loose cable in the experimental set up.  The corrected results show neutrinos moving at a speed indistinguishable from the speed of light, which implies that they have masses in the low tens of GeV or less (something long know to much greater precision by other means).

Emerging Relationships Between Standard Model Constants

Fundamental Constant Measurements

Lots of the ongoing work in fundamental physics is the process of measuring, every more precisely, the constants of the Standard Model of particle physics, and of cosmology.  But, some of these constants are known much more precisely than others. 

The weak force boson masses, the charge lepton masses, the speed of light in a vacuum, and the coupling constants of the electromagnetic and weak forces are known to astounding precision (parts per million). 

The gravitational constant, strong force constant, top quark mass, Higgs boson mass are known or are on the verge of being known with intermediate precision (perhaps parts per thousand). 

The absolute neutrino masses, the PMNS matrix parameters, the masses of the quarks other than the top quark, and the cosmological constant, however, are know only to one or two significant digits of accuracy.  But, we do know all of the values of all of fundamental physics constants, them with the possible exception of the CP-violating parameter of the PMNS matrix, to at least one significant digit order of magnitude levels of accuracy.

Implications of Fundamental Constant Measurements

As we know these constants with greater precision, it becomes possible to test a variety of possible relationships between them.  Almost everyone in fundamental physics believes that nature does not in fact have dozens of truly fundamental Standard Model constants that don't have deeper sources from which they can be, in principle at least, derived.  But, the deeper connections between those constants remains elusive.

If we knew that some of the Standard Model constants had deepere relationships to each other, we might have better clues about a deeper theory than the Standard Model that could elucidate.  For example, the "coincidental" cancellations of contributions to the Higgs boson mass whose existence has been called the "hierarchy problem" might be transparent if we knew how the fundmental fermion and boson masses were related to each other functionally.

We are close to being able to experimentally test for leading contenders for descriptions of these relationships that could dramatically reduce the number of experimentally measured parameters in the Standard Model and establish that there are deeper relationships between these parameters than the Standard Model itself makes evident.

Koide's Formula

Koide's formula, a simple formula that in its original 1982 version by Yoshio Koide, states a precision relationship between the rest masses of the charged leptons to each other that is still consistent with experimental measurements twenty years later.  A simple extension of this formula has been proposed to derive from the charged lepton masses, the masses of the top, bottom, charm and strange quarks, (also here) the quark masses, although the extended formula seems to imply a higher down quark mass than experimental evidence supports and a near zero up quark mass in some formulations.  

Other extensions of Koide's formula has been proposed for the neutrino masses (one suggests an electron neutrino mass of about 0.0004 eV, a muon neutrino mass of about 0.009 eV and a tau neutrino mass of about 0.510 eV see also by the same author here ) with a negative square root for the electron neutrino mass rather than a positive one, but this can't be tested due to the lack of precision measurements of absolute neutrino masses.  Carl Brannen's 2006 presention in the first link in this paragraph builds up this analysis from a model in which leptons are built from and composed of preons with identical positions in the previous link.  Further analysis of both extensions of the original Koide's formula can be found here. 

Recent scholarship by Yukinari Sumino and François Goffinet has also addresses the criticism of Lubos Motl that the Koide relation is formulated in terms of masses that are themselves dependent upon an energy rather than more fundamental quantities. 

Extended versions of Koide's formula, at their root, if they work, imply that all twelve of the fermion masses in the Standard Model may be determined exactly from the two most exactly measured fermion masses - thereby eliminating the need for ten of the twelve experimentaly measured Standard Model constants.

A Simple Higgs Boson Formula?

