Fear Of A Black Universe

An Outsider's Guide to the Future of Physics

Stephon Alexander 2021 Bvt Lib 523.1 ALE

Intuition can inspire discovery ... (but is no substitute for skeptical analysis IMHO)

• CV

Reads like woowoo sometimes. Does provide some notes and a few references.

• 003 Ch 1 Escape from the Jungle of No Imagination
  • 95% of matter and energy is invisible, branded "dark matter and dark energy"
  • galactic halos, accelerated expansion

  • halo paper, maybe read someday? https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/492/2/3047/5626368

• Q01.KL: over what radio-microwave-optical-UV bands is "dark" measured?
• Q02.KL: do the different bands scale the same over time?
• Q03.KL: some phenomena dissipate, others (i.e. black holes) accumulate at large scale and evaporate at tiny scale. How does this affect what we observe?
• Q04.KL: the universe is 3D+T; curved but not topologically complex. How might early topo-complexity "large" scale initial wormholes?) dissipate and affect observed energy and temperature?
• 006 birthplace northern coast of Trinidad ... Las Cuervas Bay
• 007 reputational penalties for stepping outside acceptable paradigms
• 008 volcanic with ideas, most turn out wrong

• 011 Wayne Davis zombie voodoo harrumph

• 017 First paper JHEP 2001

• 018 "Let him finish! No one ever died from theorizing" -- Abdus Salam?
• 020 Imperial college, Christopher Isham, "tell me about your dreams"
• 025 1963 Frisch Smith muon decay experiment Mount Washington NH to Cambridge
• 023-33 General Relativity
• 035 ...quantum mechanics ... there is no need to drop acid -- your mind has already experienced alternate reality.
• 035-41 Superposition
• 053-62 The Zen of Quantum Fields --- my take: conflating viewpoint with the viewed. Different narratives produce different words, but the description is not the phenomena described - which don't fit in a cage of words, not even a rigid cage of equations. A huge herd of observations can be approximated, and everyday macroscopic experience is inevitably of those huge herds, evolution produces thrifty brains tuned for those approximations.
• 056 magnets, filings, field "lines" misleading. More likely, ferromagnetic whiskers bridge between others. Photograph. Then scramble the whiskers and repeat and photograph again. My guess is that every repeat will produce different lines and spaces, though following the same curvatures. The whiskers define specific lines, the magnetic field shapes them.
• 063 Emergence: additional properties emerge from interactions between constituents
• 070 Cooper pairs: electrons with opposite spins pair together ... (KHL becoming virtual bosons with collective coherence. The pairing is enabled by the behavior of the crystal lattice, presumably)
• 079 Stanford physics? theoretical physics head Michael Peskin

  ,081 Stanford April 2020 The Diversity Innovation Paradox: women and minorities innovate novel contributions more than the majority group

-