Daily musings, mostly about physics and consciousness, heavily biased by Topological Geometrodynamics background.
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Looking through my window made of dark matter to the sunny morning of spring
The ideas related to many-sheeted space-time began to develop for a decade ago. The stimulation came from a contact by Barry Carter who told me about so called mono-atomic elements, typically transition metals (precious metals), including Gold. The pioneering observations of David Hudson suggest an interpretation as an exotic super-conductor at room temperature having extremely low critical magnetic fields of order of magnetic field of Earth, which of course is in conflict with the standard wisdom about super-conductivity. After a decade and with an impulse coming from a different contact related to ORMEs, I decided to take a fresh look on Hudson's description for how he discovered ORMEs with dark matter in my mind. I reproduce Hudson's own description here in a somewhat shortened form and subtract associations to alchemy, Bible, and mystic in order that physicist reader would not get irritated.
Saturday, March 26, 2005
Black Holes as Topological Quantum Computers?
The traditional view about black holes is that they are merciless information destroyers. Now it has been widely realized that blackhole like objects are highly interesting from the point of view of information theory. The information might not be lost after all and perhaps be coded by the states at the horizon of the black hole: something analogous to this is predicted also by TGD. The challege is to understand how black hole like objects could represent information. One cannot avoid even the idea that quantum information theory is needed although standard physics would not suggest that quantum entanglement is important at these extreme temperatures.
The RHIC data about the production of blackhole like objects in heavy ion collisions led to a considerable increase of detailed understanding of what black holes could be in TGD Universe.
Black hole like objects correspond to highly tangled (color,Z^0) magnetic flux tube structures in Hagedorn temperature identifiable as black hole temperature. In a good approximation they are describable as strings. Black holes do not possess hair, they consist of hair! And a hair badly in need of comb, one might add! The role of the gravitational constant is taken by the effective gravitational constant defined by string tension and one can speak of "strong gravitation". Black hole like states appear in all p-adic length scales.
What is new that the matter inside the flux tubes would be in a liquid like macroscopic quantum phase with a very large value of Planck constant hbar (see earlier postings in which empirical justifications for the hypothesis are discussed). This makes the matter inside blackhole like objects dark since fine structure constant characterizing the probability that the system as a whole emits photon is proportional to 1/hbar. The discrete set of values of hbar is crucial for understanding both dark and living matter. The interpretation of the matter inside black hole as dark matter follows from this picture: black and dark would be more or less synonymous now!
Dark matter particles possess complex conformal weights related closely to the zeros of Riemann Zeta, and conformal confinement, which is physical necessity, means that the net conformal weight of the system is real. The entanglement of particles possessing different complex conformal weights to give states with a vanishing net conformal weight, and having thus particle like integrity, makes dark matter and black hole like objects ideal for quantum computing. Even more, string like structure able to knot and link are ideal for topological quantum computation. I have proposed on basis of some intriguing experimental findings about the geometrical structure of DNA that cell nuclei perform topological quantum computations using DNA or (more probably) RNA, which are particular examples of structures condensed on magnetic flux tubes. The highly tangled chromosomes could be seen as analogs of blackhole like quantum computing structures at the space-time sheets with the size scale of chromosomes. Every cell in our body would contain black hole like object!
One could even imagine that the galactic black hole is a highly tangled cosmic string at Hagedorn temperature performing quantum computations. The complexity of these computations would be of course totally out of reach of human intellect. Indeed, TGD inspired theory of consciousness predicts that evolution leads to the increase of information and intelligence, and the evolution of stars and other astrophysical objects should not form exception to this.
For a more detailed discussion of the still continuing intense interaction between theoretical ideas and RHIC findings see the chapter TGD and Cosmology of TGD. For the vision about connections between dark matter and living matter see the chapter Quantum Coherent Dark Matter and Bio-Systems as Macroscopic Quantum Systems of "Genes, Memes, Qualia,...".
Matti Pitkänen
Friday, March 25, 2005
Dualities as wave-particle dualities in infinite-dimensional context?
I finally got the opportunity to start musing again about TGD dualities and to see what new understanding has emerged during the last two weeks.
