4 ms·

From 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 a

• eigenschwarz 9y ago
  Yes, 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 ago
  That 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.