When China Rules the World

The title of the post can be found on Wikipedia with additional information. But this post is more personal. Indeed China rulez! Few weeks ago I received the following email:

Quantum World-2017

Time: 16th-18th October, 2017

Place: Changsha, Hunan Province, China

Dear Dr. Arkadiusz Jadczyk,

On behalf of the organizing committee of CQW-2017, we sent you a letter a few days ago invited you to join us and give a speech at first Annual Conference of Quantum World (CQW-2017), which will be held on 16th-18th October, in Changsha, Hunan Province, China. It seems you have not received that letter yet, so I am writing again to extend our sincere invitation. As we have learnt your valuable contribution to Asymptotic Formula for Quantum Harmonic Oscillator Tunneling Probabilities…, we believe your inspirational speech and participation will highlight this congress a lot!

Under the theme “From E=MC2 to Quantum Industry”, the first Annual Conference of Quantum World (CQW-2017) aims at 200+ oral presentations in Quantum Physics and Mechanics, Quantum Information Science, Quantum Chemistry, Quantum Optics, Quantum Materials, and Quantum System, Quantum Engineering and Application, which cover hot topics with both theoretical and experimental contributions.

The conference venue Changsha, as the capital of Hu’nan province, is a beautiful, creative, historical and cultural city with comfortable climate, unique scenery and convenient transportation. It will give you a special experience on the colligation and integration of the Huxiang Culture with the modern civilization.

Worth mentioning that partial scientific program with speakers’ profile and excellent speech titles has been updated on website, kindly click here to view and give us your valuable advice.

Look forward to your kind reply with positive response.

Sincerely yours,

CQW-2017 Organizing Committee

Of course I was surprised, because I do not expect anybody but few experts in the whole world care about my paper. Looks to me like a huge conference industry.

China opens world’s ‘highest and longest glass bottomed bridge’

In my blog post Lorentz transformation from an elementary point of view – from blogging to science publishing I wrote about a paper that came as the result of blogging. This is the second paper that I wrote together with prof. Jerzy Szulga, a continuation of our previous paper, A Comment on “On the Rotation Matrix in Minkowski Space-time” by Ozdemir and Erdogdu, http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.5581, Reports on Mathematical Physics, 74(1), 2014, 39-44,
DOI: 10.1016/S0034-4877(14)60056-2. Today I received from my coauthor a message with a copy of another invitation from China:

Dear Dr. ….,

I’m writing to follow-up my last invitation as below, would you please give me a tentative reply? Thank you very much. I apologize for the inconvenience if the letter disturbed you more than once.

It is our great pleasure and privilege to welcome you to join the 8th World Gene Convention-2017, which will take place in Macao, China during November 13-15, 2017. We would like to welcome you to be the chair/speaker in Theme 902: Agriculture, Food and Plant Biotechnology while presenting about A Comment on “On the Rotation Matrix in Minkowski Space-Time” by Ozdemir and Erdogdu…….

If the suggested thematic session is not your current focused core, you may look through the whole sessions and transfer another one that fit your interest (more info about the program is available athttp://www.bitcongress.com/wgc2017/ProgramLayout.asp

Under our SAB members’ contributions and endeavor, BIT’s 7th World Gene Convention-2016 (WGC-2016), successfully held in Shanghai, China during November 13-15, 2016. Totally, there were nearly 300 world-renowned experts, professors, laboratory principals, project leaders and representatives of well-known enterprises attended the WGC-2016. Participants from the international enterprises, academic and research institutions enjoyed the three days scientific program. Depending on the warmly support and good suggestions from all of the participants, we are confident in organizing WGC-2017 which would be better and more successful than WGC-2016.

WGC-2017 features a very strong technical program, mainly focused on: breakthroughs in gene, advances genomics & genetics, new research of DNA and RNA, focus on basic research, the frontier research of life sciences, new biotherapy discovery, emerging areas for medicine applications, robust technology development, and cutting-edge Biotechnology. It aims to provide a platform for all experts from academia, industry and national labs to discuss latest hot researches and achievements. Attendees will hear world-class speakers discussing the challenges and opportunities facing the gene, biotechnology and life sciences field. The business & academic experts who are from home and abroad will give excellent speeches.

