3 ms·
The talk of simple geometry reminds me of the Ptolemaic universe for some reason. Layman's comment, I know, but I just couldn't resist.
by lambdasquirrel 10y ago
The talk of simple geometry reminds me of the Ptolemaic universe for some reason. Layman's comment, I know, but I just couldn't resist.
- jayajay 10y ago"If a and b do not agree, begin your search for letter c."
- gus_massa 10y agoIn some sense, yes. I remember the class were my physics professor explained why the SU(5) could be The Group of the universe and why it failed (IIRC the predictions were 1% off with the experiment, a good try, but enough to be discarded.) You could feel how sad he was that SU(5) has to be discarded. :( In some sense, no. The SU(5) group includes all the symmetries of the hyper-dodecahedron, were you can rotate it in the 4-dimmensional space to exchange one of the vertex/particles with another. But it also includes more strange things, like half mixing two particles. a -> (a+b) / srqt(2) b -> (a-b) / sqrt(2) This is more difficult to explain. Technically, it's a rotation in the plane x-y of 45 degrees. And you can rotate another angles, for example in some particles decays the important rotation is 13 degrees. And you can mix three or four or five particles. All of this is more difficult to imagine, but it's easy to write analytically. The use of geometric shapes like the hyper-dodecahedron is more a nice visualization technique. It's easier to explain than the details of the SU(5) group and it provides a good intuition, even after studding the theory with more details. So I prefer to ignore this technical detail, specially for a popular science article.