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I don't think theoretical physicists would find these findings to be that interesting. There are a lot of mathematical results that can be somehow applied to ph
by piokoch 6y ago
I don't think theoretical physicists would find these findings to be that interesting. There are a lot of mathematical results that can be somehow applied to physics, but very rarely something interesting comes out of it from physicists perspective. Obviously when it happens, then it can lead to a breakthrough as it happened when Einstein figured out how Riemmann geometry can be applied to GR.
The author himself is kind of uncertain if there are any real consequences comming out of his math:
>>The instability of AdS space-time has major implications for how we understand our own universe. First, since AdS space-time is unstable, it’s “something you will not see in nature,” Moschidis said.<<
>>But “even though AdS is not real,” he said, “it can still lead us to the discovery and study of real phenomena.” <<
I am not sure how our understanding of time-space can be increased by a theory that just does not describe reality.
Maybe the math is somehow useful? Maybe this might explain what happened after Big Bang (maybe instabilities were more common then)? Maybe this is the path to unify QM and GR (in the article it is mentioned that, but with some usual addition of not yet observed additional dimension that can explain everything - the feature of many "string" theories", that didn't give us much.
- andrewflnr 6y agoIt's definitely not the case that AdS being non-physical stops it from being useful in physics. ADS-CFT plays a big role in physics research today. I'm hoping that seeing how it breaks down will lead to clues about exactly where it diverges from the real world.
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoTheoretical physics has always studied theories that don't describe reality. It deepens our understanding of the theories that do describe reality. Eg., if you change one axiom of a reality-describing-theory and certain naturally occurring phenomena disappears, then you can say that that axioms causes that that phenomena to occur. Also, this is not my field, but thousands of physics papers have been written on the AdS geometry (particularly the AdS-CFT duality). This line of thinking has brought a lot of clarity to string theory and to black hole physics.