The Higgs boson mass continues to be consistent within the bounds of experimental error with a simple formula indeed: 2H=2W+Z (arguably 2H=2W+Z+photon mass, which is equivalent), that almost no one in the theoretical physics community predicted in advance.  The reason for the difference between double the Higgs boson mass (about 252 GeV) and the Higgs field vacuum expectation value (about 246 GeV) remains largely unexplained, but suggestive of a simple formula as well (for example, the difference of 6 GeV is roughly equal to the sum of the quark masses other than the top quark).  The W and Z boson masses, in turn, are related in the Standard Model by the weak mixing angle, and the photon mass in the Standard model is theoretically assumed to be exactly zero.  This relationship, if determined to be valid, would allow the masses of all of the Standard Model bosons to be determined from a single weak force boson mass and a single mixing angle, reducing the number of experimentally measured Standard Model constants by one.

Quark-Lepton Complementarity

A hypothesis known as quark-lepton complementarity (QLC) suggests that the CKM matrix governing quark flavor mixing, and the PMNS matrix governing lepton flavor mixing, when properly parameterized, can be described in terms of angles that sum to 45 degree or other multipes of that angle.  Since the CKM matrix entries are known with precision, and since there are a finite number of sensible ways to parameterized the two matrixes, it is possible to make firm predictions about the PMNS matrix terms predicted by this theory and to compare them against experimental results.  QLC is contrary to experimental evidence for many possible parameterizations, but has not been ruled out for all of them at this time.  Quark-lepton complementarity, if established to be correct, would allow all eight of the experimentally measured mixing matrix parameters of the Standard Model to be determined from just four of those mixing matrix parameters.

Relationships Between Mixing Matrixes and the Square Roots Of Fermion Masses

There have also been suggested relationships between the fermion mass matrixes of the Standard Model (or the matrix of the square roots of Standard Model fermion masses) and the mixing matrixes of the Standard Model that will be possible to test with precision PMNS angle measurements and neutrino masses in hand.

QCD

Quantum chromodynamics which describes the interactions of quarks and gluons in the Standard Model makes only low precision and qualitative predictions relative to the other Standard Model forces.  This is because the mathematical tools used to calculate electroweak force predictions, such as renormalization, don't work well with QCD since gluons have a strong degree of self-interaction.

But, numerical approximations using lattice methods, high power computers and Monte Carlo methods are increasingly making it possible to make solid QCD predictions even in low energy "infrared" contexts where quark confinment serious limits direct measurements.

These approximations are increasingly making it possible to explain how gluons give rise to the vast majority of the mass in the universe, to predict a massive state for gluons which are in motion (gluons have no rest mass), to predict the masses of composite particles made of quarks and gluons, and to predict the existence of composite particles made entirely of gluons without any quarks at all which are called glueballs.

While the mathematics invovled is hard, and the ability to conduct direct experimental measurements of the predicted behavior beyond the nature of the composite particle spectrum observed in nature is modest, QCD has an advantage not shared by beyond the Standard Model theories.  There is wide consensus on the exact form of the equations of QCD and there are moderately accurate experimental measurements of all of the physical constants in those equations.  The theoretical predictions of QCD have not been contradicted by experiment and there is thus high confidence in the ability of elaborate numerical methods that are based on these equations to accurately reproduce nature even in areas where it is very difficult to observe directly.

Quantum Gravity

The Longstanding Challenge Of Unifying Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity

The Standard Model and General Relativity are inconsistent mathematically.  Yet, both theories of fundamental physics perform admirably to the highest levels of precision to which we can experimentally test them in their own respective domains.  Efforts to reconcile the two have been on ongoing area of theoreretical physics research since the 1940s. 

Indeed, the Holy Grail of theoretical physics is a "theory of everything" involves finding a way to reconcile some generalization of Standard Model physics that unifies the three forces and couple of dozens particles in it into a "Grand Unified Theory", and a quantum gravity theory involving a spin-2, massless graviton that carried the gravitational force.  Generalizations of supersymmetry called string theory, in several forms determined to be equivalent descriptions of a larger M theory on a many dimensional brane, were held out for decades to be that TOE.  But, this proved to be a bridge too far.  Neither SUSY, nor M theory, have worked out so far, and they seem to be on the verge of being contradicted by experiment.

