Monday, November 12, 2012

To deeper waters

Higgs issue seems to divide theoreticians to two classes: the simple-minded pragmatists and real thinkers.

For pragmatists the existence of Higgs and Higgs mechanism is something absolute: Higgs exists of not and one can make a bet about it. Most bloggers and most phenomenologists applying numerical models belong to this group. In particular, bloggers have had heated discussions and have made bets pro and and co, mostly pro.

Thinkers see the situation in a wider perspective. The real issue is the status of quantum field theory as a description of fundamental forces. Is QFT something fundamental or is it only a low energy limit of a more fundamental microscopic theory? Could it even happen that QFT limit fails in some respects and could the description of particle massivation represent such an aspect?

Already string models taught (or at least should have taught) to see quantum field theory as an effective description of a microscopic theory working at low energy limit. Since string theorists have not been able cook up any convincing answer to the layman's innocent question "How would you describe atom using these tiny strings which are so awe inspiring?", QFT limits have become what string models actually are at the phenomenological level. AdS-CFT correspondence actually equates string theory with a conformal quantum field theory in Minkowski space so that hopes about genuine microscopic theory are lost. This is disappointing but not surprising since strings are still too simple: they are either open or closed, there is no interesting internal topology.

In TGD framework string world sheets are replaced with 4-D space-time surfaces. One ends up with a very concrete vision about matter based on the notion of many-sheeted space-time and the implications are highly non-trivial in all scales. For instance, blackhole interior is replaced with a space-time region with Euclidian signature of the induced metric characterizing any physical system be it elementary particle, condensed matter system, or astrophysical object. Therefore the key question becomes the following. Does TGD have QFT in M4 as low energy limit or rather - as a limit holding true in a given scale in the infinite length scale hierarchies predicted by theory (p-adic length scale hierarchy and hierarchy of effective Planck constants and hierarchy of causal diamonds)?

Deeper question: Does QFT limit of the fundamental theory exist?

Could the QFT limit defined as QFT in M4 fail to exist? After this question one cannot avoid questions about the character of Higgs and Higgs mechanism.

  1. It is quite possible that in QFT framework Higgs mechanism is the only description of particle massivation. But this is just a mimicry, not a predictive description. QFT limit can only reproduce the spectrum of elementary particles masses or rather - mass ratios. The ratio of Planck mass (also an ad hoc concept) to proton mass remains a complete mystery.

    This failure has been convincingly demonstrated by a huge amount of work in particle phenomenology. First came the GUT theorists. They applied every imaginable gauge group with elementary particles put in all imaginable group representations to reproduce the known part of the particle spectrum. They have reproduced standard model gauge symmetries at low energy limit. They have also done the necessary fine-tuning to make proton long-lived enough, to give large enough masses for the exotics, and to make beta functions sensical.

    The same procedures have been repeated in SUSY framework and finally super string phenomenology has produced QFT limits with Higgs mechanism, and are now doing intense fine tuning to save poor SUSY from the aggressive attacks by LHC. During these 40 years of busy modeling practically nothing has been achieved but the work goes on since theoreticians have their methods and they must produce highly technical papers to preserve the illusion of hard science.

  2. Higgs mechanism is also plagued by profound problems. The hierarchy problem means that the Higgs mechanism with mass of about 125 GeV is just at the border of stability. The problem is that the sign of mass squared term in Higgs potential can change by radiative corrections so that the vacuum with a vanishing Higgs expectation value becomes stable. SUSY was hoped to solve the hierarchy problem but LHC has made SUSY in standard sense implausible. Even if it exists cannot help in this issue. Another problem is that the coefficients of the fourth power in the Higgs potential can become negative so that vacuum becomes unstable: the bottom of a valley becomes top of a hill. The value of Higgs mass is such that also this seems to happen! (see the posting of Resonaances).

    Quite generally, fine tuning problems are the characteristic issues of the QFT limit. Proton must be long-lived enough, baryon and lepton number violating decay rates cannot be too high, the predicted exotic particles implied by the extension of the standard model gauge group must be massive enough, and so on... This requires a lot of fine tunng. Theory has transformed from a healer to a patient: the efforts of theoreticians reduce to attempts to resuscitate the patient. All this becomes understandable as one realizes that QFT is just a mimicry, not the fundamental theory.

