symmetries, hacking

David Kaplan (JHU) gave the HET talk about imposing severe symmetries to cancel out cosmological-constant-like terms (ie, vacuum energy density) in the standard model. It involved duplicating the entire standard model with a whole negative-energy "ghost" standard model, and thus having enormous numbers of terms cancel out. A nice idea (because the small cosmological constant would be required by the symmetry, broken only by gravity), but the theory has super-strange properties, like a rapidly decaying vacuum (!) and possibly causality issues.

I spent the rest of my research time today hacking on the morphology–color–density figures and the post-starburst environment overlap-region analysis.