How should private foundations support science?

It is amazing that there exist quite some private foundations in the United States who care about science and are enthusiastic about funding scientific projects. However, a lot of them, if not all, don’t seem to know how they should support science in a complementary way when compared to government funding agencies like NSF and DoE.

Time to reform peer-review

One of the critical features in scientific research is the application of the so-called peer-review process before a scientific paper is officially published in a journal. Ideally, peer-review, at least seemingly in its original purpose, should serve as a measure of quality control that benefits both the authors and the readers. However, nowadays, it becomes more and more like an obstruction to the advancement of science, in particular, in terms of radically new ideas and directions.

How can a new idea be accepted by eminent physicists?

In a nostalgic review article titled “Twenty years of the Weyl anomaly” [Michael J Duff, Class. Quantum Grav. 11, 1387 (1994)], Duff recalled the history of his discovery of the Weyl or conformal anomaly in quantum theory with Derek Capper.

Old Wine in New Bottles - How does science advance?

A lot of times science advances by incorporating or interpreting old ideas under new scenarios.

For example, Lorentz first proposed the so-called Lorentz transformation, but it was Einstein who correctly interpreted and applied it in his theory of special relativity. Yang and Mills first came up with the SU(2) gauge theory idea for studying nuclear isospin. But it was Glashow, Weinberg, Salam , and ‘t Hooft who found the best application of the idea to the electroweak interaction eventually leading to the most celebrated unification theory (called the Standard Model) for all three gauge interactions of the known elementary particles.

Does the Universe Have a Mirror Sector?

[This is a repost of the popular introduction page on the new mirror matter theory]

Modern physics is pillared by Einstein’s theory of general relativity (that defines spacetime and the gravitational force) and the Standard Model as the best known quantum theory (that governs quantum particles and the other known interactions). Despite tremendous successes of the two theories and decades of more scientific efforts, there remains a wide range of puzzling phenomena in fundamental physics and the dream of unification of general relativity and quantum theory has never come true.

Invisible decays and equivalence of CP violation and mirror symmetry breaking scales

COVID-19 pandemic has hindered my scientific production quite a bit. But finally my new paper on “invisible decays of neutral hadrons” is finished though it should have been done months ago. It provides precise predictions on invisible decay branching fractions of long-lived neutral hadrons that can be readily measured at existing collider facilities. The idea is that CP violation can be considered as a direct result of spontaneous mirror symmetry breaking at staged quark condensation (e.g., at temperatures of 100GeV – 100 MeV in the early Universe). For a neutral kaon system, it means that the CP and mirror breaking scales, i.e., the mixing strength and mass splitting parameters should be the same.

How to avoid a war between US and China?

The tension between two superpower nations (US and China) is getting more and more severe these days. Obviously, the worse relationship between these two countries is especially bad for chinese americans and to a certain extent, all asian americans. A war between the two, in particular, if escalated to be of nuclear type, will be a disaster to the human race on Earth. Too bad, we are watching a trade and tech war between them now. Yet a hot war, especially in south China sea or around Taiwan, could not be completely ruled out in the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made things even worse. The two biggest economies are going down. It is convenient for politicians to play the blame game and turn attention of the population elsewhere, especially against the other nation. Nationalism, fueled by politicians, could be the trigger to a hot war. It is time to test if our education systems have been robust or not. In other words, we’ll see if the overall competence level of the general public is over the “stupidity” hump(s) of the Dunning-Kruger effect or not regarding wars.