Loop Quantum Gravity

The main contender for a quantum gravity theory other than String Theory has been "loop quantum gravity" although half a dozen other names for areas of research using the same paradigm have been developed.  All of these theories start from the premise that space-time is discete rather than continuous, in some carefully defined manner at some sufficiently fine level, typically the Planck scale.  The approaches use toy models connecting nodes of space-time according to rules that look like quantum mechanical rules to formulate a space-time that behaves in the domains where it has been tested like general relativity and to give rise emergently to a four-dimensional space-time.

Efforts are underway to develop a consensus formulation of LQG, to integrate Standard Model particles and interactions into the model, and to explore phenomological distinctions between classical general relativity and the LQG formulations that reduce to it, in those circumstances where classical general relativity gives rise to mathematical inconsistencies with the Standard Model.

In some LQG models, the Standard Model particles themselves are emergent excitations of localized areas of space-time.  It is hoped that quantum gravity could allow us to better understand phenomena like black holes, the Big Bang, the point-like nature of Standard Model particles, and perhaps dark matter and dark energy as well.

LQG remains very much a work in progress, but unlike string theory, it is a work in progress that is showing (in part because these area still early days in the field) real theoretical progress.  No insurmountable dead ends in the LQG research program have emerged yet.

Ad Hoc Efforts To Address Particular Quantum Gravity Questions

Other avenues of quantum gravity research aren't so ambitious. 

Programs to investigate phenomena around black holes, around the Big Bang, in high energy settings (asymptotic gravity) have simply come up with ad hoc and incomplete ansatz approaches to analyzing particular quantum gravity problems on a case by case basis without claiming to have consistent theory of quantum gravity as a whole. 

Notably, one of these approaches, asymptotic gravity, made one of the most accurate of the many dozens of Higgs boson mass predictions.

Precision Pre-History

A new paper on wooden Neolithic water wells in Germany highlights a trend in research about the prehistory human condition that has been mostly invisible because it has happened in a gradual and diffuse way.  This trend is towards an increasingly precise chronology in the Holocene era (i.e. from around the time that farming and herding were invented) with an increasingly large number of data points.  This is also true, although less strikingly, for the Upper Paleolithic and the Middle Stone Age. 

The linked study, for example, examined 151 oak timbers for four waterlogged Neolithic wells that were dated between 5469 BCE and 5098 BCE.  The date at which the first farmers appeared in each part of Europe and the Fertile Crescent is known to a precision of about +/- 150 years, which isn't bad for events that are 7,000 to 10,000 years old in most of those places.

Written history starts in Egypt and Sumeria about 3500 BCE, and starts to include Anatolia by about 1700 BCE, although the historical record is still quite patchy until a few centuries after 1000 BCE in the Iron Age.  Significant written history is found in Britain around 0 CE although there are gaps in the record, and isn't well established in much of Northern and Central Europe until the early Middle Ages.

But, despite the limited availability of written history, our ability to match times and places comprehensively to archaeological cultures and subcultures and periods within them is increasingly precise, as is the richness of the data available to describe each of them.  Increasingly, paleoclimate data from tree rings and ice cores and organic remains in layers of archaeological sites can be used to calibrate these dates to each other and to broader climatic influences on human civilization.

Rather than having a prehistoric chronology in which there are a few highlight points and big gaps of the unknown in between them, we increasingly have a chronology of prehistory (particularly in Europe and the Middle East) which provides a comprehensive account from the Neolithic all of the way through to the present.

For Holocene era Europe, the timeline can break the entire period from about 6000 BCE to about 1000 CE (after which written records are much more widely available and are present almost everywhere in Europe), with meaningful detail about pretty much every 200-300 years period (about 28 date bins) at a level of geographic precision comparable to the size of the smaller European countries, or to the first or second level subdivisions of larger European countries (a few hundred place bins).  If you break this era of European history and prehistory into the roughly 10,000 bins in space and time, you can put meaningful, empirically based statements about what was going on at the time there in almost all of them.  And, there are many parts of the prehistoric record of Europe where the level of precision in terms of both dates and geography is much finer.

