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‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

quantamagazine.org

91–100 of 132 posts

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#91
post #32

Can those Feymann diagrams be calculated by a computer? I understand that it raises expotentially, but why the 891 and 320 thousand diagrams cannot be solved by some tool?

Of course! But the R&D for those tools are very peculiar, at least as I understand it from a friend who works directly on this domain.

Essentially there are a whole variety of different interactions, some of them which interact with themselves. You wind up with a tiny zoo of bizarre diagrammatic creatures that you have to figure out herding patterns for - and only then can you get the tool to do the herding for you. I seem to remember involved a whole deal of abstract group theory.

It's way easier to draw the diagrams on paper to solve all cases of an interaction, anyhow; after all that nightmare you wind up with some result. And from what I recall, the number of cases also grows exponentially too D:

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#92
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s quite possible. A lot of what we think of as fundamental physics might turn out to be emergent behaviour. In fact that’s pretty much the story of the development of physics. It turns out Newtonian mechanics is emergent from Relativity. Maxwells equations are emergent from quantum mechanics. The behaviour of bosons is emergent from the behaviour of quarks. As I understand it there are theoretical reasons to sus…

> The behaviour of _bosons_ is emergent from the behaviour of quarks. I think you mean > The behaviour of _hadrons_ is emergent from the behaviour of quarks. -- Anyway, back to your main idea, the problem is that most of the times the new underlaying theory is even worse than the original one > Newtonian mechanics is emergent from Relativity For Newtonian Mechanics you need only basic calculus. For General Relativity…

Yes Hadrons sorry. Posting in a hurry.

>most of the times the new underlaying theory is even worse than the original one

Oh quite. Macroscopic emergent behaviour is often apparently simpler than the underlying causes and is in some way a generalisation of them.

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall reading a book on String Theory in the late 1990s edited by Ed Witten where he mentions the problems with physics and the limits of mathematical techniques. It's long ago so I can't paraphrase his words accurately but he did so with such eloquence that I've long remembered the fact. He pitched the problem in terms of both existing physics and of new '21st Century' ideas inklings of which had somehow trickled…

He pitched the problem in terms of both existing physics and of new '21st Century' ideas inklings of which had somehow trickled down into the 20th Century and that physicists needed new mathematics to deal with them (I hope I've not mangled his words too much). It has definitely been said that "String theory is part of 21st-century physics that fell by chance into the 20th century." . I can recall seeing variations o…

Not surprised, it's a memorable quote. Some months ago, I mentioned the book to the colleague who originally loaned it to me with the view of borrowing it again but he no longer has it. I then did a quick search and couldn't place it. This has spurred me to look again, perhaps starting with GPT.

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quantum weirdness isn't significantly harder mathematically than what came before (we don't have an objective measure of how "hard" some piece of math is), it's just harder to relate to everyday experience. We absolutely have a way to measure how hard a piece of math is: computational complexity. And quantum mecanichs is more computationally complex than newtonian mechanics (while general relativity is significantl…

> And quantum mecanichs is more computationally complex than newtonian mechanics (while general relativity is significantly harder still than both of them) Is there a formal version of this claim somewhere? (Beyond theorems about quantum computers)

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Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first fundamental step in any physics model (or theory) is to separate the easily describable "laws" from the almost impossible to describe "state". The perhaps surprising question is why anything at all can be separated but if that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be having this conversation. "Going down" simply means identifying laws that are more universal in that they can underly models of different systems, idea…

> Quantum weirdness isn't significantly harder mathematically than what came before (we don't have an objective measure of how "hard" some piece of math is), it's just harder to relate to everyday experience. We absolutely have a way to measure how hard a piece of math is: computational complexity. And quantum mecanichs is more computationally complex than newtonian mechanics (while general relativity is significantl…

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Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#96
post #34

I really appreciate how writers at Quanta turn extremely complex and dry topics into a pleasurable read by mixing simple analogies with history. I really admire the skill it takes to break down these topics and make them fascinating for someone with no understanding of them, such as me.

I like those articles too but I wish they include a short version with the major takeaways. In another industry that would be an executive summary. I don't always have the time to read all the story, so I end up fast reading it trying to find the important points and I'm never sure I really found them. In this case they seem to be the paragraphs after "Here’s an extremely rough cartoon version of the approach:"

Product opportunity: an LLM based tool to summarize works ti a personally customizable level. An executive will want the societal implications without the math. A scientist will want the equations without the analogies or number of elephants in size. A lay reader mag want to know the number of elephants without those equations getting in the way.

