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Physicists Uncover Geometric ‘Theory Space’
- kitsune_ 9y agoIf anyone is interested, the animation seems to be from David Ope http://dvdp.tumblr.com/ http://dvdp.tumblr.com/
- jvandonsel 9y agoI just burned 10 minutes of my day staring at that animated GIF.
- bencoder 9y agoSame. It's only 16 frames.
- Bromskloss 9y agoSlightly larger: https://media.wired.com/photos/59266b77af95806129f4f65b/master/w_1200%2Cc_limit/Quantalarge.gif https://media.wired.com/photos/59266b77af95806129f4f65b/mast...
- viach 9y agoReading the comments, it seems like sometimes animation or illustration just shouldn't be too good, otherwise the message is ruined.
- HONEST_ANNIE 9y agoSecular scientifically oriented mind considers theoretical physics as a fundamental. Alas, very few can really understand what the high priests at the Institute for Advanced Study are actually doing. Visualizations and animations provide the analog of religious iconography. They convey the feeling of sublime to 'mere mortals'. Person may not be able to understand the Latin sermon, but there are beautiful pictures on the wall to look at.
- walterbell 9y agoLike the inscrutable algos & images of "social" media walls?
- badosu 9y agoI have always thought of the modern way to do science very 'unscientific', i.e. science as the activity scientists perform as opposed to the classical tripartite definition ('Justified True Belief'), as it is simply not feasible that all scientists can perform experiments for every bit of knowledge and must accept some propositions by authority or consensus. Your comment gave me a good insight into this idea, thanks!
- whatshisface 9y agoThe "unscientific" side might be best explained by a little editorializing. Theory, experiment and now computation have ended up split between specilaists because the required knowledge for each can no longer practically fit into one education. The effect of this is that since one brain has been separated into many heads, lots of partly-formed ideas must be communicated between them to replace what used to be internal musing. Lots of published theory has little experimental or numerical footing; theory is the superego of the split mind and plays the closest role to imagining goals and setting courses. Experiment would be lost without theory: experimental papers are relatively light on interpretation and usually serve to "check out" theorized results. To continue the metaphor they're the Id: sometimes experiments come up with results that no rational mind could have expected, grabbing the wheel and bringing theory crashing back down to earth, and upon reaching the earth again launching it off in amazing new directions. Computational physicists (I'm including anyone who spends most of their time with numbers in this) are left as the integrating Ego, trying to write code that models the theories and analyses the data and on a good day gives the same answers for both. Finally, I should add that all of these intermediate results are very carefully worded to be true, claiming no more than can be claimed. The system would still work if they were phrased assertively but there's such a strong culture of truth that nobody does that. So, you can trust the papers, but not so much the magazine write-ups which usually clobber the careful stepping.
- quadcore 9y agoHe conjectured that each particle is composed of other particles, and those others are held together by exchanging the first particle in a process that conveys a force. Thus, particles’ properties are generated by self-consistent feedback loops. Can someone rephrase that to me?
- qubex 9y agoHe basically posited that particles self-validate themselves recursively: particle A is made up of components B and C tied together by the exchange of streams of... particle A.
- quadcore 9y agoVersus particle A is made up of components B and C tied together by the exchange of streams of ...?
- qubex 9y ago...as opposed to hadrons (and other composte particles) made up by trios of quarks bound together by streams of gauge bosons (gluons that also recursively interact with themselves, generating more gluons), W and Z gauge bosons, and electromagnetic gauge bosons (photons). That sounds a bit confusing, I’m sure, but aside from the gluons creating other gluons, there’s no recursion. In Chen’s view, it was alternating “turtles all the way down”...
- quadcore 9y agoWhat about size in all that? Say a boson has a size? What about the particles in Chen's view? Also, can we differentiate a boson, say A, from a boson B? How (specifically, how sure are we that's two different objects)? In Chen's view? Finally, how does space and time look like in boson's world, roughly?
- qubex 9y agoFundamental particles are pointlike and dimensionless. They have wave-particle duality and have characteristic wavelengths however on the order of 10^-16 m or so for hadrons and quarks are about 2000 smaller.
- Cacti 9y agoI really enjoy this magazine, but them and a couple others seem to have an "earth shattering" theory announcement nearly every week and it is often hard to tell from the articles if these are truly fundamental discoveries or I'm just being taken for clickbait.
- amelius 9y agoI don't understand the point of most of these pop-sci articles. They are too difficult to understand for the layman, but they are too handwavy and contain too many silly analogies and too little insight for those who are truly interested.
- knolan 9y agoOne of the reasons I gave up on New Scientist. We would be much better served by more in-depth articles that don’t claim to ‘change everything’ but instead inform.
- jakubp 9y agoThen it means they are for the layman. Layman isn't after understanding, but curiosity, wonder, anger, whatever fuels his emotional needs at the moment.
- totalZero 9y agoAre you talking about cave people, or fellow human beings? Curiosity and wonder are the motivation for understanding, even among researchers. Or do you believe that researchers do their work for a PhD and for the compensation? Not sure why you mention anger. I picture an angry plumber ripping up an issue of Popular Science while sitting in a La-Z-Boy and drinking a Rolling Rock.
