Author | Guitarist | Physicist
James Russell Farmer, BSc(Honours, physics, University of Sydney), MSc (Particle physics, Imperial College, London), DipSustHort (Unitec, Auckland), MAgr (University of Sydney), BSc (Chemistry and Applied Mathematics, University of Sydney).
My passions in life have been in tennis, music and science in that order. When I was 10, I bought my first tennis racquet, an aluminium one for $15, in 1976. This was before graphite racquets arrived on the scene. A short time later, I won a tennis tournament in Auckland, New Zealand. I was disappointed the prize was a bar of chocolate, but the tournament organisers offered to give me an alternative prize, a cover for my racquet, which I was very happy about.
When John Lennon died, I made up my mind I wanted to be a rock star, so I got my friend Louie, in Sydney, to teach me rhythm guitar. That was 1981, and by 1982 we had a band going. It only lasted six months. The following year, after a “trip”, I was overwhelmed with the profundity of Young’s double slit experiment, and decided to become a physicist. I enrolled in a BSc at the University of Sydney, in 1984.
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Another version of Feynman’s QED, in which Einstein’s interpretation of Planck’s law is derived from first principles, without all the tedious rigour of the “semi-classical treatment” of quantum mechanics. We arrive at a theoretical mass of the Higgs boson, without reference to particle physics! It is confirmed that “dark matter” is just the mass equivalent of the galactic gravitational energy.