Ancient DNA data, combined with old fashioned but reliable physical anthropology analysis of old skeletal remains whose conclusions are often corroborated by ancient DNA evidence, has given us a solid foundation from which to discuss who the people who practiced these prehistoric cultures were, where they came from, and the extent to which they displaced or were in continuity with prior residents of the same places.

In short, we have reached a point where the breadth and depth of our reliable data on European prehistory since the arrival of the first farmers is almost as good as our ancient history record, where it is available, for the entire period before the Roman era, although, of course, prehistory lacks the many of the names and personalities of the historic record, and likewise lacks definitive resolution of historical linguistic questions even though strong suppositions can be supported.

Does the SM Require Excited Higgs Bosons?

QCD physicist Marco Frasca argues at his blog that the mathematical structure of the scalar field of the Higgs boson in the Standard Model implies that there cannot be just a single Standard Model Higgs boson. 

He explains that "a massless scalar field with a quartic interaction in [de Sitter] space develops a mass. . . . A self-interacting scalar field has the property to get mass by itself."

"de Sitter space" is a space-time in which special relativity applies, and is a background upon which the Standard Model of Particle Physics can be formulated that is more general than the usual Minkowski space (where only special relativity applies), but is symmetrical and lacks the mass-energy fields of general relativity; it is a particular vacuum solution of the equations of general relativity.

Instead, Frasca argues, the mathematics imply that there must also exist other, higher energy, excited states of the scalar field in addition to the Higgs boson observed so far. In other words, there must be higher energy versions of the Higgs boson in the kind of scalar field that it generates.  He summarizes his argument by stating that:

[I]f we limit all the analysis to the coupling of the Higgs field with the other fields in the Standard Model, this is not the best way to say we have observed a true Higgs particle as the one postulated in the sixties. It is just curious that no other excitation is seen beyond the (eventually cloned) 126 GeV boson seen so far but we have a big desert to very high energies. Because the very nature of the scalar field is to have massive solutions as soon as the self-interaction is taken to be finite, this also means that other excited states must be seen.

Frasca's observation goes beyond the canonical description of the Higgs boson, but isn't precisely beyond the Standard Model physics either.  A better way to describe his observation would be to say that it is a non-canonical analysis of how Standard Model physics plays out that makes predictions that have not yet been observed and not yet achieved consensus status among physicists.

Is The de Sitter Space Assumption An Important Loophole To Frasca's Conclusion?

There is a loophole in Frasca's analysis, however.  His analysis and that of the other paper he cites in support of his conclusion both assume a background of de Sitter space, as is natural and usually done without comment of any kind in quantum mechanics. 

But, we don't live in de Sitter space.  We live in a world where the entire background independent formulation of Einstein's theory of general relativity applies to a universe full of matter and energy.

Put another way, our world has stuff in it, while de Sitter space doesn't, and that might be relevant to a mechanism that has a fundamental role in giving rise to mass, which is a quantity upon which gravity acts that exists only outside de Sitter space which assumes away its existence, at least as a first order approximation.  Some of the relevant distinctions are explored here.

It is possible that while a self-interacting massless scalar field does acquire mass and does imply the existence of excited states of the Higgs boson in de Sitter space, that this conclusion does not in fact hold in the space-time of the asymmetrical, mass filled universe version of general relativity in which we actually live.  Indeed, the absence of of excited states of the Higgs boson could be a clue that could point physicists in the right direction when developing a coherent theory of quantum gravity. 

