Griffiths (2008), David, Introduction to Elementary Particles, Wiley 2008 ' In the second, revised edition of a well-established textbook, the author strikes a balance between quantitative rigor and intuitive understanding, using a lively, informal style. The first chapter provides a detailed historical introduction to the subject, while subsequent chapters offer a quantitative presentation of the Standard Model. A simplified introduction to the Feynman rules, based on a "toy" model, helps readers learn the calculational techniques without the complications of spin. It is followed by accessible treatments of quantum electrodynamics, the strong and weak interactions, and gauge theories. New chapters address neutrino oscillations and prospects for physics beyond the Standard Model. The book contains a number of worked examples and many end-of-chapter problems. A complete solution manual is available for instructors.' 
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A.G. Sulzberger (2024_08_25), Opinion: How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America, ' After several years out of power, the former leader is returned to office on a populist platform. He blames the news media’s coverage of his previous government for costing him reelection. As he sees it, tolerating the independent press, with its focus on truth-telling and accountability, weakened his ability to steer public opinion. This time, he resolves not to make the same mistake. His country is a democracy, so he can’t simply close newspapers or imprison journalists. Instead, he sets about undermining independent news organizations in subtler ways — using bureaucratic tools such as tax law, broadcast licensing and government contracting. Meanwhile, he rewards news outlets that toe the party line — shoring them up with state advertising revenue, tax exemptions and other government subsidies — and helps friendly businesspeople buy up other weakened news outlets at cut rates to turn them into government mouthpieces. Within a few years, only pockets of independence remain in the country’s news media, freeing the leader from perhaps the most challenging obstacle to his increasingly authoritarian rule. Instead, the nightly news and broadsheet headlines unskeptically parrot his claims, often unmoored from the truth, flattering his accomplishments while demonizing and discrediting his critics. “Whoever controls a country’s media,” the leader’s political director openly asserts, “controls that country’s mindset and through that the country itself.” This is the short version of how Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, effectively dismantled the news media in his country.' back

Clare Farmer (2024_09_05), Is policing in Australia corrupt and abusive? An eye-opening new book investigates, ' Edited by former Queensland police officer and Gunai/Kurnai woman Veronica Gorrie, the title of When Cops are Criminals may suggest a book covering high-profile, or unusual, officer-involved crimes. But this collection does not focus on the extraordinary. As Gorrie explains, her reason for putting the book together was to highlight the harmful behaviours committed by police every single day, and, more importantly, the impact this has on their victims. Gorrie’s previous award-winning book, Black and Blue: a memoir of racism and resilience, was an account of her time as a police officer between 2001 and 2011. In this new edited collection, 12 authors – survivors, campaigners, practitioners, and academics – share their own stories (or those of others to which they are privy). Review: When Cops are Criminals – edited by Veronica Gorrie (Scribe) The predominant theme of When Cops are Criminals is that police and policing in Australia are systemically corrupt and abusive. Experiences of police misconduct and criminal behaviours – from racial profiling to sexual assault and family violence – are shown to be normalised, multi-jurisdictional, and persistent. Each chapter addresses the enduring and systemic racism, homophobia, misogyny, institutionalised toxicity, and dysfunction that enable and excuse individual and collective abuses of policing power. The book also highlights the limitations of mechanisms designed to ensure effective police scrutiny and meaningful accountability. The chapters largely focus on individual experiences, through deeply personal narratives and victim-survivor vignettes. These experiences are not situated within broader statistical analyses or tested empirical evidence, in terms of the number, type, or location of police involved in alleged abusive, corrupt, or criminal behaviours. Nor, given the nature and purpose of the collection, are specific responses put forward by the various police forces or the bodies that oversee them.' back

Deanne B. Fisher (2024_0-9_06), New measurements reveal the enormous halos that shroud all galaxies in the universe, ' In a study published today in Nature Astronomy, we reveal the first detailed picture of the gas shroud around a galaxy, extending 100,000 light years out into “empty” space. If our own Milky Way has a similar halo, it is likely already interacting with the halo of our nearest galactic neighbour, Andromeda.' back

