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Every once in a while I get the feeling that the greatest discoveries are still ahead and these next few decades might be the real "golden age of science". The "individual genius" phase is just behind us and the "collaborative brilliance" phase is just beginning.
http://www.ted.com/talks/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_every...
Is anyone here familiar with this work? I would like to hear more about it. At a minimum, this article is very much better than the usual science blog filler—it contains signs of a genuine conceptual breakthrough. For example: “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.” That doesn't happen very often! Or this: [T]he new geometric approach to particle interactions remo…
It contains claims of such signs, which seems to be the point of this fluff piece.
Alarm bells should go off when you read statements like this:
"...giving up space and time as fundamental constituents of nature and figuring out how the Big Bang and cosmological evolution of the universe arose out of pure geometry."
Ah yes, well that solves the mystery, doesn't it. The universe arose out of pure geometry.
A more concrete sign of the limitations of this work can be seen in the paragraph prior to the above quote:
"Physicists must also prove that the new geometric formulation applies to the exact particles that are known to exist in the universe, rather than to the idealized quantum field theory they used to develop it, called maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory."
The problem is that maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory conflicts with experiments (see e.g. http://news.discovery.com/space/lhc-discovery-maims-supersym...). This is why they hurry to qualify this point by saying:
"This model, which includes a 'superpartner' particle for every known particle and treats space-time as flat, 'just happens to be the simplest test case for these new tools,' Bourjaily said. 'The way to generalize these new tools to [other] theories is understood.'"
Well that's good, because they're going to need that generalization. Now all they need is to actually produce it.
This is the sort of thing that leads these gee-whiz models to end up on the ash heap of history.
Don't get me wrong, it would be fantastic if the amplituhedron revolutionizes quantum theory. But based on the red flags in this article, I wouldn't hold my breath.
So this guy was right? The geometry-based particle interaction theory sounds similar to what this guy was saying a few years back on TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_every...
The thing in this post is a new way to calculate scattering amplitudes that has nothing to do with space, time, and isn't motivated by unitarity or locality.
Is anyone here familiar with this work? I would like to hear more about it. At a minimum, this article is very much better than the usual science blog filler—it contains signs of a genuine conceptual breakthrough. For example: “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.” That doesn't happen very often! Or this: [T]he new geometric approach to particle interactions remo…
"it contains signs of a genuine conceptual breakthrough." It contains claims of such signs, which seems to be the point of this fluff piece. Alarm bells should go off when you read statements like this: "...giving up space and time as fundamental constituents of nature and figuring out how the Big Bang and cosmological evolution of the universe arose out of pure geometry." Ah yes, well that solves the mystery, doesn'…
Every once in a while I get the feeling that the greatest discoveries are still ahead and these next few decades might be the real "golden age of science". The "individual genius" phase is just behind us and the "collaborative brilliance" phase is just beginning.
Why do you think there will be or should be a golden age, rather then continuous progress forever? http://beginningofinfinity.com
So I don't think "golden ages" are going away any time soon.
The paper from the arxiv mentioned in the article: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.5605v1.pdf
(This was in May, lol)
[1] BA is a nifty numerical method involving a lot of number crunching to find scattering matrices for these theories, and is very useful in low-dimensional electronic systems.
Is anyone here familiar with this work? I would like to hear more about it. At a minimum, this article is very much better than the usual science blog filler—it contains signs of a genuine conceptual breakthrough. For example: “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.” That doesn't happen very often! Or this: [T]he new geometric approach to particle interactions remo…
"it contains signs of a genuine conceptual breakthrough." It contains claims of such signs, which seems to be the point of this fluff piece. Alarm bells should go off when you read statements like this: "...giving up space and time as fundamental constituents of nature and figuring out how the Big Bang and cosmological evolution of the universe arose out of pure geometry." Ah yes, well that solves the mystery, doesn'…
Every once in a while I get the feeling that the greatest discoveries are still ahead and these next few decades might be the real "golden age of science". The "individual genius" phase is just behind us and the "collaborative brilliance" phase is just beginning.
Why do you think there will be or should be a golden age, rather then continuous progress forever? http://beginningofinfinity.com
This isn't to say that all progress is done in goldrushes, but the most basic and, therefore, best-known work of a given field will be done in that period.