1. HO-H duality as p-q duality in the configuration space of 3-surfaces?
HO-H duality means that space-times can be regarded either as surfaces of H=M4xCP_2 or of its tangent space HO=M^8. This reminds strongly of co-tangent bundle and the familiar p-q (wave particle) duality of quantum mechanics. Indeed, in the geometric quantization you select Lagrange manifold which means assigning canonical momenta p(q) to position coordinates q. This choice corresponds in very general sense to Bohr quantization although it is not unique without further conditions coming in practice from symmetries. The idea is obvious. p-q duality in the infinite-dimensional context would mean following. a) In q-represention you represent the quantum theory using configuration space spinor fields in the space defined by the positions in the configuration space CH of 3-surfaces X^3 in H=M^4xCP_2. Each X^3 corresponds to a four-surface X^4(X^3) ("Bohr orbit going through X^3"). These surfaces are unique apart from physically very important complications caused by classical non-determinism, which can be overcome by appropriately generalizing X^3. That is allowing X^3 to consist of sequence of space-like disjoint components with time like separations, a snapshot of space-like disjoint components with time like separations, a snapshot about non deterministic time evolution: this would be the first guess. b) In p-representations related to q-representation by generalized Fourier transform you represent the quantum theory in the fiber of cotangent bundle of CH. What is the new and marvellous element that the canonical momenta are represented as 4-surfaces in the tangent space of HO=M^8, tangent space of H! Duality means Bohr orbit representation assigning to 4-surface in H a 4-surface in HO. Here the power of geometric thinking becomes obvious. Armed with this generalization of q-p duality you can go through the various aspects of HO-H duality, make it much more precise, and derive a lot of highly non-trivial looking new predictions. One of the most beautiful implications of strong form of this duality would be that the 4-surfaces in CH representing positions q and the 4-surfaces CHO representing canonical momenta p are set-theoretically identical! CH 4-surface has the metric, Kähler structure, and Kähler action induced from H and CHO 4-surface has all this induced from HO! Duality is indeed in question! This picture generalizes also to the level of HQ-coHQ duality stating that the theory can be represented either in terms of hyper-quaternionic 4-surfaces or co- hyper-quaternionic 4-surfaces of H (HO). Now cotangent bundle is replaced by the 4+4-dimensional normal bundle and duality of course makes only for 4-D surfaces in 8-D imbedding space.What about M-theory dualities?
The generalization of configuration space of 3-surfaces to that of configuration space of 1-surfaces with Kähler metric (which need not exist mathematically except in very rare cases, sorry!) allows also a deeper understanding of spontaneous compactification and the dualities of M-theory. All spontaneous compactifications, that is theories in given target space would have same cotangent space, whose points are representable as strings in flat target space. The non-compactified theory corresponds to the perturbative theory which is always the same whereas compactifications correspond to non-perturbative theories, which are the "real" theories. The duality mapping strings in two representations to each other would be analogous to Bohr quantization assigning to a given position q canonical momentum p(q), and Lagrange manifolds of cotangent bundle of compactified theory would determine a huge variety of different dualities unless there are some constraints from symmetries. Probably these constraints are very important, at least in TGD. Of course, this formal picture need not make sense since the existence of infinite-dimensional Kähler geometry poses so strong constraints that the notion of dynamical target space must be given up. For instance, the Kähler geometry of loop groups is unique and has Kac-Moody algebras as symmetries. In the more general case this geometry need simply not exist at all. This would of course mean getting rid of the landscape problem. Unfortunately, it would very probably mean that the physics predicted by string models and M-theory does not have much to do with what we see in laboratory. During these 16 years of configuration space geometry in TGD framework I have been wondering why string theorists refuse to take the notion of infinite-dimensional geometry seriously and why they have spent a lot of time with matrix models and alike. It might be a good idea to see whether the theory allows a formulation in terms of Kähler geometry of the configuration space of strings and what the existence of this formulation predicts. My strong conviction is that this would finally pave the way to TGD and we could start doing physics again. For the first draft of these ideas see the last section of TGD as a Generalized Number Theory II: Quaternions, Octonions, and their Hyper Counterparts Matti PitkänenTuesday, March 22, 2005
More About Black Hole Like Objects in RHIC
I already told about black hole like objects identified in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven. For decades physicists have been complaining that there are not experimental data challenging standard model and now we have it. Even restricting the considerations to RHIC one can say that QCD is heavily challenged by these data. So are all conventional theories, from GUTs to string models and M-theory, claiming to produce standard model as such as their low energy limit.