Diana Kwon (202409_04), HIV: how close are we to a vaccine — or a cure?, ' At a major HIV conference in July, scientists announced that a seventh person had been ‘cured’ of the disease. A 60-year-old man in Germany, after receiving a stem-cell transplant, has been free of the virus for almost six years, researchers reported. The first such instance of eliminating HIV from a person in this way was reported in 2008. But stem-cell transplants, despite being highly effective at ridding people of the virus, are not a scalable strategy. The treatment is aggressive and poses risks, including long-term complications from graft-versus-host disease — a condition in which donor cells attack the recipient’s own tissues. The procedure was only possible in the seven successfully treated people because all of them had cancers that required a bone-marrow transplant, says Sharon Lewin, an infectious-diseases physician who heads the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne, Australia. “We would never even contemplate this for someone who was otherwise healthy,” Lewin says. “No one is thinking about this as a cure for HIV.” The standard treatment for HIV is antiretroviral therapy (ART), which involves a mix of drugs, usually taken daily, that prevents the virus from replicating inside the body. ART can reduce an infected person’s viral load to an undetectable level, stopping the virus from wreaking havoc in the body and drastically reducing the risk of transmission. But, for many people, such a strategy is not enough. Longer-term solutions are in the works. But how close are we to a cure for HIV — or a vaccine? Nature spoke with specialists to find out.' back

Feynman, Leighton & Sands, FLP III:9 The Ammonia Maser, 'In this chapter we are going to discuss the application of quantum mechanics to a practical device, the ammonia maser. You may wonder why we stop our formal development of quantum mechanics to do a special problem, but you will find that many of the features of this special problem are quite common in the general theory of quantum mechanics, and you will learn a great deal by considering this one problem in detail. The ammonia maser is a device for generating electromagnetic waves, whose operation is based on the properties of the ammonia molecule which we discussed briefly in the last chapter.' back

Feynman, Leighton & Sands III:8, Chapter 8: The Hamiltonian Matrix, 'One problem then in describing nature is to find a suitable representation for the base states. But that’s only the beginning. We still want to be able to say what “happens.” If we know the “condition” of the world at one moment, we would like to know the condition at a later moment. So we also have to find the laws that determine how things change with time. We now address ourselves to this second part of the framework of quantum mechanics—how states change with time. ' back

Francesca Ebel & Mary Ilyushina (2024_09_010, Pop star Monetochka reminds Russians of their country’s lost liberal moment, ' Elizaveta Gyrdymova — better known as Russian pop sensation Monetochka — remembers a different Russia. Growing up in the 2000s, she recalls her hometown of Yekaterinburg in the Ural mountains as a free-spirited, democratic city where politics were discussed openly in classrooms and people took local elections seriously because they were actually competitive. When she moved to Moscow in 2016, she befriended people who attended political protests or worked for international companies. Her first album was released in 2018 as Russia hosted the FIFA World Cup championships, and she remembers once having to push her way through a crowd of cheering, happy foreigners to reach one of her concerts. But last year, Monetochka, one of Russia’s most beloved singers, was labeled a foreign agent and now faces a potential criminal case after criticizing the invasion of Ukraine. Like so many other Russians, she fled her homeland and does not know when — or if — she will ever return. . . . One video posted on TikTok reminded users of “the times famous artists from all over the world came to Russia,” with clips from popular concerts in Russia by Imagine Dragons, Lady Gaga and Billie Eilish. Another showed the now inconceivable clip of comedian-turned-Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky performing a stand-up show in Russia in 2013. Users filmed themselves crying as they listened to the song’s chorus: “It was in Russia, that means it was long ago/ It was in Russia, that means it was a dream".' back

Hrvoje Tkalčić (2024_09_02), Seismic echoes reveal a mysterious ‘donut’ inside Earth’s core, ' About 2,890 kilometres beneath our feet lies a gigantic ball of liquid metal: our planet’s core. Scientists like me use the seismic waves created by earthquakes as a kind of ultrasound to “see” the shape and structure of the core. Using a new way of studying these waves, my colleague Xiaolong Ma and I have made a surprising discovery: there is a large donut-shaped region of the core around the Equator, a few hundred kilometres thick, where seismic waves travel about 2% slower than in the rest of the core. . . . There is also another planetary-scale process at work in the outer core. Earth’s rotation and the small solid inner core make the liquid of the outer core organise itself in long vertical vortices running in a north–south direction, like giant waterspouts. The turbulent movement of liquid metal in these vortices creates the “geodynamo” responsible for creating and maintaining Earth’s magnetic field. This magnetic field shields the planet from harmful solar wind and radiation, making life possible on the surface. A more detailed view of the makeup of the outer core – including the new-found donut of lighter elements – will help us better understand Earth’s magnetic field. In particular, how the field changes its intensity and direction in time is crucial for life on Earth and the potential habitability of planets and exoplanets.' back

