BJ Physics Notes

Recent Talks​

These should be consulted before venturing into the sundry physics categories, because they provide an overview, as well as some indication of the evolution of my thinking while the detailed PDF's were being created



Pedagogy

These consist of slides from lectures on general relativity and cosmology, given a few years ago at the University of Hawaii. The 13 chapters, plus the two appendices, are mostly written up, and someday may appear here as a set of PDF's.


The Dark Energy Problem (U. Hawaii)


OldTalks

These will contain a variety of otherwise hard-to-find items.


Miscellaneous Items

The CV is somewhat out of date.



Geology

I have a dacha in Teton Valley, Idaho. Since retirement I acquired an interest in earth science, which led to a small amount of amateur field work. This section consists of slides from two talks given to the Geologists of Jackson Hole (yes, they have a website).



My name is James Bjorken, known in the physics community as bj. I retired from a theoretical physics staff position at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in 1998. Since then, my physics interests have mostly been focused on the problem of dark energy.


This website will contain, for the most part, a collection of notes in pdf form documenting work done since retirement. They are at present being placed on this site, along with introductory material.


If is my hope that these notes may stimulate visitors to take these raw ideas, run with them , and either improve on them or criticize them to death. I am not very sensitive to intellectual property issues, other than direct plagiarism and/or quotation of this material taken out of context, to attack me or these ideas.


This site will not be a blog, although I greatly appreciate critical feedback. I may later post, at my discretion, emails that I receive - but of course only with the writers permission.​ I only intend to update this site once or twice a year.

The Rotating Mass Matrix​

This consists of riffs based on seminal ideas of Hong-Mo Chan and his collaborators (cf. arXiv 1206.0199 and references therein). I recommend browsing them in the order given.



Higgs at the LHC

These notes explore the idea that the newly discovered Higgs boson is a member of an electroweak-doublet, family-nonet multiplet. The work is incomplete in many ways. Andthe model may be dead; Kathryn Zurek tells me that one-loop corrections to the Zqqbar vertex may kill the model. (arXiv 1203.1320). This needs to be examined in detail. I should now have done that myself. But I was distracted by BICEP2.



2015 Road Trip Material

These contain draft slides of talks already given at the University of Hawaii -- and possibly to be given at other venues in the near future



MacDowell-Mansouri Gravity

This category contains my principal research interest. It is centered on the dark energy problem and the related (speculative) quantity I call darkness. I suggest browsing these items in the same order as I have listed them.



BICEP2

This category contains three ideas: (i) a provocative description of gravitational waves in first-order, temporal-gauge language, (ii) an interesting model of dark energy in terms of a fermionic chiral condensate, and (iii) a pictorial way of visualizing the physics of the CMB power spectra -- including polarization spetra. It is best to regard "Gravitational Waves" as an appendix to "Inflation".