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Fascinating that this is getting so much traction on Hacker News, given how technical and physics-specific it is. Guess there's a lot of physicists on here (hi

Fascinating that this is getting so much traction on Hacker News, given how technical and physics-specific it is. Guess there's a lot of physicists on here (hi all!) This PDF is a summary of a really interesting and surprising research direction in modern theoretical physics. It came out of trying to explain why certain extremely complex calculations gave unexpectedly simple results. People like Nima Arkani-Hamed thinks that it a sign of new/deeper principles underlying the current laws of physics, though not everyone follows the logic quite this far. See https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-discover-geometry-underlying-particle-physics-20130917/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-discover-geometry-...

bloopernova 3y ago
That article is pretty mind blowing! "A sketch of the amplituhedron representing an 8-gluon particle interaction. Using Feynman diagrams, the same calculation would take roughly 500 pages of algebra." That excerpt is pretty wild. 500 pages "compressed" into one geometric shape.
gexaha 3y ago
Has there been any progress in the last 10 years since the discovery of amplituhedron?
- qnleigh 3y ago
  I'm not the best person to answer this, but my understanding is yes. The claim is that it's an almost ubiquitous phenomenon; many theories, I think even including non-supersymmetric theories, have something similar going on where a geometric object can determine the results of certain Feynman diagram calculations (maybe still only at tree level). There was even an example I saw in a lecture where some topics that would be taught in a first year quantum field theory course fit into this framework. Nima Arkani-Hamed has a bunch of lectures on YouTube that are pretty entertaining, and while they can get quite technical, he says a lot that can be appreciated without understanding the details.
  - gexaha 3y ago
    Thanks! I saw a couple of his lectures on YouTube, and it's very difficult to understand, whether it is just marketing, or there is some progress going on in the topic

bloopernova 3y ago

That article is pretty mind blowing! "A sketch of the amplituhedron representing an 8-gluon particle interaction. Using Feynman diagrams, the same calculation would take roughly 500 pages of algebra." That excerpt is pretty wild. 500 pages "compressed" into one geometric shape.

gexaha 3y ago

Has there been any progress in the last 10 years since the discovery of amplituhedron?

qnleigh 3y ago
I'm not the best person to answer this, but my understanding is yes. The claim is that it's an almost ubiquitous phenomenon; many theories, I think even including non-supersymmetric theories, have something similar going on where a geometric object can determine the results of certain Feynman diagram calculations (maybe still only at tree level). There was even an example I saw in a lecture where some topics that would be taught in a first year quantum field theory course fit into this framework. Nima Arkani-Hamed has a bunch of lectures on YouTube that are pretty entertaining, and while they can get quite technical, he says a lot that can be appreciated without understanding the details.
- gexaha 3y ago
  Thanks! I saw a couple of his lectures on YouTube, and it's very difficult to understand, whether it is just marketing, or there is some progress going on in the topic