- shawnz 9y ago> Curiosity and wonder are the motivation for understanding, even among researchers. Right, and the layperson is just interested in those first two things, whereas the researcher follows through to the point of understanding. Or maybe they don't. Someone who does research is not necessarily interested in understanding every single field either.
- qubex 9y agoAs somebody schooled in applied mathematics, it never fails to strike me how totally inscrutable and abstruse these pieces sound. It reads like a passage straight out of Harry Potter.
- Ascetik 9y agoBecause it's made up, just like Harry Potter. "Theory Space" the name alone should give you red flags. Sounds like another term for 'scientists discovered' what Aristotle already knew 2400 years ago... the term "potentiality".
- qubex 9y agoThat’s where I have to disagree... as most mathematicians I tend towards the idea that mathematical structures are discovered (even though techniques might be invented). There’s clearly an underlying pattern to physics, and the two main theories have to be reconciled somehow since the Universe hangs together pretty coherently; it’s just as obvious (to me, at least) that they’re mapping something with these procedures and that what they’re finding is not a side-effect of the procedure that gets randomly instantiated by the algorithm.
- empath75 9y agoWhy should 'theory space' throw red flags? If you have a set of 'theories' with some structure attached to it, you have a 'theory space'.
- thanatropism 9y agoUsually the structure in "space" is topological, i.e. some concept of a "neighborhood".
- Steuard 9y agoAnd indeed there is a concept of "neighborhood" here: a set of parameters characterizing the conformal field theory in question.
- nimish 9y agoThis "bootstrap" appears to not be the "bootstrap" regularly encountered in statistics, just fyi if you were confused like me for the entirety of this article.
- auntienomen 9y agoCorrect. Both terms do, however, refer to Baron von Munchausen's levitation technique.
- Myrmornis 9y agoWhat about "the bootstrap method"? That name is commonly associated with the data resampling technique. Did the journalist make an error in saying that it was also used for this thing in theoretical particle physics?
- jacobolus 9y agoThese are all based on a saying from the early 19th century about the foolishness of trying to do something impossible, e.g. “It is conjectured that Mr. Murphee will now be enabled to hand himself over the Cumberland river or a barn yard fence by the straps of his boots.” (1834) An earlier tall tale (from the 18th century or before) is that the fictional Baron Munchausen pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair. Often the bootstrap saying is claimed to come from this source, but there’s not much proof of that, and it’s probably a misattribution. In computing, the idea of “bootstrapping” (“booting”) dates from the 1950s, and refers to a computer starting with some simple capabilities which can read some data in and go through a series of steps each of which increases its capability, until it has been fully initialized. Metaphorically, the computer is pulling itself up by its own bootstraps rather than getting an external boost. There are many other later uses of this idea of “bootstrapping”, including in statistics (from the late 1970s) and theoretical physics.
- Myrmornis 9y agoCool, I didn't know the literature references. However what I was asking was whether the specific phrase "the bootstrap method" was used for this thing in theoretical physics. I only know the statistical concept, which _is_ called "the bootstrap method"; this physics thing sounds to me more like a "theory" or "model" than a "method" and I wondered if perhaps the journalist had got "the bootstrap method" from google hits (which are overwhelmingly dominated by the statistical concept) and thus muddied the waters slightly. A fairly unimportant question, to be sure.
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- kraig911 9y agoReading this made me realize how I sound explaining my job to my mother. The sounds of cars rushing over my head and "What?" echoing between my ears...
- eigenschwarz 9y agoI work directly in this field. This article covers a lot of a material that is at the forefront of theoretical high energy physics where we are neck-deep in the 'fog of war.' Truthfully, I can think of few subjects more difficult to describe to people not in the field than the conformal bootstrap; there are a lot of technical details that are easy to get hung up on but are crucial for understanding the big picture.
- shepardrtc 9y agoFrom the article, it looks very promising! Forgive me for my lack of understanding, but the article made it sound like it could supplant the notion of quarks and/or other elementary particles. Is that correct?
- eigenschwarz 9y agoYes, not that they do exist but perhaps the notion of how a quantum field theory of quarks is really nearly the same thing in some ways as an Ising model, etc. The ultimate goal is to understand how these disparate physical systems are similarly mathematically structured and how to get from one to the next, and to find out the limits of the space of theories. (The signposts and roads analogy in the article is a good one.)
- auntienomen 9y agoThat was Chew's original motivation, explaining the hadron/meson zoo without quarks and gluons, but it's not likely to happen any time soon. The conformal bootstrap program is about analyzing _conformal_ QFTs, those which look the same at every magnification setting. (The theory of hadrons is not conformal; if you zoom in, the particles get bigger.) In conformal QFTs, it turns out something like Chew's vision does hold. This implies a huge set of constraints, and it turns out you can use these constraints to find solutions to the equations of motion of these theories. This is a bit of a miracle, since it's extremely hard to solve these equations directly. It's also rather valuable, since conformal QFTs describe a lot of natural physical system (like the triple point phase of water). Being able to solve these theories with sufficiently good approximations means that you can compare theoretical and experimental predictions.
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