Philip E Gibbs

The United Nations Population Prospects provide past estimates and future projections of population by country, sex and age from 0 to 100 years. The latest edition, published in July 2024, covers the years 1950 to 2100. The aim of this study is to extend the UN projections up to the age of 125 using a linear mortality model that we have previously...

The United Nations Population Prospects provide past estimates and future projections of population by country, sex and age from 0 to 100 years. The latest edition, published in July 2024, covers the years 1950 to 2100. The aim of this study is to extend the UN projections up to the age of 125 using a linear mortality model that we have previously...

Demographic projections of maximum age to the year 2100 have produced mixed results. Mortality plateau models used in some studies have tended to predict relatively high ages over 130 years by the end of the century. We use the latest validation and count of supercentenarians in the G12 countries to test models of ageing beyond 100 years and conclu...

After decades of study, string theory still lacks a formulation which is non-perturbative, background independent and duality invariant. The free Lie algebra can be resolved into cyclic structures which can be mapped onto a closed string-like state in a given background. From this observation the idea that string theories may be reformulated in bac...

Madame Calment's extraordinary longevity claim has significantly influenced current estimates of human lifespan. However, recent evidence raises doubts about the authenticity of her record. We compare two competing hypotheses: the base scenario, which assumes that Jeanne's daughter Yvonne died in 1934, and the switch scenario, which proposes that Y...

In 1997 Jeanne Calment died at a claimed age of 122 years and 164 days. The authenticity of her age was validated by Michel Allard and Jean-Marie Robine who published popular books about her case. In 2018 Nikolay Zak presented evidence that Jeanne Calment's daughter Yvonne had assumed her mother's identity. In 2019 the original validators and their...

Ce chapitre explique pourquoi "la Doyenne de L'humanité", Madame Calment, n'a jamais rencontré Vincent Van Gogh.

This chapter debunks the myth that "the oldest human" Madame Calment met Vincent Van Gogh

Background: The ages of the oldest humans are important data for scientific studies in gerontology, medicine and demographics. Scientists often reference specific cases such as Jeanne Calment, or resources such as the International Database on Longevity. However, numerous inherent dangers and pitfalls have dogged the history of human longevity reco...

In 2018-2019 evidence emerged that Jeanne Calment’s outlying record longevity claim could be invalid. According to an old hypothesis revitalised by Nikolay Zak, Mme Calment who died in 1997 with a validated age of 122 years and 164 days, was in fact Jeanne Calment’s daughter Yvonne who had masqueraded as her mother since 1934 when Yvonne was report...

Scientists who specialise in the study of supercentenarian lifespans warn us of the inherent dangers and pitfalls that have dogged the history of human longevity record keeping. Many people who were believed to be the oldest person in their day turned out to be younger than claimed. In recent decades validators have sought to apply more robust and...

Major contradictions between pro-witch and anti-switch teams listed

Major events in the swap scenario are listed with suggestions of who knew what at which point

The verification of human longevity is a hazardous process with many errors, false claims and myths among the true records. In the light of past withdrawn and disputed cases we conduct a sceptical reappraisal of validations from the top of the lists of world's oldest people. Longevity data is used increasingly by scientists with applications in res...

Mme Calment died in 1997 at the reputed age of 122, the longest validated lifespan of all time. Recently it has been suggested that in fact Mme Calment was not Jeanne Calment born in 1875 as believed, but rather her daughter Yvonne born in 1898. She could have swapped identity on her mother's death in 1934. In this study, the most reliable evidence...

Mme Calment died in 1997 at the reputed age of 122, the longest validated lifespan of all time. Recently it has been suggested that in fact Mme Calment was not Jeanne Calment born in 1875 as believed, but rather her daughter Yvonne born in 1898. She could have swapped identity on her mother's death in 1934. In this study the most reliable evidence...

A comment on the response from the French gerontological community to assertions by Russian scientists that Jeanne Calment did not live to an age of 122

Jeanne Calment is said to have died at 122 years old in 1997, holding the record for the oldest validated person who ever lived. However doubts have been raised that in fact her daughter Yvonne may have made an identity switch in 1934. In this discussion document I look at what new evidence may be sought to settle the question of her authenticity....

