Future Train Wreck: Mine or Modern Physics talk Next Thursday, Jan. 26

If you are in Cambridge, MA on Thursday, Jan. 26, you can see me live at MIT in room 3-270 from...

Holiday Physics Card, 2016

Just put them in the mail on December 24...It was a fun year of thinking, whether the idea is right...

Unified Mathematical Field Theory Talk

I gave a 15 minute talk at a local Americal Physical Society Meeting.  Here is the title and...

Holiday Card 2015

Here is my holiday card for 2015, a tradition of mine going back to 1990.  Enjoy.On the back...

 Doug Sweetser Trying to be a semi-pro amateur physicist (yes I accept special relativity is right!). I _had_ my own effort to unify gravity with other forces in Nature. It ran into quite a number of technically... Read More » Blogroll

# Celiac: My Trendy Experience

Aug 29 2012 | comment(s)

I am white. I am liberal. I went to a good college, but some might argue that I didn't get a good education. Certainly I like to study science to this day. Let me tell a medical story I went through which might be germane to a blog by Hank, "Celiac: The Trendy Disease For Rich White People".

I have always been liberal about eating, as in I eat anything. I was skeptical about all food allergies. I also have insulin dependent diabetes. That is a disease that can kill you any day, but I am approaching my thirtieth year.

# Last Weekly Blog

Jul 09 2012 | comment(s)

The Higgs has been discovered, so this is the last of my Monday/Tuesday weekly blogs.  Blogging at Science 2.0 achieved my primary goal: debunking my GEM unified field proposal.  Part of that work suggested there was "no stinkin' Higgs".  The announcement from the LHC on July 4 of the Higgs discovery showed that technical speculation was in error. Don't believe the 1 in a million of being wrong PR however.  The spin of the particle detected remains to be shown in the data.

# Looking at the Real Numbers the Z2 Way

Jul 09 2012 | comment(s)

What I enjoy most is upsetting my own apple cart, presumptions about how things are as provided by my earliest teachers.  The image I learned about real numbers has negative numbers on the left, positive numbers on the right, and a zero sitting in the middle, with the integers marked out as even as can be:

# The Ontology of Quaternions as an 8 Dimensional [Proto-]Vector Space

Jun 25 2012 | comment(s)

[I changed the title of this blog to prepend Proto to vector space since a vector space is defined over a mathematical field.  While I explored the possibility that the positive real numbers might make up a mathematical field, that effort did not pan out.  In a subsequent blog, I will show how many properties of a vector space are shared by the positive real numbers over the group Z2.]

The only metric that is spherically symmetric and solves the Einstein field equations is the Schwarzschild metric, or so sayith Jørg Tofte Jebsen aka Birkhoff's theorem. [Correction: The theorem applies for a spherically symmetric, non-rotating, and uncharged source for the vacuum field equations.]
$i^2=j^2=k^2=ijk=-1$

# Quaternion Scalars, Quaternion Vectors: Life Without An Orthonormal Basis (2/2)

Jun 11 2012 | comment(s)

Everyone's introduction to quaternions always has the same math one-liner:

$i^2=j^2=k^2=ijk=-1$

This blog will dive into an issue that has bothered me for years, namely that the line assume the only coordinate system that can be used for quaternions are both normal and orthogonal.  It is the later property that stumped me, and I made a small step forward I will report on.