Slowly making progress

Since I put out two papers in the last two weeks, I decided to take a mental break.
This happened until a colleague told me about a couple of critiques by Jacques Distler.
During a first read of his critiques and comments on his blog "musings", I thought that it was an outright attack on my ideas rather than a careful and openminded scientific inquiry on my hard work.
But after much reflection, I realized that Jacques two main critiques were valid and helpful in deepening my understanding and misunderstanding.

His first observation was that the cosmological constant that one sees in the term that couples to the 'instanton' term is only a contribution to the total bare cosmological constant. This was correct but luckily it did not kill my argument. It changes (clarifies) my story, though, in the sense that (see my previous blog entries) it is now clear that my mechanism does not completely dovetail the Peccei-Quinn mechanism. In other words I'm am not relaxing the gravitational theta parameter. Instead I'm making an educated guess as to how a nonperturbative effect could render the cosmological constant gravitationally inert. Much has to be done on this . .. so I guess my mental break never happened. . .

On a more happy tip . .. my good friend Duane Valz threw a birthday party for me at his Loft space in Emeryville, CA. Duane has this beaufiul loft space with a nice view of the Berkeley Hills. Believe it or not, this was the first birthday party I ever had. It was an amazing get together of friends. Whenever my birthday came up, I never cared to celebrate it, but it was fun to have my friends meet each other. My music friends met my science friends and they all agreed how eclectic a person I am.

Comments

[carlos vicente]

just found out about this site. ill check it out often. congrats on the faculty position!!!!

Carlos

[Normand Hamel]

"It was a very clever paper. Everything Stephon did was OK, except for starting with the action of Freidel and Starodubtsev."

With a comment like this you had nothing to worry about Stephon! I read through "musings" and I liked the general tone of the discussions there. Frankly, I expected to see big egos clashing together. Quite the contrary I am pleased to report. One thing that impressed me is the apparent clarity of JD's expositions. You said it yourself, that his comments helped you to clarify a particular point in your paper. You guys use each other as a reflection in a mirror of your own thinking. And that's fine, so long as parity is not violated by anyone!

This stuff is at least 13.7 billion light-years over my head, but somehow I enjoy it. It's like reading poetry. You don't have to understand the meaning to appreciate it.
In my next life I want to be a theorical physicist!

Normand

[APeat]

I'm not an expert in the field, but whenever a dispute arises between Jacques Distler and the Loop Quantum Gravity crowd, distler always comes out sounding alot more coherent.