Koide’s coincidence | Hacker News Reader

Koide’s coincidence

johndcook.com

32 pointstacon6 comments

There's a long-running thread over on PhysicsForums: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-is-new-with-koide...

As mfb points out at the end, you can get a lot of interesting results by juggling operations around. On the other hand, the equation seems to hold up better as we measure more precise values for the particle masses.

A potentially interesting side-thread with another interesting coincidence is https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/implications-of-nishid...

Koide recently gave a talk at a conference where he presented a review and some new research. At least the review slides are accessible and give some history.

http://www.koide-phys.com/us-hep/talk/talk18.html

Review is the bottom of the two. In it Koide compares his equation with Kepler's law of planetary motion. The explanation of what was going on had to wait until Newton's law of gravitation, but in the meantime it lent support to the heliocentric model of the heavens.

Disclaimer: my physics classes at uni stopped at classical mechanics.

Hmm. I was hoping for something more definitive here, like "The masses of each particle are known to be correct to 5 decimal places. Even if we nudge each value as far as we can, the result is still slightly less than 2/3."

I’m not very familiar with the subject, but isn’t that exactly what the author did, except that the conclusion was that 2/3 can be plausibly reached? (And that it uses the less constraint standard deviation instead of “decimal places”.)

The article does not conclude nor suggests that the 2/3 ratio is a coincidence. What am I missing?

We could have, with this method, discovered "no, it could not be this far off from 2/3 just due to measurement error of the relevant constants". However, we did not. It's a negative result, which proves nothing, but it is of interest, at least in part because of the method used.

It's at least a neat coincidence, and maybe something more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com