It is sometimes said that glass in very old churches is thicker at the bottom than at the top because glass is a liquid, and so over several centuries it has flowed towards the bottom. This is not true. In Mediaeval times panes of glass were often made by the Crown glass process. A lump of molten glass was rolled, blown, expanded, flattened and fin...

A covering problem posed by Henri Lebesgue in 1914 seeks to find the convex shape of smallest area that contains a subset congruent to any point set of unit diameter in the Euclidean plane. Methods used previously to construct such a covering can be refined and extended to provide an improved upper bound for the optimal area. An upper bound of 0.84...

The elements of the Moser ring that are of unit modulus

The universal covering problem as posed by Henri Lebesgue in 1914 seeks to find the convex planar shape of smallest area that contains a subset congruent to any point set of unit diameter in the Euclidean plane. Methods used previously to construct such a cover can be refined and extended to provide an improved upper bound for the optimal area. An...

All Ulam numbers up to one trillion are computed using an efficient linear-time algorithm. We report on the distribution of the numbers including the positions of the largest gaps and we provide an explanation for the previously observed period of clustering.

A new paradigm is emerging in fundamental physics, but what is the true nature of the new thinking? It may be too early to give a full answer but I think that an important part of it is in the way that we understand the vacuum, and how it relates to particle physics.

The Ulam numbers form an increasing sequence beginning 1,2 such that each subsequent number can be uniquely represented as the sum of two smaller Ulam numbers. An algorithm is described and implemented in Java to compute the first billion Ulam numbers.

A conjecture on the quasi-periodic behaviour of Ulam sequences.

In 1914 Lebesgue defined a "universal covering" to be a convex subset of the plane that contains an isometric copy of any subset of diameter 1. His challenge of finding a universal covering with the least possible area has been addressed by various mathematicians: Pal, Sprague and Hansen have each created a smaller universal covering by removing re...

We live in a world of strange contradictions. On the one hand humanity has sent men to the moon, built the largest and most complicated machine on Earth to complete the standard model of particle physics and developed technical gadgets that provide access to much of the world's knowledge from a device we carry in a pocket. Yet at the same instant w...

Lebesgue's universal covering problem is re-examined using computational methods. This leads to conjectures about the nature of the solution which if correct could provide a blueprint for a complete solution. Empirical lower bounds for the minimal area are computed using different hypothesis based on the conjectures. A new upper bound of 0.844112 f...

John Wheeler advocated the principle that information is the foundation of physics and asked us to reformulate physics in terms of bits. The goal is to consider what we know already and work out a new mathematical theory in which space, time and matter are secondary. An application of the converse of Noether's second theorem to the holographic prin...

It has been suggested that reality works like a quantum computer, but such claims are just words if they are not backed up by sound mathematics. In pursuit of the fundamental equations I look to string theory where physicists led by Mike Duff have noticed useful connections between the quantum gravity of black holes and quantum information theory....

Hyperdeterminants are generalizations of determinants from matrices to multi-dimensional hypermatrices. They were discovered in the 19th century by Arthur Cayley but were largely ignored over a period of 100 years before once again being recognised as important in algebraic geometry, physics and number theory. It is shown that a cubic elliptic curv...

Diophantine m-tuples with property D(n), for n an integer, are sets of m positive integers such that the product of any two of them plus n is a square. Triples and quadruples with this property can be classed as regular or irregular according to whether they satisfy certain polynomial identities. Given any such m-tuple, a symmetric integer matrix c...

We prove that any 3x3 unitary matrix can be transformed to a magic matrix by multiplying its rows and columns by phase factors. A magic matrix is defined as one for which the sum of the elements in any row or column add to the same value. This result is relevant to recent observations on particle mixing matrices.

In this focus issue of Prespacetime Journal we pres ent a series of Matti Pitkänen's papers under the headline "The miracle of existence according to the oretical physicist Matti Pitkänen. 30 years of independent research" representing development of this TGD approach in theoretical physics during the latest year of research. In this focus issue of...