Ian Duck and E.C.G. Sudarshan (1998), Toward an understanding of the spin-statistics theorem, 'We respond to a request from Neuenschwander for an elementary proof of the Spin-Statistics Theorem. First . . . Then we discuss an argument suggested by Sudarshan, which proves the theorem with a minimal set of requirements. . . . Motivated by our particular use of Lorentz invariance, if we are permitted to elevate the conclusion of flavour symmetry (which we explain in the text) to the status of a postulate, one could recast the proof without any relativistic assumptions, and this make it applicable even in the nonrelativistic context. . . . Finally, an argument starting with ordinary number-valued (nonmmuting), and with Grassman valued (anticommuting) operators, shows in a natural way that these relativitcally embed into Klein-Gordon spin-0 and Dirac spin-½ fields, respectively. In this way the Spin Statistics theorem is understood at the expense of admitting the existence of the simplest Grassman-valued field.' back

Jack Hibberd, A Stretch of the Imagination, ' Max Gillies as Monk O'Neill in the 1990 production of Jack Hibberd's classic Australian play. Best watched at HD 720p Bloomsday in Melbourne, presents "A Stretch of the Imagination" by Jack Hibberd with Wayne Pearn as Monk O'Neil and directed. back

Jeffrey Nicholls (1987), A theory of Peace, ' The argument: I began to think about peace in a very practical way during the Viet Nam war. I was the right age to be called up. I was exempted because I was a clergyman, but despite the terrors that war held for me, I think I might have gone. It was my first whiff of the force of patriotism. To my amazement, it was strong enough to make even me face death.
In the Church, I became embroiled in a deeper war. Not a war between goodies and baddies, but the war between good and evil that lies at the heart of all human consciousness. Existence is a struggle. We need all the help we can get. Religion is part of that help and theology is the scientific foundation of religion.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (1992), An essay on the divinity of money , ' The rise of science questioned revelation and the churches as sources of truth, but they have remained in existence because science still lacks the power to ask or answer the fundamental questions of life and death that concern theology. Here I outline a new scientific theology whose model of god derives not from ancient text but from the mathematical theory of text and communication itself. I propose that this model describes the universe of our experience, which is therefore fittingly called god. I then interpret this model using elements of current physical theory. These ideas are then applied to money. The movement of money is an abstract representation of the the activity of society as a whole, just as the flow of momentum in space-time is an abstract representation of the physical universe. My hypothesis is that proper understanding and political control of public cashflows is necessary and sufficient to obtain peaceful civilisation.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (1992a), An essay on value, ' 1: We must kill to live. The question before is is whether or not to kill some fraction of the old growth forest (OGF) in the Wingham management area (WMA) in order to keep the sawmilling operation at Mt George alive.
2: Religion: Although the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), as we have it, is a document based largely on resource, commercial and employment considerations, I believe the Commission is facing a religious issue, and will have no peace until it realizes that fact.
3: Matters of life and death are questions of religion. For those who have power over life and death, deciding what to kill is a question of value. The value system of any organism is determined by the history of its survival.
4: If the decision is good, the benefit from killing will exceed the value of what is destroyed, yielding a profit and enhanced probability of survival. A wrong judgement of value leads to the opposite result.' back

John von Neumann, Zur Algebra der Funktionaloperationen und Theorie der normalen Operatoren , back