    One could also see these two problems of the Higgs mechanism as the last attempt of the frustrated Nature to signal to the busy mainstream career builders something very profound about reality by using paradox as its last means. From TGD vantage point the intended message of Nature looks quite obvious and is actually taken for decades years ago!

Shut up and calculate

The basic problem in the recent theoretical physics is that thinking has not been allowed for more than half century. Thinking is seen as "philosophy" - something very very bad. The fathers of quantum theory were philosophers: they realized the deep problems of quantum measurement theory and considered possible conclusions for the world view. For instance, Bohr - whose view became orthodoxy - concluded that objective reality cannot exist at all and that quantum theory is just a collection of calculational recipes with Ψ having no real existence. Einstein had totally different view. He believed that quantum theory is somehow fundamentally wrong.

Neither of them was yet mature to see that the problem involves the conscious observer in a very intimate manner: in particular, how the subjective time and the geometric time of physicist - certainly not one and the same thing - relate to each other. Both were also unable to see that objective reality could be replaced by objective realities identified as "solutions of field equations" and that quantum jumps would take between them and give rise to conscious experience. This would resolve both the problem of time and the basic problem of quantum measurement theory.

Later theoreticians followed the advice which has been put to the mouth of Feynman, and decided to just shut up and calculate. This long silence has lasted more than half a century now. I belong to those few who refused to follow the advice with the consequence that the decision makers of Helsinki University gave me officially a label of a madman and besides intensive blackmailing did their best to prevent any support for my work (see previous posting motivated by a warning of young readers about the dangers of reading my blog - sent by presumably finnish physics authority calling himself Anonymous).

LHC has now demonstrated how catastrophic consequences can be when the profession of the theoretician reduces to mindless calculation. We have got lost generations of theoreticians who continue to fill hep-th and hep-ph with preprints with a minimal connection to physical reality and mostly trying to solve the problems created by the theory itself rather than those provided by physics. This is however what they are able to do: collective silence has lasted too long. Even string model gurus have lost their beliefs on The Only Possible Theory of Everything. Some of them have suffered a regression to surprisingly childish models of gravitation (entropic gravity). Some have begun to see everything as black-holes without realizing that blackholes as a mathematical failure of general relativity should have been the starting point rather than the end. Some are making bets and having learned debates about paradoxes related to blackholes (firewall paradox is the latest newcomer (see the blog posting).

Or could thinking be a rewarding activity after all?

There are also some theoreticians who have followed their own star and have not been able to resist the temptation to think and imagine. I have used to call my own star TGD. As described in previous posting, p-adic thermodynamics can be seen as a- or even the - microscopic mechanism of massivation in TGD framework. There are two options to consider. According to Option I p-adic thermodynamics alone explains only fermion masses and the microscopic counterpart of Higgs mechanism would give the dominant contribution to gauge boson masses. For Option II p-adic thermodynamics would produce both gauge boson and Higgs masses and Higgs mechanism could appear at QFT limit as a mere phenomenological description of the massivation.

Option II is the most conservative option and apparently conforms with the standard model view. It also treats all particles in the same position. Note that in standard model Higgs itself like eye which cannot see itself since its tachyonic bare mass is put in by hand. Option II is also aesthetically more satisfactory if one believes that QFT limit of TGD indeed exists. For Option I one should invent new QFT mechanism describing fermion massivation in QFT framework or give up the idea about QFT limit altogether. Option I or Option II? This question might find an answer within few days!

The existence of M4 QFT limit is not obvious in TGD framework (what this limit could be if it exists has been discussed in the previous posting). This is due to a dramatic simplification in the microscopic description of particles. The only fundamental fields are spinors of H=M4× CP2 having just spin and electroweak quantum numbers and conserved carrying quark or lepton number depending on H-chirality. Color emerges and corresponds to color partial waves in H. Also bosons emerge meaning that gauge bosons, Higgs, and graviton have pairs of fermion and anti-fermion at the opposite throats of wormhole contacts as building bricks. Gauge fields, Higgs field, gravitational field and also Higgs mechanism can emerge in this approach only as a phenomenological description at M4 QFT limit assuming that it exists. Fermionic families emerge from topology and also bosons are expected the analog of family replication phenomen induced from the fermionic one.

