M-Theory

M-theory, the theory formerly known as Strings

The Standard Model

In the standard model of particle physics, particles are considered to be points moving through space, tracing out a line called the World Line. To take into account the different interactions observed in Nature one has to provide particles with more degrees of freedom than only their position and velocity, such as mass, electric charge, color (which is the “charge” associated with the strong interaction) or spin.

The standard model was designed within a framework known as Quantum Field Theory (QFT), which gives us the tools to build theories consistent both with quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity. With these tools, theories were built which describe with great success three of the four known interactions in Nature: Electromagnetism, and the Strong and Weak nuclear forces. Furthermore, a very successful unification between Electromagnetism and the Weak force was achieved (Electroweak Theory), and promising ideas put forward to try to include the Strong force. But unfortunately the fourth interaction, gravity, beautifully described by Einstein’s General Relativity (GR), does not seem to fit into this scheme. Whenever one tries to apply the rules of QFT to GR one gets results which make no sense. For instance, the force between two gravitons (the particles that mediate gravitational interactions), becomes infinite and we do not know how to get rid of these infinities to get physically sensible results.

ISIS & History of Wahhabism

The dramatic arrival of Da’ish (ISIS) on the stage of Iraq has shocked many in the West. Many have been perplexed — and horrified — by its violence and its evident magnetism for Sunni youth. But more than this, they find Saudi Arabia’s ambivalence in the face of this manifestation both troubling and inexplicable, wondering, “Don’t the Saudis understand that ISIS threatens them, too?”

It appears — even now — that Saudi Arabia’s ruling elite is divided. Some applaud that ISIS is fighting Iranian Shiite “fire” with Sunni “fire”; that a new Sunni state is taking shape at the very heart of what they regard as a historical Sunni patrimony; and they are drawn by Da’ish’s strict Salafist ideology.

Other Saudis are more fearful, and recall the history of the revolt against Abd-al Aziz by the Wahhabist Ikhwan (Disclaimer: this Ikhwan has nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood Ikhwan — please note, all further references hereafter are to the Wahhabist Ikhwan, and not to the Muslim Brotherhood Ikhwan), but which nearly imploded Wahhabism and the al-Saud in the late 1920s.

Many Saudis are deeply disturbed by the radical doctrines of Da’ish (ISIS) — and are beginning to question some aspects of Saudi Arabia’s direction and discourse.

Islamic State & conflict in Iraq

A decade ago, the occupying force in Iraq dissolved that country’s army, sending hundreds of thousands of fighting men home. Earlier this year, thousands of them tore through northern Iraq under the flag of the Islamic State (IS). It’s time to join the dots. President Obama’s air strikes on IS targets are welcome, but in his well-received speech in September, he failed to acknowledge past mistakes that partly account for the group’s rise — not only mistakes made with regard to Syria in recent years, but going back to the conduct of the war in Iraq and its aftermath.

After the Iraq War, the occupying forces embarked on a policy of ‘de-Baathification,’ removing members of the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein’s Baathist party from positions of power. But the unintended consequence was effectively to disenfranchise millions of soldiers, administrators and public servants, who also mostly happened to be members of the Sunni minority, leaving them alienated from the new government, with no job and no stake in the new Iraq. People in most of the Arab world do not understand democracy in terms of equality for all under the rule of law regardless of religion, ethnic group, sect, and gender, but simply as the majority ruling over everyone else — a zero-sum game — so in the absence of any concerted effort to build a genuine democracy, the end of the dictatorship only led to greater sectarian division.

Insurgency in Yemen: The New Challenge to American Counter-Terrorism Strategy

American strategy against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen relies on local Yemeni forces to defeat terrorists and the militias that support them. The challenge has historically been finding and eliminating AQAP leaders, since the group has held relatively isolated safe havens until recently. The advent of the Arab Spring and the subsequent contraction of the Yemeni state, however, allowed AQAP and a nascent insurgent arm, Ansar al Sharia, to expand their sanctuary in Yemen dramatically. They have even threatened Aden, Yemen’s second city, advanced toward Sana’a, and fought Yemen’s military to a draw. American assistance programs aimed at helping Yemen build and maintain counter-terrorism forces will not suffice in the face of a real and growing al Qaeda-affiliated insurgency.

Yemen’s military capabilities enhanced through American security assistance programs were not designed to counter an insurgency. In the wake of the Yemeni government’s crackdown on protests in 2011, in fact, the U.S. government suspended many forms of support even within that counter-terrorism assistance program that might have been used to suppress demonstrators. But defeating the insurgency will require regular Yemeni troops, not just elite counter-terrorism units. These regular troops do not have advanced training, nor are they well equipped. Ongoing political challenges in Sana’a, security challenges elsewhere in the country, and the steady collapse of Yemen’s economy and infrastructure will all compete for the attention of the government in Sana’a and hinder the prosecution of the counter-insurgency campaign in the south. If the assumption that Yemeni forces will be successful proves to be false, then America’s counter-terrorism strategy in Yemen fails. Amidst the many challenges facing American policy in Yemen today, we must now add the requirement to design a dramatically different approach to helping Yemenis fight the Islamist threat that also threatens the United States.

Syria explained: How it became a religious war

How did Syria go from an internal uprising to a wider clash drawing funding and fighters from across the region?

