Photons travel slower than neutrinos by 25 ppm!

I find it interesting that photons travel about 25 ppm slower in a vacuum than neutrinos do through hard rock! It comes as no surprise to me that something that cuts through matter like a hot knife through butter should outrun a wimpy photon that is buffeted around by weak electric fields. Why the big surprise? What surprises me is that the speed difference is so small. I would guess that what is really in error is the speed of light in a true field free vacuum. I would bet that photons travel at the same velocity as neutrinos. What is in error is our assumption that we actually have a pure vacuum measurement of the speed of light.

An electron in a box.

Imagine a box. It is surrounded by plates and coils such that you can dial in the Ex, Ey,and Ez electric field components using parallel plate capacitors and the Bx, By, and Bz magnetic field components using electromagnets. The field can be uniform across the volume to good accuracy. Assume that the six field components are static. This is a box that could be made to good accuracy by one skilled in the art.

Now, drop an electron into the box and see how it reacts to various static fields, based on the electron's initial conditions. Under what conditions does the electron gain or loose energy? How are the photons of the static fields interacting with the electron to create such diverse behaviour? What exactly is going on if you use the QED photon-electron interaction model?

This is a very interesting problem and begs MatLab simulation. I'll get around to it! Have you done it?

Stock price - - an instantiation of fruit.

So to make a specific instance of fruit, let's instantiate the class of fruit with a company's stock price. Is there a metric to permit sorting the fruit?

How about Q = ((P1-P0)/P0)/(P1/E) ?

Perhaps, perhaps not. I'd say you better look at the chart before pulling the trigger!

Getting near bed time!

Good Fruit - Bad Fruit: Life's Metaphor

1. Suppose I have a basket filled with fruit.
2. Suppose fruit can ripen.
3. Suppose fruit can spoil.

What is my best maintenance strategy? I suppose it is simply to learn to recognize when to pull ripe fruit, never allow it to spoil (at least for long), and replace what is taken with new fruit with the potential to ripen.

I think strategically that's all there is to it! The devil's in the tactical details of making the proper decisions on how to do that!

Isn't life simple?

Again, time for bed . . .

Our Eigen World

I keep thinking at the core of things that nature keeps on performing the same operation; iterating ad infinitum. What comes of it? . . . our eigen world, like a power series iteration caused by some mysterious world operator? What could that operator be? Upon what manifold does it operate? What subtle non-linearity allows it to interact with itself rather than passing through itself? So many questions! Are these questions even relevant? Time for bed . . . that much is certain!

Eigen Zeit

It seems logically consistent to obtain a measurable time in the same way one obtains a measurable location: by finding the eigen value of the location operator. The only twist is that time is the imaginary part of the eigen value. Why restrict the world to Hermitian operators with real eigen values? Let the operator have a complex eigen value so it yields not only the x location as the real part, but the x time as the imaginary part. Thus, there are six natural location observables in a stationary state: x+icu, y+icv, and z+icw . . . three spatial and three temporal. Indeed to great accuracy, t/sqrt(3)=u=v=w where t is time as we know it today. It only appears as if we have a single measure of time.

Other operators on the same wave function yield other observables in stationary states. It all springs from a single wave function with a wealth of interesting operators whose purpose is to observe various aspects of itself. Strangely, our observation is itself observable through the tracks it leaves in observing!

Must get some sleep . . .

Idempotency rules!

The collapsed wave function is our visible world . . . the consequence of an idempotent projection operation. Visible reality is a coagulated eigenket.

Is our apparent 3D plus time world just a projection of a 6D complex vector space?

We might literally be correct in saying "it's only a movie, it's only a movie . . ."!