Dec. 19th, damn near 20th
(11:55 p.m.). Bed.
Long range order.
What is it? Kitaigorodsky says on p. 47 of Order and Disorder in the World of Atoms, "This term can rightfully be applied to the arrangement of atoms in a crystal.” He also says, as
the reason for this crystalline property, “along the directions of axes of the
cell, similar atoms will be found at strictly equal distances hundreds and
thousands of times.” I put that comma in
there myself. But I do like K’s writing
and would like to own a better—not falling apart—copy of the book.
I want to look at this idea
in relation to the idea of symmetry.
Long range order implies a lack of symmetry. This idea has been bugging me since I don’t
know when. Nineteen-ninety-four or a
little earlier. Long range disorder
implies, as I understand it, perfect symmetry.
In other words, rotational and translational invariance. Or, in other other words, isotropy and
homogeneity. I don’t like this idea of
symmetry. I like to think of symmetry as
having to do with orderly structure, not just nothingness! Well, one more thought: look into order,
noncommutativity, and addition (summing).
6:15 p.m. December 22.
Also, to continue the discussion above, I need to order another copy of Kitaigorodsky’s
book. Mine has fallen to pieces (it’s an
old paperback, old meaning printed in 1980, although I have had it probably
only since the mid-nineties.)
Thought number two: I’ve really gotten habitual with writing the
time of my journal entries. I’m not sure
I even like that.
Number three: Oppenheimer had such great promise as a
theoretical physicist, but he failed.
Why? As Crease & Mann see it,
he had no personal feeling in him for where he wanted physics to go. He was not “his own man” is one way they
describe Oppenheimer’s failure to do great things in physics. He was clever, subtle, but in the end a
physics failure. (I’m using some applicable words from
the classroom dream scene in A Serious
Man.)
I view quantum field theory
in exactly that way. Gauge invariance,
virtual particles, and . . . well, I’m not sure what all I’m thinking of that I
don’t like, oh, yeh, the application of perturbation theory and of
renormalization—these are all like Oppenheimer himself. Cleverness to the nth power,
precocious, lacking in a clear philosophical view of what physics should
be. Now, like Oppenheimer in the 1930s,
QFT and the Standard Model are having their field day. In spite of the Higgs discovery—an amazing
effort and accomplishment—I believe this field day of the Standard Model will
also pass. I think it will be replaced
by something much simpler and better that puts it to shame by explaining all
the current experimental high-energy data and also the electron, proton and
neutron charges and masses.
1:55 a.m. (I will keep writing down the time. Seems significant that I'm awake at 2 a.m., doesn't it?) The day after Christmas. "The Effervescence of the Vacuum" seems like it should be a term to describe some of the observed effects now attributed to virtual particles.
8:10 p.m. Sunday
Dec. 29. The “law of conservation of
electric charge, which is exact” (p. 194 Crease & Mann) is something I
would like to now discuss. The charge
could change subtly in some situations, but may be unmeasurable in these
situations. This is in fact like
symmetry: the changes are unobservable. E. g., changes in electromagnetic potentials
are such that electromagnetic fields are not changed.
Can we also have, then, changes in electric charge of
electron and proton such that the electromagnetic field is not observably
different? Huh. Far-fetched, Frank.
Also, here’s an old thought scribbled on a piece of
paper I’m now transcribing into this notebook:
“What was the thing about time I was thinking this morning? About t = 0 in this diagram? [Upside
down T, with t = 0 at the intersection point.] And how it should be used in the usual
Einstein rest frame Lorentz transformation?
More to it! I’ll remember it
later. Had some other inchoate thought
before that. Also: shoot the monkey and the question of the
relativity of simultaneity.”