Putting-it-under-the-rug policy applied to anomalies applied so often earlier is the silliest option than one can imagine in this kind of situation. If even these findings are not enough to wake up the community of theoretical physicists to experimental reality, it is difficult to imagine what could do it. Therefore I am somewhat astonished and disappointed that physics bloggers except me and Plato have not found this sensational discovery worth of commenting.
Because of the exceptional importance of the finding I summarize briefly the main findings and theoretical concepts and ideas again from a more holistic point of view. The discovery of black hole like objects was the third one in a series of discoveries and one can only imagine what LHC brings with it.
- The first discovery was the lack of longitudinal Lorentz invariance of particle distributions suggesting a collective behavior. This was around 2002.
- The collective behaviour which was later interpreted in terms of color glass condensate meaning the presence of a blob of liquid like phase decaying later to quark gluon plasma since it was found that the density of what was expected to be quark gluon plasma was about ten times higher than expected.
- The last finding is that this object seems to absorb partons like black hole and behaves like an evaporating black hole.
- I proposed 2002 a model for Gold-Gold collision as a mini big bang identified as a scaled down variant of TGD inspired cosmology. This makes sense because in TGD based critical cosmology the initial state has vanishing mass per comoving volume instead of being infinite as in radiation dominated cosmology. Any phase transition involving a generation of a new space-time sheet might proceed in this universal manner. The implication of p-adic fractality is that cosmology can be studied in laboratory!
- Cosmic string soup in the primordial stage is replaced by a tangle of color flux tubes containing the color glass condensate. CGC is made macroscopic quantum phase by conformal confinement (the conformal weights of partons are complex and relate to zeros of zeta) and only the net conformal weight is real in this phase). Flux tubes correspond to flow lines of incompressible liquid flow and non-perturbative phase with a very large hbar is in question. Gravitational constant is replaced by strong gravitational constant defined by the relevant p-adic length scale squared since color flux tubes are analogs of hadronic strings. Presumably L_p, p=M_107=2^107-1, is the p-adic length scale since Mersenne prime M_107 labels the space-time sheet at which partons feed their color gauge fluxes. Temperature during this phase could correspond to Hagedorn temperature for strings and is determined by string tension. Density would be maximal.
- Next phase is critical phase in which the notion of space-time in ordinary sense makes sense and 3-space is flat since there is no length scale in critical system (so that curvature vanishes). During this critical phase phase a transition to quark gluon plasma occurs. The duration of this phase fixes all relevant parameters such as temperature (which is the analog of Hagedorn temperature corresponding since critical density is maximal density of gravitational mass in TGD Universe).
- The next phase is radiation dominated quark gluon plasma phase and then follows hadronization to matter dominated phase provided cosmological picture still applies.
- Dark matter is identified as a macroscopic quantum phase with large hbar for which particles have complex conformal weights and by conformal confinement behaves like single coherent whole. Dark matter controls living matter and this explains the weird looking findings about Bohr rules for planetary orbits.
- Living matter would be also matter with large value of hbar and form conformally confined blobs behaving like single units with extremely quantal properties, including free will of course! Dark matter and conformal confinement would be responsible for the mysterious vital force.
- Any system for which some interaction becomes so strong that perturbation theory does not work gives rise to this kind of system in a phase transition in which hbar increases to not lose perturbativity gives rise to this kind of "super-quantal" matter.