In addition to the dynamic scientific program, you will benefit from the wonderful experience in Macao, China. Macao is an international free port. It’s famous for light industry, tourism, and hotel. Macao is also one of the most developed and richest regions in the world, this is a city of amazing and fascinating cultural wealth. The unique blend of European and Oriental cultures existing here creates a pleasurable and laid back atmosphere in a truly beautiful city. We hope you will enjoy your stay in this beautiful city with all its feature, beauty, architecture and hospitality!

We expect your precious comments or suggestions; also your reference to other speakers will be highly appreciated. We look forward to receiving your replies on the following questions:

1. What is the title of your speech?

2. Do you have any suggestions about our program?

For more information, please visit the conference website http://www.bitcongress.com/wgc2017/default.asp

We look forward to see you in Macao in 2017 for this influential event.

Sincerely yours,

Ms. Teresa Xiao

Organizing Committee of WGC-2017

It is only Chinese people can have such a broad and brave imagination and vision of the future. To connect Lorentz and spin groups of matrices with genes and agriculture – it is a real feat.

Elliptic m-deformed relativity

According to Wikipedia special relativity theory was originally proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein. But Wikipedia is not always the best source of information. For instance Wikipedia has a section about “Causality and prohibition of motion faster than light“. Quite often we can read sentences like that one:

” Since the moving clouds travel slightly slower than the speed of light, they do not actually violate Einstein’s theory of relativity which sets light as the speed limit.”

while elsewhere you can read:

It continues to be alleged that superluminal influences of any sort would be inconsistent with special relativity for the following three reasons: (i) they would imply the existence of a ‘distinguished’ frame; (ii) they would allow the detection of absolute motion; and (iii) they would violate the relativity of simultaneity. This paper shows that the first two objections rest upon very elementary misunderstandings of Minkowski geometry and lingering Newtonian intuitions about instantaneity. The third objection has a basis, but rather than invalidating the notion of faster-than-light influences it points the way to more general conceptions of simultaneity that could allow for quantum nonlocality in a natural way.

The point is that very often physicists do not think. They repeat what someone told them, or what they read, without much thinking. To quote from “Superluminal motions?A bird-eye view of the experimental situation“, Found.Phys.31:1119-1135,2001, by Erasmo Recami

… Still in pre-relativistic times, one meets various related works, from those by J.J.Thomson to the papers by the great A.Sommerfeld. With Special Relativity, however, since 1905 the conviction spread over that the speed c of light in vacuum was the upper limit of any possible speed. For instance, R.C.Tolman in 1917 believed to have shown by his “paradox” that the existence of particles endowed with speeds larger than c would have allowed sending information into the past. Such a conviction blocked for more than half a century (aside from an isolated paper (1922) by the Italian mathematician G.Somigliana) any research about Superluminal speeds.

Science is not free from “religious wars”. But that is not the subject of my post today. My post is about a certain curious observation that gave me some idea, and I do not know whether this idea is new, or it already occurred to someone else before. And I do not care, because the idea may be not crazy enough to be worth of discussing. Nevertheless it fits the subject of discussion in my recent series, so I will tell it to you now, and, perhaps, ask some questions.

In Special relativity we have a strange formula for addition of velocities (here we will discuss only velocities in one space dimension):

Q & A: Relativistic velocity addition

To simplify the notation I will assume that c=1, or, if you wish, I will understand my velocity \beta as the quotient u/c etc.
The relativistic addition of velocities is sometimes denoted as u\oplus v

(1)   \begin{equation*}\beta\oplus \beta'=\frac{\beta+\beta'}{1+\beta\beta'}.\end{equation*}

John Baez, whom we know from my previous posts, has a web page on How Do You Add Velocities in Special Relativity? There he notices the well know fact that the relativistic addition of velocities is essentially the same as for hyperbolic tangent, where we have

(2)   \begin{equation*}\tanh (x+y)=\frac{\tanh x +\tanh y}{1+\tanh x\tanh y}.\end{equation*}

One of the consequences of the above addition formula is that if, say \beta=0.9 and \beta'=0.9 then \beta\oplus \beta'=0.994475.
Your spaceship moves with respect to the Sun with velocity that of 90% of the speed of light, and you send from it, in the direction of its flight, a missile traveling with respect to the spaceship with another 90% speed of light, and yet, with respect to the Sun the missile has the speed of 99% of the speed of light, rather than 180% as we would expect from naive addition.

