This blog contains four snaky puzzle questions, their back stories, answers, and discussions. Due to family responsibilities, the video blog must be delayed until at least Thursday.
click or skip a reading of this blog:


April 18 - Higgs? We ain’t got no Higgs 

Thanks to all that read my previous post, “Sexy Standard Model Symmetries”. Most probably did not notice quite a few technical exchanges between David Halliday and myself. I was pretty darn sure I had a way to represent electroweak symmetry using quaternions. David was pretty darn sure I did not. Such exchanges can go on for some time, unless one party finally sees that they were in fact wrong on the facts. That doesn’t happen often. It did happen here, and I was the one who was wrong. This blog will go into my mistakes, and generate a few more animations which may open up new views.

What is sexy? That is in the eye of the beholder. The eye dominates, using roughly 40% of our CPU. We don’t ask movie stars to understand spread-spectrum communications technology, unless they do, like Hedy Lamarr.

The title is a playful variation on a line from a Bogart movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  That was an adaptation from a novel of the same title:

"All right," Curtin shouted back. "If you are the [LHC] police, where are your [Higgs]? Let's see them."

For the unpopular cutting edge, there is no book with the answers at the back. This post will need to suffice for the snarky puzzles at the end of my previous posts. I am a playful snark, not a caustic one. I used to teach retarded citizens how to add. [clarification: while paying for 1 year of math grad school in Bloomington, Indiana, I volunteered an hour a week for a year at a local center.] I am that patient with myself, and will be so with you. Physics discussions can devolve into that 6 year-old boy fighting kind of groove (hi Sascha!). Since this is research, we do have a chance to learn something new together.
[click or skip a dramatic reading of this post]