In a word, Middle East experts say, religion.

Shiite Muslims from Lebanon, Iraq and Iran have flooded into Syria to defend sacred sites and President Bashar al-Assad’s embattled regime. Sunni Muslims, some affiliated with al Qaeda, have rushed in to join rebels, most of whom are Sunni.

Both sides use religious rhetoric as a rallying cry, calling each other “infidels” and “Satan’s army.”

“That is why it has become so muddy,” said professor Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “The theological question has returned to the center.”

That’s not to say that the warring parties are fighting over, say, the definition of God.

But the United Nations, in a series of reports, has warned with mounting urgency that the battle lines in Syria are being drawn along sectarian – that is, religious – lines. Both sides fear that whoever wins power will wipe out the loser.

Concept of Death

Philosophers and non-philosophers stand on a level of equality with respect to death. There are no experts on death, for there is nothing to know about it. Not even those who study the death process have an edge on the rest of us. We are all equals in thinking about death, and we all begin and end thinking about it from a position of ignorance.

Death and its concept are absolutely empty. No picture comes to mind. The concept of death has a use for the living, while death itself has no use for anything. All we can say about death is that it is either real or it is not real. If it is real, then the end of one’s life is a simple termination. If it is not real, then the end of one’s embodied life is not true death, but a portal to another life.

Having no content, we must speak of death metaphorically. For those who think death is real, death is a blank wall. For those who think it is not real, death is a door to another life. Whether we think of death as a wall or a door, we cannot avoid using one metaphor or another. We often say that a person who dies is relieved of suffering. However, if death is real, then it is metaphorical even to say that the dead do not suffer,

Dear Dad….

Pain and suffering have visited my family, as it will visit all families. After 68 years of being a humble,   hardworking, honest human, I lost my Dad.  While this happens to every child, everyone experiences it differently, deals with differently but the pain is all the same.  And while we hesitate to face pain and suffering, it has great lessons to teach us. Pain and suffering are well outside of the boundaries of our everyday life. When it comes, it shatters these boundaries and turns our world upside down. We become a family with all of the others who have known pain and suffering. And we have another chance to prioritize what’s truly important in our lives.

In some ways, I see life as a puzzle – every experience you have forms a piece of your unique puzzle. When combined, they form the entire picture of your life. My Dad took a piece of my puzzle with him, a piece that will never return. I am incomplete without it, without him. We shared memories that nobody else shares, which means he knew me differently than anyone else. When someone you love dies, that part of you dies as well. You can’t re-live that memory with anyone else. Your puzzle may grow, but you can never replace that missing piece. And because of that, I will never be the same again.

Nietzsche, Our Contemporary

Friedrich Nietzsche, who was born in 1844, fell silent in 1889, and died eleven years later, was the first great philosopher of the twentieth century. What made, and makes, him so important, is that he recognized with great clarity and impressive foresight the most troubling and persistent problem of modernity, the problem of values. His attempts to resolve this problem were not successful, but they did uncover depths of issues that still defeat our best efforts today.

Let’s begin with his notorious declaration that “God is dead” (first in The Gay Science, 1872). Secular thinking is a commonplace today, but in Nietzsche’s time this declaration was strikingly prophetic. The point of the claim is not so much to assert atheism: although Nietzsche was certainly an atheist, he was far from being a pioneer of European atheism. Rather, his observation is sociological, in a way: he means that Western culture no longer places God at the center of things. In another way, the term ‘sociological’ is quite misleading, for there is nothing ‘value-neutral’ in Nietzsche’s assertion. The death of God has knocked the pins out from under Western value systems, and revealed an abyss below. The values we still continue to live by have lost their meaning, and we are cast adrift, whether we realize it or not. The question is, what do we do now?

Classical Economics Vs. Keynesian Economics

Should the government influence the economy or stay away from it. Should economic policy be focused on long term results or short term problems.This and other such beliefs form the difference between the two major schools of thought in economics: Classical and Keynesian economics.

Macroeconomics considers the performance of the economy as a whole, which involves two major approaches to study the pattern and influence on the economy. Economists who believe in either of the types of thoughts are at loggerheads about various aspects about the way the economy influences people and vice-versa. Here, we have tried to draw a brief comparison that highlights the major differences.

Difference between Classical and Keynesian Economics

Keynes refuted Classical economics’ claim that the Say’s law holds. The strong form of the Say’s law stated that the “costs of output are always covered in the aggregate by the sale-proceeds resulting from demand”. Keynes argues that this can only hold true if the individual savings exactly equal the aggregate investment.

Inflation……

Physicists define the boundaries of physics by trying to describe them theoretically and then testing that description against observation. Our observed expanding Universe is very well described by flat space, with critical density supplied mainly by dark matter and a cosmological constant, that should expand forever.  When the scale factor a(t) was very small, radiation energy density was much larger than the matter and vacuum energy densities. The temperature gets smaller as the scale factor rises:

The experimental understanding of particle physics starts to poop out after energies above the electroweak unification scale, around 1TeV. At a very small scale factor, or a very high temperature, Grand Unified Theories, supersymmetry, and string theory have to be taken into account in the cosmological modeling.
This exploration is guided by three outstanding problems with the Big Bang cosmological model:
1. The flatness problem
2. The horizon problem
3. The magnetic monopole problem