Higgs like bosons exist as Euclidian pions or scalar particles and they might also develop coherent states characterized by the vacuum expectation value of Higgs but already this possibility must be taken critically since coherent states is a QFT based notion and it is not quite clear whether it generalizes to microscopic level (see this).

What is important that Higgs does not make fermions massive. For Option II this is true also for bosons. Rather, the couplings and vacuum expectation of Higgs are such that Higgs can pretend of achieving this feat. Higgs mechanism reproduces: p-adic thermodynamics predicts.

Standard model action is only an effective action providing tree diagrams so that the loop corrections leading to the hierarchy problem are not present unless the counterpart of fatal radiative corrections appear in the effective action which must depend on p-adic length scale (in TGD the discrete p-adic length scale evolution replaces the continuous renormalization group evolution of quantum field theories). Zero energy ontology however dramatically modifies the view about Feynman diagrammatics, and can save the situation since standard SUSY generalizes to super-conformal invariance.

There are of course lot of critical questions to be answered. I have written an entire book motivated by the challenge of understanding why p-adic thermodynamics should be needed in real number based physics. p-Adic physics for single prime is definitely not enough: one must fuse p-adic physics for various primes p and real physics to single coherent whole and this requires a lot of not yet existing mathematics such as generalization of number concept. The connections of p-adic physics to the description of cognition and intention in quantum consciousness theory are also obvious and p-adic space-time sheet would correspond to the "mind stuff" of Descartes. These few examples show how profound and totally unexpected new visions a more philosophical and imaginative attitude to physics generates.

Another book is devoted to the physical implications of p-adic physics and of the hierarchy of effective Planck constants, a notion implied by the very special properties of the basic variational principle dictating the space-time dynamics in TGD framework.

For a summary of the evolution of TGD inspired ideas about particle massivation see the chapter Higgs or something else?. See also the short article Is it really Higgs?.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Matti,

In TGD inspired theory of consciousness there are some basic concepts and let’s I define them from my simple intuition about them, after this I make comparison with TGD to make my questions clear.
In my view when I experience my around, what is experiencer is not mere my body, but in really it is a conscious entity beyond my body. This is called “I”.
In TGD there is the notion that you called it “self”. As I understand the notion of “self” is the same as “I” for living matters. But you generalize the notion and say in generally self is a subsystem able to remain un-entangled under the sequential quantum jumps. Henceforth the definition isn’t only for living matters but for non-living matters too.

Concerning the term “entanglement” in the definition of self, in TGD it is not a primary term catching the current physics without variation, but there are some differences.
For example there are two entanglement in TGD “Bound state entanglement’ and “Negentropic entanglement”? In the first, entropy of two systems will be increased and in the other, negentropy is increased (or entropy is reduced)
Entanglement between two electrons in standard QM is an example for bound state entanglement and some cognitive processes like love are negentropic entanglement.
By these types of entanglements, please explain to me more clearly in the definition of self.

Ulla said...

This can be an important link to why life is based on carbon. It is the signalling detection.
http://phys.org/news/2012-11-advances-carbon-nanotubes.html

Ulla said...

Self and topological insulations, as an creation of islands or a kind of memory state?

There are also the negative negentropy, where the negentropy is increased. This is maybe the missed thing by most. Found by quantum computer researchers. It creates the islands?

Is love a cognitive process? It makes the brain do odd things, so the cognition is reversed at least there, but it is most informative and gives very much healing, so...maybe for the whole body it is?

Ulla said...

http://phys.org/news257080023.html#nRlv Excitons from giant matter waves.

Anonymous said...

To Ulla:

Love is not cognitive process, It was just my absurd mistake:). Thanks for the notice!

Ulla said...

