Physicists Discover Geometry Underlying Particle Physics 600
New submitter Lee_Dailey sends this news from Quanta Magazine:
"Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality. 'This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,' said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work. The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like "amplituhedron," which yields an equivalent one-term expression."
Re:hmmm.... (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody reads the classics (Score:0, Informative)
Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.
These things come up every so often and it always makes me facepalm in a RTFM moment. It is as if none of these advanced physics and mathematics people have ever read or understood why mathematics and physics was invented in the first place. The Greeks invented it to study forms, geometric at first, learning quickly that so much of our human perception is illusion based on these forms. Only later did abstraction of these forms come to be through a great many expressive number systems that have never stopped increasing in complexity to think that analytical quantitative thought has become bloated and inefficient compared to its forgotten origins.
Another excellent example is ignorance on Descartes. Mathematicians and physicists use Cartesian coordinate systems so frequently but have completely neglected the rest of the work by the man that invented it. Temporal relativity, the atomic idea of time later 'pioneered' by Planck, and time itself as merely a manifestation of the flow of consciousness within it can all be attributed to Descartes, but all that Oxford cares of him is his pretty graphs.
If people so high would have taken the time to learn why these thoughts and tools came to be instead merely how to use them, human understanding could be centuries more advanced. Instead we have to reinvent and rediscover ancient issues over and over with new tools designed to solve different problems in ways that require different efficiencies.
Relevance of theory to the real world is unknown (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron
Since the N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory is a toy theory that does not describe the real world, the relevance of this theory to the real world is currently unknown, but it provides promising directions for research into theories about the real world.
It's a time cube (Score:4, Informative)
EARTH HAS 4 CORNER
SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY
TIME CUBE
WITHIN SINGLE ROTATION.
4 CORNER DAYS PROVES 1
DAY 1 GOD IS TAUGHT EVIL.
IGNORANCE OF TIMECUBE4
SIMPLE MATH IS RETARDATION
AND EVIL EDUCATION DAMNATION.
CUBELESS AMERICANS DESERVE -
AND SHALL BE EXTERMINATED
Re:hmmm.... (Score:5, Informative)
Lisi's E_8 conjecture [wikipedia.org] is somewhat more complicated than this one. For a start, the geometry of the E_8 group is richer than that of a mere amplituhedron. Others may note that Lisi's conjecture also includes gravitation in its unification, while TFA appears to be only about particle families.
Re:Hold up. (Score:3, Informative)
>If I remember correctly, General Relativity used tensors over a 10 dimensional simplificaiton of a 16 dimensional field.
The metric tensor, a second-order tensor, has 16 components (something like a 4x4 matrix), but it is symmetrical so it is completely determined by only 10 of the components.
A third-order tensor would have 64 components. These have nothing to do with the number of spacetime dimensions (4).
Re:hmmm.... (Score:2, Informative)
This isn't a particle so much as methodology; physicists have discovered that certain particles fit together in a certain way. Apparently before this it was a huge clusterfuck. Its like the mandelbrot set; its not a physical "thing", but its damn useful. To physicists only, I think, but we'll see.
Or put another way, it's math. Which is the study of how numbers and patterns relate to each other. In this case, they've found a useful pattern of interactions, which means it's easier to describe using mathematical notation. And we call such patterns "geometry". A famous pattern of this sort is the classic Pythagorean Triangle.
simply nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
The Slashdot headline, not the physics.
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/ [columbia.edu]
Re:Relevance of theory to the real world is unknow (Score:5, Informative)
If one assumes that Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are correct, and there is no observational evidence that they are not, then Yang-Mills theory, or something very much like it, is inevitable. It arises from the need for conservation of the various charges each force.
A Yang-Mills theory [wikipedia.org], based on {pick-your-favorite-group}, may be inevitable. Whether it would be the N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory [wikipedia.org] is another matter; it won't be [arstechnica.com].
Re:42 (Score:5, Informative)
Also, computing proteins folding is probably going to get a serious performance boost too. If this proves to really work genetic engineering is going to enter a new phase.
Probably not.
This just speeds up some mathematical methods used to calculate probability fields in quantum mechanical problems. So it will provide a certain linear speedup of those calculations (for example 1000 times faster).
It will not however help with NP hard problems (like protein folding), because these would need real quantum computations (on a quantum computer) to reduce the exponential order of the problem into a lower order one.
If a problem would take many times the age of the universe to calculate, then dividing that time by a small factor will not help much.