I have no particularly good reason to think that Frasca's result shouldn't generalize, other than that we do not observe the Higgs field at its vacuum expectation value acquiring mass in real life (with the possible exception of dark energy which is many, many orders of magnitude too small for this conclusion to hold).  So, if there is no flaw the mathematical reasoning that Frasca employs as he reaches his conclusion in de Sitter space, perhaps this counterfactual assumption about the nature of space-time does matter in some way.  Given that the Higgs vev, by definition, permeates all of space-time and plays a fundamental role in giving rise to mass, this isn't such a far fetched possibility. 

In general, no mathematically tractable theory of quantum gravity that can clear this kind of hurdle has been formulated, so it is impossible to say, in general, how a quantum mechanics based conclusion would play out in a context in which gravity could play an important role. 

In similar situations (e.g. the quantum mechanics that take place at the event horizon of a black hole), physicists develop an ad hoc ansatz to deal with possible quantum gravity issues, and to determine where quantum gravity considerations might be relevant, on a case by case basis without the benefit of a full theory of quantum gravity.

Could Excited Higgs Boson States Be Unattainably Heavy?

It is also worth noting that since Frasca is discussing the qualitative properties of otherwise massless scalar fields that are self-interacting, his post, at least, does not predict any particular mass for an excited state of a Higgs boson. He simply predicts that they exist. 

Thus, the loophole that he affords himself is that an excited state of the Higgs boson might exist, but it might be so heavy that it will never be realized outside of Big Bang conditions. 

Indeed, if this were the case, excited Higgs bosons might play a role in making possible forms of baryongenesis and leptogenesis that cannot be achieved at sufficient rates to explain the presence of mass in the universe without them.

Background On Scalar, Vector and Tensor Fields

Spin-0 particles are either "scalar" or "pseudo-scalar" depending upon their parity and create "scalar fields" (i.e. fields described at any given point in space-time by a single number).  Spin-1 bosons are called "vector bosons" and create "vector fields" (i.e. fields described at any given point in space-time by a directional arrow and the magnitude of that arrow, such as electromagnetic fields).  And, spin-2 particles (such as the hypothetical graviton) are "tensor" bosons that create "tensor" fields (i.e. fields described at any given point in space-time by a matrix of numbers of the kind found in general relativity).

Since the Higgs boson is the only spin-0 particle in the Standard Model, as all other Standard Model bosons have spin-1, this issue doesn't crop up anywhere else in the Standard Model.  Further, electromagnetic forces is not self-interacting.  Only the Higgs boson generates a self-interacting scalar field. 

Thus, Frasca's analysis does not imply that there must be a more massive excited version of the W or Z boson, a more massive excited version of the gluon, or a more massive excited version of the photon (although his reasoning is simply silent on these points and doesn't rule them out either).

Physical Constants Stay Constant

A clever astronomy observation has established that the physical constants of the Standard Model related to the electron mass, the Higgs field strength, the quark masses, the strength of the strong force, and Planck's constant, have been unchanged to a very high degree of precision for at least 7 billion years, subject to some fairly weak assumptions that are used to put a date on the observation (e.g. the constancy of the speed of light has to be assumed as part of a red shift calculation).

Of course, this is what scientists assume anyway.  But, finding a way to confirm the value of so many physical constants more or less directly, so distantly in the past, is a remarkable feat that quashes a variety of beyond the Standard Model theories.

On the other hand, the constants whose values have been observed to be constant are not necessarily those whose values would be expected to change over time, at least on those time scales. 

Many proposals for changing physical constants either suppose differing values in the extremely high energy environment of the first 0.5 billion years or less after the Big Bang (or even the first few hours or seconds after the Big Bang).  These formulas may formally be functions of temperature or entropy.  More than six billion years after the Big Bang, these physical constants would have long since reached equilibrium levels.

Others proposals for physical constants that vary over time involve physical constants related to gravity and the details of the particle composition of the universe (e.g. a dark matter proportion or Hubble's constant), which arguably arise from the structure of all of space-time and may evolve as the composition and dispersal of the universe changes over time.