Now, in the recent series of posts we were discussing elliptic functions, and in particular Jacobi sinus function \sn(u,m). We know that for the parameter m=1 we have \sn(u,m)=\tanh u. We also have addition formula for \sn(u,m). It is thus natural to ask how would special relativity look like when the formula (1) is replaced by one derived from the addition formula for \sn(u,m) given in the post Elliptic addition theorem:

(3)   \begin{equation*} \mathrm{sn} (u+v,m)=\frac{\mathrm{sn}(u,m)\mathrm{cn}(v,m)\mathrm{dn}(v,m)+\mathrm{sn}(v,m)\mathrm{cn}(u,m)\mathrm{dn}(u,m)}{1-m\,\mathrm{sn}^2(u,m)\,\mathrm{sn}^2(v,m)}. \end{equation*}

We can set \beta=\sn(u,m),\, \beta'=\sn(v,m), then \cn(u,m)=\sqrt{1-\beta^2},\, \dn(u,m)=\sqrt{1-m\beta^2}, \cn(v,m)=\sqrt{1-\beta'^2},\, \dn(v,m)=\sqrt{1-m\beta'^2}, and the new, proposed addition formula, involving parameter m not ncessrily equal to 1, reads:

(4)   \begin{equation*}\beta\oplus_m\beta'=\frac{\beta\sqrt{1-\beta'^2}\sqrt{1-m\beta'^2}+\beta'\sqrt{1-\beta^2}\sqrt{1-m\beta^2}}{1-m\beta^2\beta'^2}. \end{equation*}

That is my candidate for the m-deformed relativity. How it compares with the non-deformed (that is “standard”) relativity? It looks weird.
Assume our space-ship travels with the speed 90% of the speed of light. Assume m=0.9, and assume we shoot a missile from our ship, in the direction of its motion. What will be the speed of the missile? Here are the plots:

The blue curve is the special relativity. The 0.9\oplus \beta' speed always increases, though slower and slower as \beta' approaches 1. But the m-deformed relativity, represented by the red curve is even crazier. If the missile is shot with a speed over a certain value, it starts to move slower with respect to the Sun.

Is that crazy enough to have a chance to be useful?

Can these elliptically deformed addition formulas be included in some geometrical setting? Will it follow from some algebra involving a generalization of the Lorentz group? I do not know.

Lorentz transformation from an elementary point of view – from blogging to science publishing

This morning I received the following email

Your submission “Lorentz transformation from an elementary point of view” (MS #3302) has been published to Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra.

http://repository.uwyo.edu/ela/vol31/iss1/56

Want to maximize readership? Improve the Google rank of your submission by putting its title, formatted as a link, on your personal or departmental webpage at your institution.

Thank you,

The Editors

Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra

I checked, and indeed, there it is for everybody to read:

http://dx.doi.org/10.13001/1081-3810.3302

I am writing this post not exactly in order “to maximize readership and to improve the Google rank“. I am writing it because this particular paper has an interesting history related to …. blogging. I will describe this story now.

It all started when on April 1, 2014, on my Polish blog, I have made a post entitled “Zwłoki Ridriguesa” – “The corpse of Rodrigues”. My post, with a funny title, was about a paper that I received for reviewing for a journal. There were two authors, both of them Turks, and the paper was dealing with the Lorentz group (the symmetry group of Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory).
At that time I was working on my book ” Quantum Fractals From Heisenberg’s Uncertainty to Barnsley’s Fractality” that appeared in print at the end of that year. While my book was about quantum fractals, quantum measurements, quantum jumps, there were also important parts there dealing with the Lotrentz groups that, for some mysterious and not yet understood reasons plays a role in quantum measurements of electron and proton spin. There are also mysterious connections with the phenomenon of relativistic light aberration. In all these phenomena the Lorent group plays an important role. Here is an extract from the index of my book:

Lorentz
matrix, 68, 94
transformation, 29, 45, 54, 66, 89,
92, 103, 110
Lorentz boost, see boost, Lorentz
Lorentz group, see group, Lorentz, 53
orthochronous, 46
restricted, 46–48, 50, 314
Lorentz matrices, 28, 40, 45, 52, 96,
101, 110, 126, 130
distance, 43

So I got interested in the paper of the two Turkish mathematicians,
Mustafa Özdemir of Akdeniz University and

