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A video lecture by Nima Arkani-Hamed here on the topic: http://susy2013.ictp.it/video/05_Friday/2013_08_30_Arkani-Ha...
A video lecture by Nima Arkani-Hamed here on the topic: http://susy2013.ictp.it/video/05_Friday/2013_08_30_Arkani-Ha...
edit: Also the hand-written presentation slides are lovely.
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…
I've been keenly following this area of research and have heard some of the talks and read some papers. I concur with the sketch given by @gaze. 1. The notion of unitarity is a "common sense" rule that implies that you can consistently assign probabilities to possible outcomes in a quantum mechanical experiment ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarity_%28physics%29 ) 2. The notion of locality states that what happens…
Unfortunately for science, the principle of locality has been violated multiple times with experiments involving quantum entanglement.[1]
I think you are confusing Micro-causality with Einsteinian locality[2], the theory that influences propagate at most as fast as light. Micro-causality is the locality that's associated with quantum field theory and what was discussed in this article. Many theories in the history of science have been proven wrong. And if one of these is, then it will no lead to the end of science as we know it.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/science/2007/04/new-experiments-with-...
[2] http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~as3/nonlocality.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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'…
Things that work on simple models motivate work on more complex models. He STARTS OUT by saying N=4 SYM is a toy model. The klein-gordon equation is unphysical but motivated a lot of good physics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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'…
what are your qualifications? No offense meant, but I am trying to see if this is real or not. Quite a few smart people seem excited by it, yet you dismiss it
Why aren't you asking them for their qualifications, then? Serious question, think about what your choice implies. Is it that "you want to believe", perhaps?
You don't need a PhD in quantum physics to detect the hype in this article. The comment I responded to was reacting more to the unsupported claims and hype than any actual discovery.
"yet you dismiss it"
I'm not dismissing that the work could have value, but the article makes claims that go far beyond anything that's been demonstrated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_theory
Wiki doesn't have a lot of info, but it's mostly been debunked from what I've read.
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…
Relevant quote: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points." (Alan Kay)
In 1986, it became apparent that Feynman’s apparatus was a Rube Goldberg machine.
I think Feynman would have loved to have heard his doodles to be described in such a way (maybe he did, he had a few years left in him at that point!)
From what I get they managed to vastly simplify calculations of super-symmetric Yang-Mills theory by representing results as volumes of geometric object. Super-symmetric Yang-Mills theory is not shown to represent reality (yet?) but they hope they can use similar method to simplify calculations of the quantum field theories that are currently believed to represent reality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what are your qualifications? No offense meant, but I am trying to see if this is real or not. Quite a few smart people seem excited by it, yet you dismiss it
"Quite a few smart people seem excited by it" Why aren't you asking them for their qualifications, then? Serious question, think about what your choice implies. Is it that "you want to believe", perhaps? You don't need a PhD in quantum physics to detect the hype in this article. The comment I responded to was reacting more to the unsupported claims and hype than any actual discovery. "yet you dismiss it" I'm not dism…
It's like inverse bike shedding.