Barry Holstein and I once wasted some time figuring out our academic genealogy – i.e. tracing back the PhD advisors of our PhD advisors. Interestingly it goes back through some pretty big names, all the way to Bernoulli, who was self-taught. Here is the link to the genealogy tree. Of course this sets us up for the appropriate joke about how the standards have deteriorated in modern times. But nevertheless, this is an interesting – at least to us.
P.S. Continuing this family tree in the other direction, you can find a link to a listing of my PHD students here.
I have had the pleasure of spending 10 weeks at the Universitat Zuerich. Hopefully I will soon be able to report on the results from that visit. I worked with Daniel Wyler on the Regge region in SCET and on the vectorial standard model. Both are interesting and hopefully important. I am now back at UMass.
We are pleased that Luca Grisa will be joining our theory group this fall as a postdoctoral research associate. Luca is working on some fascinating research topics. His papers can be found here
In this paper, Thibault and I study the range of masses for light quarks that leads to nuclear binding. There are two calculations involved, which are used to provide estimates for how nuclear binding depends on quark masses.
The quark masses enter the Standard Model as parameters that are not fixed by any principle. It turns out that if they were slightly different, nuclei would not bind and there would be no atoms, and then no life. If we eventually learn that there is indeed a principle that fixes the quark masses, then this observation is just a bit of amusement. However, it is also possible that the mass parameters may not be fixed uniquely and could be different in different parts of the Universe. In that case, we would only find ourselves in the part of the Universe where the masses fall into the anthropically allowed range. In such theories the anthropic bounds could then play a role in determining the values of the masses.