The problem of finding two polynomials P(x) and Q(x) of a given degree n in a single variable x that have all rational roots and differ by a non-zero constant is investigated. It is shown that the problem reduces to considering only polynomials with integer roots. The cases n < 4 are solved generically. For n = 4 the case of polynomials whose roots...

In relativity time is bound to space by the symmetries of spacetime. In the general theory the symmetry is covariance under diffeomorphisms but in string theory this extends to the full permutation group acting on spacetime events. This huge symmetry has profound implications for the nature of time, causality and the way we see our place in the uni...

A famous problem posed by Diophantus was to find sets of distinct positive rational numbers such that the product of any two is one less than a rational square. Such Diophantine sets have been used to construct high rank elliptic curves. Here I demonstrate a link with Cayley's hyperdeterminants which provides a fruitful generalisation of Diophantin...

Diophantine quadruples are sets of four distinct positive integers such that the product of any two is one less than a square. All known examples belong to an infinite set which can be constructed recursively. Some observations on these regular solutions are presented. In particular we see how factors of the four numbers satisfy relations which gen...

A famous problem posed by Diophantus was to find sets of distinct positive rational numbers such that the product of any two is one less than a rational square. Some sets of six such numbers are presented and the computational algorithm used to find them is described. A classification of quadruples and quintuples with examples and statistics is als...

A model of the universe as a very large white hole provides a useful alternative inhomogeneous theory to pit against the homogeneous standard FLRW big bang models. The white hole would have to be sufficiently large that we can fit comfortably inside the event horizon at the present time, so that the inhomogeneities of space-time are not in contradi...

I apply the principle of event-symmetry to simple string models and discuss how these lead to the conviction that multiple quantisation is linked to dimension. It may be that string theory has to be formulated in the absence of space-time which will then emerge as a derived property of the dynamics. Another interpretation of the event-symmetric app...

A covariant formula for conserved currents of energy, momentum and angular-momentum is derived from a general form of Noethers theorem applied directly to the Einstein-Hilbert action of classical general relativity. Energy conservation in a closed big-bang cosmology is discussed as a special case. Special care is taken to distinguish between kinema...

This answer to the Frequently Asked Question first appeared in the Usenet Physics FAQ in 1997. In 1873, while investigating infrared radiation and the element thallium, the eminent Victorian experimenter Sir William Crookes developed a special kind of radiometer, an instrument for measuring radiant energy of heat and light.

An answer to the Frequently Asked Question originally from the usenet physics FAQ 1997

It has been said that the letter c is used for the speed of light because it stands for the Latin word celeritas. A more careful examination of the historical literature suggests that the real reason is more complex. "As for c, that is the speed of light in vacuum, and if you ask why c, the answer is that it is the initial letter of celeritas, the...

I consider an algebraic construction of creation and annihilation operators for superstring and p-brane parton models. The result can be interpreted as a realisation of multiple quantisation and suggests a relationship between quantisation and dimension. The most general algebraic form of quantisation may eventually be expressed in the language of...

To accommodate topology change, the symmetry of space-time must be extended from the diffeomorphism group of a manifold to the symmetric group acting on the discrete set of space-time events. This is the principle ofevent-symmetric space-time. I investigate a number of physical toy models with this symmetry to gain some insight into the likely natu...

In this sequel to my previous paper, "Is String Theory in Knots?" I explore ways of constructing symmetries through an algebraic stepping process using knotted graphs. The hope is that this may lead to an algebraic formulation of string theory. In the conclusion I speculate that the stepping process is a form of quantisation for which the most gene...

It is sometimes said that there may be a unique algebraic theory independent of space-time topologies which underlies superstring and p-brane theories. In this paper, I construct some algebras using knot relations within the framework of event-symmetric string theory, and ask the question "Is string theory in knots?"

This essay is a tour around many of the lesser known pregeometric models of physics, as well as the mainstream approaches to quantum gravity, in search of common themes which may provide a glimpse of the final theory which must lie behind them.

I examine various aspects of event-symmetric physics such as phase changes, symmetry breaking and duality by studying a number of simple toy-models.