- Physically hbar means a larger unit for quantum numbers and this requires that single particle states form larger particle like units. This kind of collective states with weak mutual interactions are of course very natural in strongly interacting systems. At the level of quantum jumps quantum jumps integrate effectively to single quantum jump and longer moments of consciousness result. Conformal confinement guarantees all this. Entire hierarchy of size scales for conformally confined blobs is predicted corresponding to values of hbar related to Beraha numbers but there would be only single value corresponding to very large hbar for given values of system parameters (gravitational masses, charges,...).
- Liquids might be liquids because they contain some dark matter at magnetic/Z^0 magnetic flux tubes (darkness follows from the large value of hbar).
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Jetset events in physics and the era of arroganzia
The event of weekend was the conference in Harward held in honor of Sidney Coleman. Kind of jetset event with 6 Nobelists and one Fields medalist. Definitely something new in physics. Perhaps we must blame the year 1905 of Einstein also for this. On the other hand, it seems that "get in media or perish" has become a fact of life. Many physics bloggers commented the event and I had the same irritated feeling as stimulated by those beautiful and handsome empty-heads posing in all periodicals nowadays. What worries me that people whose attention is caught by this kind of events are regarded as the most promising young scientists. I would prefer rebels over high society reporters. On the other hand, I must admit that also I read these blog reports. Perhaps it is just the fact that some-one is writing about physics and even physicists in media and breaking the illusion that scientists are completely unemotional life forms adapted to live in laboratory environment.
About lectures
Lectures gave nothing new of course. The dominating theme was naturally Sidney Coleman as a legendary teacher. Witten was expected to tell about his partial giving up of string model: so far has things gone that Pope is expected to tell that he does not believe in God anymore. Witten however spoke about the emergence of space-time and an old no-go theorem with second big W telling that gravitation cannot emerge from Minkowski space since there are no local diffeo invariants. I realized that this no-go theorem provides a further heuristic argument to end up with TGD. Space-time as a 4-surface, particles as 3-surfaces, and Minkowski space locality lifted to a locality in the configuration space of 3-surfaces provide the manner to circumvent the no-go theorem. Witten identifies emergence with non-perturbative effects and indeed, perturbation theory does not work in M^4 background at all in TGD framework. In more speculative spirit: also the quantization of Planck constant and gigantic value of hbar_gr for GM_1M_2>=1 and avoidance of black hole collapse completely analogously with the avoidance of infrared catastrophe in the case of hydrogen atom would fit with the notion of gravitational emergence. A further, still vague, TGD inspired idea is that the quantization of hbar guarantees that perturbative approach works. The system would perform a sequence of hbar-increasing phase transitions in order to remain perturbative. TGD clearly fits very nicely with the theme of Witten although space-time itself is almost the space-time of classical pseudo-Riemannian geometry apart from being a many-sheeted surface, and containing also p-adic space-time sheets. David Gross (whose very nice Nobel lecture about basic problems of physics I heard in Finland) still defended string model, but not so much as a TOE but as a calculational trick allowing to do QCD in a stringy manner. I dare hope that more convincing manners to calculate in QCD could be invented. I would be even happier of the assumptions of QCD itself would be critically re-examined: spin crisis of proton gives good motivations for this. Weinberg closed his talk by admitting that he has no idea about what to do next, perhaps Sidney could help (Sidney Coleman was a legendary mentor). High society would not be high society without self appraisal. Indeed, it seems that these people are continually making accidental notices about how super-fast and super-sized brains they possess. These people are certainly brilliant symbol manipulators but why have they spent 20 years in vain with a theory whose fate was obvious for very many physicists from the beginning? A kind of complementarity seems to hold true. The product of mathematical skills and philosophical depth seems to be proportional to some kind of cognitive hbar. Perhaps also some philosophy is needed unless we want even third superstring revolution (here I humbly cross my fingers and pray God for saving us from this curse).Super string arrogantsia
