so sorry!! couldn’t help myself on that…but you know, god’s in the details.

A perennial subject of public debate has been the question: Why do outhouse doors have a crescent moon cut in the them? I puzzled over this question after reading about it in a “Dear Abbey” column many years ago. I couldn’t get anywhere with it. Then, some years later serendipity stepped in. I was watching a vintage cartoon on the tube. The scene was of soldiers of the WWII era. They were unloading crates of rifles. As I commented to myself on the superiority of the art work as compared to modern cartoons I noticed a detail. The wooden crates had hand holds cut into the end panels. They were crescent shaped! I had an “aha” moment. In a flash one of the secrets of the universe was opened up to me. I could see it so clearly now. The historical interplay of events mixing with human needs and desires. The balancing of aesthetics and utility. Within my mind a sequence of events took the form of a story: During the Great Depression the government sponsored civil works projects that sent many groups of workers out into the countryside. Often they were miles from civilization. They brought along crate loads of tools. When they arrived at a work site they had to pitch tents and build their own “facilities”. How much better to have a real structure with something you can sit in and on rather than just the standard open air latrine trench? So they used the lumber from the wooden tool crates and incorporated the perforated end panels to provide a modicum of light, ventilation, and style. QED- That’s it in a nutshell. A couple of unanswered questions remain. What about the 5 pointed star issue? Could the practice in question predate the Great Depression? Much more work could be done in this area but I will leave that for the younger generation.

Apologies to Dick in advance.

Ummm… and, if this is too complicated a thing for a single post then perhaps a list of concepts/theories I should understand to find out what the fundamental nature of space time has been theorized to be!

The last time I tried to venture in that direction was my undergrad. My physics friends had no idea and the library had offered nothing worthwhile.

I haven’t studied QFT in depth (i.e. I haven’t taken a class or worked through a textbook), but I got a crash course on it here at the PI in the last week and a half to help simulate Bohmian trajectories. And so my limited understanding says that this guy is making sense, despite presenting it in a kinda amateur format (typed up using Microsoft Word 2007’s equation editor, referring mostly to textbooks and not papers, being an individual who gives his work address instead of an academician, calling Dirac sea theories “hole theory,” etc.). It seems like someone who works on QFT on the side and thinks he’s found a good way to address something that’s been bugging him since he first learned it. And, well, if I were in that position, I know I’d like some help.

So anyone want to clue me in? Is it that he (seems to be as far as I can tell from skimming) using the Pauli equation instead of the Dirac equation? Hey, you said this was an open thread :-D.

Elliot

The only possible way an amateur can gain the attention of the professionals is by extending the work of the professionals. Furthermore, this has to be done in a way that is so simple that the professional can understand it in only a few seconds of effort. That means it has to be written using high school algebra, or maybe a little calculus, nothing more. It must be completely obvious. If this is done, the professionals will respond.

If one does obtain a peek into God’s physics notebook, one should have the presence of mind to copy down a few simple equations that can make it into the physics literature despite the sociological barriers. One does this by sending a one-page sheet of algebra to the physicist who is closest to guessing the elegant equations.

But write it here for a general audience? No, that would be a waste of time.

How about a detailed post on reheating after inflation? A discussion of the models of particle production would be nice as well.

I am a graduate student in experimental cosmology, so something at a beginning graduate student level would be really nice.