Well, in a way it is very 'cognitive' or negentropic. Cognition is a part of NMP.

About the gene regulation and emotions. http://zone-reflex.blogspot.fi/2012/11/methyldynamics-behind-virtually-all.html

Matti Pitkanen said...


Dear Hamed, your first question relates to "I" and self and its generalization.

A: I hope that I am boring when I list the basic notions and ideas.

a) Quantum jump as a moment of consciousness - moment of recreation - is basic notion. The natural guess was that self results as a fusion of quantum jumps just as matter arises as fusion of elementary particles.

It seems however possible to identify self and quantum jump so that quantum jumps =selves form a hierarchy with quantum jumps within quantum jumps. Hierarchy of selves as a fractal hierarchy of moments of consciousness. Self has subselves as mental images giving rise to the experience about flow of time. Self in this sense corresponds to a primitive awareness: no self model yet. Self can be also empty of mental images/ subselves/sub-CDs/topologically condensed space-time sheets. Deep meditative states might represent this kind of situation. Concentration to single mental image by eliminating thought by preventing metabolic energy feed to these subselves: self as a gardener eliminating all un-desired plants.

b) Self must have imbedding space and space-time correlates: CD and space-time sheets are these. Again one has hierarchies. I have talked in previous postings about a connection with the arrow of geometric time resulting basically from state function reductions at opposite boundaries of CDs. In quantum theory one must allow wave functions in the moduli space of CDs and these correspond discretizations of partial waves in M^4_+/-xCP_2 . Every reduction involves localization of either tip of all CD:s in quantum superposition and delocalization of second tip: interpretation is in terms of wave particle duality.

c) Cognitive aspects of consciousness might be present at elementary particle level as p-adic space-time sheets. Cognitive representations are obtained as intersections of real and p-adic space-time sheets consisting points in an algebraic extensions of rationals: the higher the evolutionary level the larger the algebraic extension. "Common point" makes sense also at WCW level: some partonic 2-surfaces make sense both as real and p-adic surfaces belong to the intersection of real and p-adic worlds (say surfaces determined by polynomials with rational coefficients). The postulate is that life resides in this this intersection of cognition and sensory worlds.

d) I/ego serves as as a model for self and is constructed by brain. Brain is a builder of standardized mental images responsible for conscious intelligence. Primary sensory percepts at the level of sensory organs. The ability to zoom is essential for conscious intelligence. The hierarchy of effective Planck constants makes this possible: the larger the value of hbar, the longer the time span of memory and planned actions. Scaled representations for pieces of history emerge: lifetime can be abstracted to a story of few minutes. Or time span of nanosecond can be scaled to minutes in a computer model of meso-physics constructed by brain.

e) In TGD Universe biological body provides the basic sensory input responsible for the sense of self. The layers of onion-like magnetic body receive it via EEG and its (also fractal) variants. The relative motion of biological and magnetic body (involving also deformations of magnetic body) would be essential for the sensations about own body. Out-of-body experiences in situations in which sensory input is absent, reveals its existence. Also experiences like train illusion in which magnetic body moves with respect to biological body.

To be continued...

Matti Pitkanen said...


Dear Hamed, your second question was about entanglement and its role the definition of self and also about bound state entanglement and negentropic entanglement.

A: Bound state entanglement is stable for energetic reasons. De-entanglement would in general require decay of the bound state not favored energetically. Negentropic entanglement is stable by NMP. Repeated state function reduction at the same end of CD is possible. Nothing happens since negentropy is at maximum. This together with absence of subselves/mental images could relate to the experience of "timelessness" typically reported by mystics.

a) Anatomy of quantum jump: cascade of quantum jumps proceeds from largest CD in cascade downwards and leads to splitting of subsystems to unentangled subsystems and stops when bound state entanglement or negentropic entanglement is reached. By NMP the followup quantum jumps at same end of CD do not change the situation. Eventually state function reduction occurs at the second end of CD and the second tip of CD is localized. Coudd sleep-awake cycle correspond to this alternation and therefore be completely universal?