The nice summary of Lubos about conference with many pictures brought in light the second half of the title of the day: the era of arrogantsia in science and society. What made me unhappy were t'Hooft's extremely nasty comments about his teacher Veltman, as also his need to tell in this kind of occasion that he had discovered asymtotic freedom before others without realizing it and tha the indirectly even seemed to accuse his teacher for his failure. Why?: he got is Nobel in any case. Lubos documented even t'Hooft's nasty claims about slow-mindedness of Veltman. I just wonder what physics might look now if all these fast-brains had been a little bit slower and spent five minutes pondering deep philosophical issues before launching the first super string revolution and perhaps even ten minutes before initiating the second one. As we know, first super string revolution began 1984, about two years after my thesis. At that time I applied a research position in TFT, Research Institute of Theoretical Physics in Helsinki University. With the bird's eye of view provided by TGD it was easy to tell what went wrong with superstring models and I indeed did this in my application. I was right except for one important thing for myself personally: I really believed that super string period would last only few years.The era of arrogantsia in Finnish science
For the first time I became painfully aware of the dominance of arrogantsia in theoretical physics around 1978 when I got my great idea and applied for a researach position. I was fired within few weeks. Around 1992 or so I felt again the power of arrogantsia. Two fresh professors, one in mathematics and second in theoretical physics, gave their statement about my work after I had applied for a position of docent (this would have given me the right to lecture about my work). These young arrogants had learned their style during student years in USA, and used without hesitation the opporturnity to declare that my work was sheer bullshit. I would not like to repeat this, but in order to convince the reader that they were unashamedly lying, I must tell that Mathematical Subject Classification Tables of American Mathematical Society have link to TGD but says nothing about my executors. At that time the vision of science arrogantsia was that the era of individuals in science was over and everything worth of mentioning would be done in groups. This argument was used as an excuse by one of my executors as a justification for my death sentence. Critical mass was the magic word: if you put together sufficiently many arrogants, an intellectual chain reaction creating endlessly new ideas begins. Interestingly, in this respect a sligth paradigm shift has occurred. Individuals are in fashion again. The practical manifestation is an open favourite system to be launched next year in Finnish universities. Salary would tell who is good and who is not so good. In-equality and in-justice are believed to create to a healthy society. Fits nicely with neo-liberalistic thinking. The importance of rotation was also emphasized. In practice this meant that people were forced to move to new rooms. Some consultant had managed to convince leaders that this would enhance creativity! Some unlucky ones were rotated twice: probably this was not an accident. The loss of safety about basic survival was believed to enhance creativity: young researchers were given only only a few years to demonstrate their ability to produce publications and in the case of a failure the equivalent for the fate of laboratory rat was waiting. The notion of academic assembly line emerged in Finland as it did everywhere. Now it is becoming clear how devastating effect the too early and too narrow specialization has had. Here might be the basic reason for why the super-strings have survived as long as 20 years as a dominating paradigm although the successes of this approach are comparable to those in biology during the days of Lysenko. During the highest high of market economy thinking even the replacement of science leaders with professional managers without any education in science was considered seriously. Nobel was declared to be the basic goal, not the passion for understanding as such. There was even a flow diagram for how to achieve Nobel. You must make the discovery before the age of thirty years, and spend the life between discovery and Nobel as a science salesman travelling around the globe selling you discovery to any influental one who it might concern. It was made clear that the people at the top know best what kind of research leads to Nobel. Focusing was the key word. A lot of money was feeded to bio-technology and many business oriented people realized that bio-technology was a royal road to financial success. It did not occur to anyone that also individuals with passion and ideas might be needed and the output from this financial focusing was scandalously small. At the same time those very few individuals who were carrying out really original work rather than competing for doing first something which would be in any case done within a year or two, were actively discouraged. For instance, Kajander, who has done very original work with nannobacteria (a candidate for a new kind of life form) has done most of his research with his own expense and has been a victim of systematic ridiculing by his colleagues. He was even threatened with law suit for scientific fraud. I am myself a second example about this kind of active suppression and still suffering it. The great promise of arroganzia was that the new science-as-a-jungle vision would guarantee Finland its first Nobel in physics before 2006. We are at the deadline now and I am eagerly waiting to see who did it! Matti PitkanenThursday, March 17, 2005
Evidence for Many-Sheeted Space-Time in RHIC?!
