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What matters is not the man, but the math. Regardless of who he is, are his critiques of the string theory math sound? As a dabbler in theoretical physics I don
by Communitivity 8y ago
What matters is not the man, but the math. Regardless of who he is, are his critiques of the string theory math sound? As a dabbler in theoretical physics I don't have the skill to judge. What I am interested in, and only tangentially related, is someone doing a good comparison and contrast of the octonion theories and string theories. For more on octonions see https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-underpin-physics-20180720/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-..., http://physics.oregonstate.edu/~tevian/octonions/ http://physics.oregonstate.edu/~tevian/octonions/.
- auntienomen 8y agoThere really isn't any comparison between string theory and the octonion "theories". String theory is a fairly well-developed mathematical theory. We don't understand everything about it, of course, but we really do know quite a bit. The situation is comparable to that of quantum electrodynamics in the 1960s; we've got enough of a theory that we can do reliable computations, but we're still missing some important concepts. The octonion theory isn't a theory at all yet. Assuming that it will eventually become a theory, what we have now is more like Bohr's early quantum mechanical models or de Broglie's wave-particle duality. We've got some heuristics and some numerical coincidence and some toy models that suggest there might be something there. But no one has actually found a mathematical model that extends or explains the Standard Model of particle physics.