b) Negentropic entanglement does not represent information about either entangled system but about their relationship. Interpretation is as a quantum representation for a rule: abstraction A--B as superposition of instances a_i--b_i. Schroedinger cat is good example. Note that the choice of basis a_i and b_i is not unique: for instance if entanglement matrix is unit matrix all unitarily related basis are possible. This explains why the information associated with this kind of states ("enlightment") is not communicable: experience of understanding without knowing what one understands! When the entanglement ceases, memory is formed and since some basis has been chosen in state function reduction, communication of the memory is possible. Communication involves also quantum measurement!

c) NMP provides the basis of emotions. Negentropic entanglement is accompanied by positively colored emotions: love, joy, experience of understanding. Entropic entanglement by negatively colored ones. Negentropic entanglement in principle requires no binding energy. High energy phosphate bond of ATP molecule is fundamental in metabolism: it carries metabolic energy. Could this bond have negentropic entanglement so that NMP would make the bond stable rather than binding energy? This would make ATP the basic carrier of information and fight for survival would be fight for negentropic entanglement.

d) Living matter is building quantum rules by building negentropic entanglement. Systems with large number of energetically degenerate states are ideal for this purpose: if their number is power of prime p, the number theoretic entanglement negentropy is maximized for this prime. 4-D spin glass degeneracy of TGD universe due to vacuum degeneracy of Kaehler action makes possible large degeneracy. Systems with very large degeneracy of macroscopically equivalent ground states have large ensemble entropy of the macroscopic ground state and are ideal if they are able to negentropically entangle. Second law has also its positive aspects! BTW: Do not confuse the ensemble entropy with entanglement negentropy!



Ulla said...

Entropic entanglement? That means loosening of entanglements?

Homeostasis is a problem. It is a basic regulating concept in biology, and it has to be energetic, going towards entropy, and in that way following the second law.

Still there are a nonzero basic level, maybe due to the nerve signals (Josephson junctions?), that are always working, if not in any other ways they are sponanously firing to keep up the basic disturbance level (the back of the Big Book). Can this then also be said to keep up the basic entanglements and the basic, 'smaller' Self? The enlightment and growing of Self would be to have more entanglements, encompassing other selves? Note the problem of ego/self. Maybe even some kind of fusing? You talked about a jail of free will? Matter usually doesn't count in this context? What makes ordinary matter so rigid and different from living matter? They are the same atoms. You have talked of living matter as an anyonic state, as instance, more basic than fermionic/bosonic matter. Then it would be more like the interaction itself, or in your words the consciousness? The entanglements are much reacting/forming like bosonic matter?

To go towards entropy means more harmony and stability, to go towards negentropy means more disturbance, fight? This is seen very well in the brainwaves, disturbances gives peaks, and when the message is understood the peaks are gone.

Matti Pitkanen said...

To Ulla:

Entanglement is entropic if one uses standard Shannon entropy to define entanglement entropy. This applies for generic entanglement probabilities and the interpretation is that this entropy describes the lack of information about state of either entangled system: we do not know for sure whether Schrodinger cat is dead or alive.

If entanglement probabilities are rational numbers or numbers in algebraic extension of rationals, the notion of number theoretic entanglement entropy makes sense. The logarithm of probability appearing in the formula is replaced with logarithm of p-adic norm of probability which makes sense with the above restriction on probabilities. Still the entropy has standard defining properties. One might somewhat poetically say that this definition makes sense in the intersection of real and p-adic worlds, where the life resides.

The news is that number theoretic entanglement entropy can be negative unlike ordinary one, and thus becomes negentropy for suitably chosen primes. It is very large if the probabilities are of form m/p^N, where p is the p-adic prime used to define the p-adic number. If the number of states appearing in superposition of pairs of states is p^N, this is achieved.

The interpretation is that number theoretic entanglement negentropy characterizes- not the ignorance about single particle state in entangled system- but information carried by superposition of state pairs axb in state AxB. Superposition would represent a rule whose instances are pairs axb: a and b imply each other. When the larger then number of instances in superposition of state pairs, the more information the rule carries. Living matter would build this kind of rules about reality and this would help it to survive.