Could be combined with the information bubble filter described in Stephenson’s Burn or Dodge in Hell.

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first fundamental step in any physics model (or theory) is to separate the easily describable "laws" from the almost impossible to describe "state". The perhaps surprising question is why anything at all can be separated but if that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be having this conversation. "Going down" simply means identifying laws that are more universal in that they can underly models of different systems, idea…

> Quantum weirdness isn't significantly harder mathematically than what came before (we don't have an objective measure of how "hard" some piece of math is), it's just harder to relate to everyday experience. We absolutely have a way to measure how hard a piece of math is: computational complexity. And quantum mecanichs is more computationally complex than newtonian mechanics (while general relativity is significantl…

Computational complexity is defined for programs with respect to a parameter in the limit where that parameter is large. What's the objectively correct parameter for this comparison that every theory of physics has, after you convert it to a program in the objectively correct way, which you supposedly have?

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#98

So one question I have in the introduction section is that it seems the article misses the difference between the number of Feynman diagrams to calculate a_n and the value of a_n. They point out that the the number of Feyman diagrams grows ~n!, which is much larger than the rate x^n shrinks (given 0 Based on my limited knowledge of particle physics, physicists are currently able to calculate using Feynman diagrams be…

It is generally believed that the perturbation expansion that we see in realistic quantum field theories are what are known as asymptomatic expansions. These are series that have a radius of convergence of zero (i.e. they only converge when the expansion parameter is exactly zero and diverge for all non zero values).

There are then two natural questions: 1. if the perturbation series diverges, why doesn't the universe explode? and 2. If the series diverges, why can we use it at all?

Let's first talk about the first part: why doesn't the universe explode? Well, it's because the perturbation series is not actually what is going on, the real answer is the solution to the full set of equations. It's just that we're using a perturbation expansion as a crutch. It's sort of like if the universe's function is 1/(1-x) but we constantly insist on using 1+x+x^2+... Clearly the first function is completely well behaved at x=2 but the second one is not. If we notice that our series explodes for x=2 we should not immediately assume that the universe also must explode, it's just that our representation of the true physics is not faithful. This is perhaps a bad example because the series in question is convergent for some x, just not for x=2. The perturbation expansions in question are more subtle since the never converge.

This then leads into the second question: if the series diverges, how can we even use it? Well the idea here is that it's not just any divergent series (like my silly example with 1/(1-x) above) but rather an asymptomatic series. This means that as long as you truncate the series at some point it is in fact reasonably close to the target function for a sufficiently small value of the parameter. It's just that the more terms you want to include, the sooner the approximation breaks in terms of the parameter. So, if you want to include 10 terms it might be a decent approximation until x ~0.1 but if you include 100 terms it might only be a good approximation until x~0.01. Now, within the overlapping range (xWhy do we think that QFT perturbation theories generally have zero radius of convergence? Well, look at QED, the quantum theory of E&M. If the theory had any nonzero radius of convergence, that also means that the theory would need to make sense for negative coupling constants. However, what would E&M look like for negative coupling? Well, we'd still have electron/positron virtual pair creation from the vacuum since the interactions of the theory are still the same. However this time around they wouldn't attract each other anymore but instead repel each other causing an instability in the vacuum of the theory. We would just constantly be producing these particle/anti-particle pairs and they'd form two separate clusters where all the electrons attract each other and all the positions attract each other but they pairwise repel. In other words, the vacuum would break. This suggests that QED with a negative coupling constants doesn't make sense. But this contradicts the fact that the radius of convergence of the perturbative expansion is nonzero.

That's not to say that all QFTs must have zero radius of convergence, but similar arguments can (I think) be made for the type of QFTs that we actually see in nature.

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#99
post #29

The way I read this: this method of finding non-pertrubative terms requires calculating perturbative terms first, that’s why it can’t be applied to QED and other more-or-less realistic theories. But of course string theorists can use this method to write more papers.

I'm much more interested in whether it can provide a better way to deal with the strong force. QCD is almost impossible to calculate with in most cases because everything diverges.

Re: ‘Alien calculus’ could save particle physics from infinities

#100
post #62
post #12

Sincere question: could it be that the underlying structure of the universe is really simple but since we have no idea what it is we have to use exotic mathematics for it?

Everything is simple, given the right notation (and the concepts underlying it). The original Maxwell theory of electromagnetism is about 10 rather involved equations. Maxwell-Heaviside form is 4 simpler equations. A formulation using differential 3-forms is 2 simple equations. A formulation using geometric algebra / Clifford algebra is one utterly simple equation.

Number of equations != How simple something is
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