I present arguments to the affect that the topological phase of string theory must be event-symmetric. This motivates a search for a universal string group for discrete strings in event-symmetric space-time which unifies space-time symmetry with internal gauge symmetry. This is partially successful but the results are incomplete and I speculate on...

Open and Closed super-string field theories are constructed in an event-symmetric target space. The partition functions of Statistical and Quantum models are constructed in terms of invariants defined on Lie-algebra representations. An attractive feature of the closed string models is the elegant unification of the space-time symmetries with the ga...

Field Theory on Event Symmetric space-time is constructed using the gauge group of discrete open strings. Models with invariant actions can be viewed as natural extensions of Matrix Models. The objective is to find a fundamental non-perturbative pre-theory for superstrings.

In the event symmetric approach to quantum gravity it is assumed that the fundamental laws of physics must be invariant under exchange of any two space-time events. The fact that this symmetry if obviously not observed is attributed to the possibility of a spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism in which the residual symmetry is diffeomorphism inva...

We present results of lattice Monte Carlo simulations of SU(2) gauge theories at finite baryonic density using an exact algorithm to include the effects of dynamic fermions. Our intention is to investigate the feasibility of such calculations. The possible implications for similar methods with SU(3) theories are discussed.

The Lanczos method is proposed for the Monte Carlo simulation of the QCD (lattice) vacuum including dynamical fermion loops. It appears that an exact fermion update is feasible on medium-sized lattices with today's vector processors.

We present a modified version of the Lanczos algorithm as a computational method for tridiagonalising large sparse matrices, which avoids the requirement for large amounts of storage space. It can be applied as a first step in calculating eigenvalues and eigenvectors or for obtaining the inverse of a matrix row by row. Here we describe the method a...

The fermion propagator matrix is introduced and analyzed in lattice QCD. It can be related directly to the inverse of the fermion matrix and is similar in some ways to the transfer matrix. It is shown how the Lanczos algorithm can be used to diagonalise it and this is illustrated by calculating the eigenvalues on 44 QCD configurations and relating...

Lattice calculations at finite baryonic density have so far been less successful than calculations at finite temperature. The reasons for some of the difficulties are clarified and it is suggested how correct Monte Carlo simulations might be performed.

Simulations of QCD at finite baryonic density on the lattice have given results which are in complete contradiction to theoretical ideas. It is expected that there will be a chiral symmetry restoration phase transition at nuclear density. I.e. at a chemical potential µ equal to about a third of the nucleon mass (1/3)mN. Monte carlo simulations have...

We present the results of a high statistics study of the chiral condensate in quenched lattice QCD on an 84 lattice at β = 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 5.8 and 6.0. We see clear evidence for deviation from asymptotic scaling in the range of β considered. Our results are in agreement with the behaviour anticipated from recent Monte Carlo renormalisation grou...

We calculate the chiral condensate 〈ψ〉 for all quark masses using Kogut-Susskind fermions in lattice-regularized quenched QCD. The large volume behaviour of 〈ψ〉 at small quark masses demonstrates that the explicit U(1) chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken. We perform the calculation for β = 5.1 to59 and find very good continuum renormalization g...

The momentous discovery of the Higgs boson announced on July 4, 2012 by CERN brought tremendous excitements both in the physics communities and general public. As the dust settles, we can start to ask some questions. In this Higgs essay, we discuss the central element of the story which is often forgotten in the noise of celebration and the outlook...

This news is adapted from viXra log (http://blog.vixra.org) and contains LHC updates through February 25, 2012. Today CMS have delivered a new report of searches for exotic particles including SUSY using datasets up to 5/fb. I dont think I have ever seen so many new results released in one presentation (Eva Halkiadakis). Sadly there are no new disc...

Following the CERN announcement on December 13, 2011, physicists have been giving some very different assessments of the chances that the ATLAS and CMS detectors have seen the Higgs boson. Combining the three things I will consider, I get an overall probability for such a strong signal if there is no Higgs to be about 1 in 30. Perhaps I have failed...