Nikole M. Nielsen et al (2024_09_06), An emission map of the disk–circumgalactic medium transition in starburst IRAS 08339+6517, ' Most of a galaxy’s mass is located beyond its stellar component, spread out to hundreds of kiloparsecs. This diffuse reservoir of gas, the circumgalactic medium, acts as the interface between a galaxy and the cosmic web that connects galaxies. We present kiloparsec-scale-resolution integral field spectroscopy of emission lines that trace cool ionized gas from the centre of a nearby galaxy to 30 kpc into its circumgalactic medium. We find a smooth surface brightness profile with a break in slope at twice the 90% stellar radius. The gas also changes from being photoionized by H ii star-forming regions in the disk to being ionized by shocks or the extragalactic UV background at greater distances. This transition represents the boundary between the interstellar medium and the circumgalactic medium, revealing how the dominant reservoir of baryonic matter directly connects to its galaxy.' back

Peter Martin (2024_09_04), The Greens want a super-profits tax. Labor and business used to like the idea too, ' When the Greens proposed an extra super-profits tax on the excessive part of really excessive profits last week, business and the government acted as if the sky was about to fall in. It would make Australia one of the “worst places in the world to run a business”, said the Business Council. It would “force up prices on everyday essentials”. The idea that large profits were “unjustifiably extracted” was false, said the head of the Commonwealth Bank, and so on. Labor was the same. The Greens were making up numbers, the super-profits tax was “designed to get attention,” according to Treasurer Jim Chalmers. But the principle behind the idea is a good one – as Labor and the Business Council should know better than anyone. . . . At the heart of the Greens’ idea, as well as the idea put forward by the Business Council 15 years ago, is a two-tier system of company tax. Ordinary profits would get taxed at a standard rate. . . . “Above normal returns” would get taxed at a higher rate. What’s a normal return? Researchers at the ANU’s Tax and Transfer Institute, drawing on the experience of the countries that have done this, suggest using the 10-year government bond rate, which at the moment is close to 4%. . . . But for some businesses in some industries, outsized returns are the norm. Among them are the big four banks, where the returns on equity exceed 10%. For big mining companies such as Rio and BHP, those returns on equity approach 20%. With Coles and Woolworths, they exceed 25%.' back

Richard Behiel (a), The Mystery of Spinors, 'In this video, we explore the mystery of spinors! What are these strange, surreal mathematical things? And what role do they play in physical reality? We'll talk about the algebra of SO(3) and SU(2), and the profound physical implications of spinors, particularly as it relates to spin-statistics and the stability of matter! back

Richard Behiel (b), Deriving the Dirac Equation, ' In this video, we'll derive the Dirac equation, and see where it comes from!' back

Richard Berhiel, Relativistic Quantum Waves (Klein-Gordon Equation), In this video, we'll unify special relativity and quantum mechanics, to derive the beautiful Klein-Gordon equation! Then we'll explore some of its properties, to see what it can (and can't) tell us about the nature of things. This is part of a video series that's building toward an exploration of the Dirac equation, and then a triumphant return to the hydrogen atom. back

Richard Feynman (2013), Feynman Lectures on Physics: I_48 Beats, ' 48–1 Adding two waves Some time ago we discussed in considerable detail the properties of light waves and their interference—that is, the effects of the superposition of two waves from different sources. In all these analyses we assumed that the frequencies of the sources were all the same. In this chapter we shall discuss some of the phenomena which result from the interference of two sources which have different frequencies.' back

Richard Feynman (2013), Feynman Lectures on Physics: I_49 Modes, ' 49–1 Adding two waves Some time ago we discussed in considerable detail the properties of light waves and their interference—that is, the effects of the superposition of two waves from different sources. In all these analyses we assumed that the frequencies of the sources were all the same. In this chapter we shall discuss some of the phenomena which result from the interference of two sources which have different frequencies.' back

Zhang Tong (2024_09_06), How China’s Chang’e-5 lunar probe and 3 glass beads rewrote the moon’s geological past, ' Lunar samples brought to Earth by a Chinese probe have provided new evidence that volcanoes on the moon continued erupting until as recently as 120 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the planet. The analysis by Chinese researchers not only challenges long-held assumptions about the moon’s geological evolution, but also adds to scientific debate about the thermal evolution of other planetary bodies and the question of how planets cool. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Science on Friday by Professor Li Qiuli and his team from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGGCAS). It had generally been assumed that the moon cooled soon after it formed 4.5 billion years ago, and that its volcanic activity ended around 2.8 billion years ago. However, more recent observations have led planetary scientists to speculate that the moon’s volcanic activity had continued much longer.' back