Melek Erdoğdu of Necmettin Erbakan University in Konya. But, at the beginning, I was very suspicious. No so about Turkey, but the authors were quoting some “Rodrigues formula” and, since 2012, I was not anymore in friendly relations with Rodrigues. When I started studying the paper I realized that there Rodrigues was from the year 1884 – not the same as my ex-friend. So I started reading and checking the formulas in the paper one by one. After two weeks I have obtained, what I thought, better formulas. I was posting about my progress with improving the Turkish paper on my blog, and soon there were quite serious discussion about the subject, with lot of important observations and contributions from my readers, mainly from “TICHY” and “BJAB”. The end result of all that was that I have suggested several improvements to the paper (“On the Rotation Matrix in Minkowski Space-Time” by Mustafa Özdemir and Melek Erdoğdu, and that I coauthored a separate paper on the subject using different methods – “A Comment on ‘On the Rotation Matrix in Minkowski Space-time’ by Ozdemir and Erdogdu“. It all started and developed thanks to the blog.

It took us eight months of intensive email exchanges. We fought because I am a physicist and he is a mathematician. We have different ideas about what is evident and what not, what is simple and what is complicated, what can be considered as a “proof”. But we did it. In our paper we did not write even 10% of what we knew. Jerzy, my coauthor, decided that we should publish it all, and that we should aim at writing it using only elementary methods that can be understood by a student taking an elementary linear algebra course. Jerzy took almost all the burden of writing it all up. When it was all done we have to face the problem of finding a publisher. First we tried Journal of Geometry and Physics. We got the reply

the Journal of Geometry and Physics is devoted to the publication of top-quality research papers whose topics lie in the interface between geometry and modern theoretical physics.

We think JGP it is not the correct recipient for papers like yours. Therefore, we regret we will not be able to publish your paper.
This is not a rejection; rather we shall consider your paper as withdrawn

That was not a surprise. If you write your paper in such a way that everything is clear and everybody can understand what you are talking about, then many journals will refuse publishing it even without sending to pear review – if you can write clearly, it means you are not a real top scientist!
Then we tried Acta Applicandae Mathematicae – with result:

The paper is outside the scope of Acta Applicandae Mathematicae, being unsuited to its broad mathematical readership. The authors may wish instead to submit the manuscript to a more specialized journal.

Our next try was Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra. That proved to be the right choice. From there we received encouraging referee reports including

The paper has been meticulously written in whole. Each detail is studied. Authors obtained important results…. the paper is very interesting and elaborated. The main idea and motivation of this paper is very good.

This is a well written and elegant paper. It a presents some definite results

I find this approach interesting and relatively novel. Moreover, the paper is clearly and consistently written without using specialized terminology or advanced methods to present some complicated mathematical problems of the Lorentz transformation. Standard textbooks on linear algebra and calculus should be enough to understand this formalism. Thus, I believe that the present article can be useful and inspiring for a broad audience.

So our paper was finally accepted for publication. But very soon we have found that the referees did not really read the paper deeply enough! Sarah, the copy editor for the journal, wrote us about her doubts concerning one particular formula. And indeed, it was bad, very bad. Fixing this error proved to be equivalent to rewriting one of our “Theorems” and introducing quite a number of additional changes in order to avoid misunderstandings. Now all of it is in the past, and the paper is out for everybody to read and to criticize!

In the meantime, while working on this paper I received email from Ivailo M. Mladenov, Senior Research Fellow at Institute of Biophysics Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

Dear Professor Jadczyk,

It is by some chance that I have
to came across your paper entitled

A COMMENT ON “ON THE ROTATION MATRIX IN MINKOWSKI
SPACE-TIME” BY OZDEMIR AND ERDOGDU

There I have seen formula (43) which is the main
result of your paper without even mentioning that
it appears almost 10 years ago as (17) in

http://www.bio21.bas.bg/proceedings/Proceedings_files/vol7/Dimitrov.djvu

I do not think that this is the right way
for doing science.

Sincerely yours,

Ivailo Mladenov

===========================================
web: http://www.bio21.bas.bg/ibf/dpb_files/im/Mladenov.htm
===========================================

And indeed, I was not aware of this paper when submitting for publication our paper. Today the first thing we often do when starting any research is searching Internet. But even with all the searching capabilities available we often miss something that did not make its way to the top ten or twenty of Google search pages. I checked and indeed, the paper by Dimitrov and Mladenov contained several results that coincided with those in our paper, though obtained in a different way. We are quoting Dimitrov and Mladenov paper in our new, “elementary” paper. I hope they are happy now.