While performing the usual morning walk in the web I encountered an astonishing news fragment from the latest New Scientist. Since it was not April First I decided to glue the fragment here, and felt extremely frustrated of not being able to continue reading without subscribing to New Scientist. The article was by Eugenie Samuel Reich in New Scientist 19 March 2005, issue 2491. It turned out that this piece of data led to a beatiful unification of several loosely related pieces of TGD.
A fireball created in a particle accelerator bears a striking resemblance to a black hole - but thankfully not the sort that could consume the Earth. A FIREBALL created in a particle accelerator bears a striking similarity to a black hole. But don't panic: even if the controversial claim is true, it is not the sort of black hole that would cause Earth to disappear in a puff of radiation. At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, beams of gold nuclei travelling at close to the speed of light are smashed into each other. The intense heat of the collision breaks down the nuclei into quarks and gluons, the most basic building blocks of all normal matter. These particles form a ball of plasma about 300 million times hotter than the surface of the sun (New Scientist, 16 October 2004, p 35). The fireball, which lasts a mere 10-23 seconds, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the collision. But 10 times as many ...Here it ended! Just when the fireball had started to absorb jets of particles! What a pity! Next day I went to RHIC homepage and found that Physics Today article What Have We Learned From the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider? gives a nice account about experimental findings. Extremely high collision energies are in question: Gold nuclei contain energy of about 100 GeV per nucleon: 100 times proton mass. The expectation was that a large volume of thermalized Quark-Gluon Plasma (QCP) is formed in which partons lose rapidly their transverse momentum. The great surprise was the suppression of high transverse momentum collisions suggesting that in this phase strong collective interactions are present. This has inspired the proposal that quark gluon plasma is preceded by liquid like phase which has been christened as Color Glass Condensate (CGC) thought to contain Bose-Einstein condensate of gluons. I also learned that there is M-theory inspired article "The RHIC fireball as a dual black hole" by Hortiu Nastase (hep-th/0501068). I read the article but it could not inspire me too much. In the following I try to articulate TGD inspired impressions.
Minibang model for the events
I have written already earlier about the unexpected properties of the quark-gluon plasma (see Simulating Big Bang in laboratory. At that time the puzzle was the observed breaking of longitudinal Lorentz boost invariance for rapidity distributions reported already 2002. This has been later interpreted in terms of strong collective interactions due to liquid like character of the phase in question. The proposed model was based on direct scaling of TGD inspired very early cosmology to hadronic context. TGD inspired cosmology involves cosmic string dominated phase during which ordinary notion of 3-space does not make sense. The cosmic strings decay to ordinary matter and space-time in the usual sense emerges during quantum critical period with flat 3-space: this cosmology is fixed completely apart the parameter fixing its duration. Then follows the ordinary cosmology with sub-critical density. A direct translation of this picture to hadronic context would suggest following.- The color-glass condensate (CQC) believed to correspond to a Bose-Einstein condensate gluons, which has been introduced later, could correspond to the period dominated by color magnetic flux tubes containing the gluon condensates. These strings could be also seen as TGD counterparts black holes in the sense that the mass is determined by the length of the string just as the mass of black hole is determined by its radius. This picture conforms with the description as an incompressible liquid flow. In TGD based view about hydrodynamics the flow lines of liquid flow correspond to magnetic (em, Z^0, or color: as you like) flux tubes and the local incompressibility of the flow corresponds to the vanishing divergence of the magnetic field telling that there are no magnetic charges.
- The critical period with flat 3-space to the phase transition to radiation dominated cosmology identifiable as QGP.
- Hadronization would correspond to the transition to matter dominated cosmology.
Conformal confinement as TGD counterpart of CGC?
The next twist in the story was the shocking finding, compared to Columbus's discovery of America, was that, rather than behaving as a dilute gas, the plasma behaved like a liquid with strong correlations between partons, and having density 30-50 times higher than predicted by QCD calculations. Liquid character means strong correlations. When I learned about these findings, I proposed how TGD might explain them in terms of what I called (see conformal confinement). Since I was doing busily some other things, I did not have time to find how earlier picture could relate to this new idea. In TGD super canonical conformal weights of particles are predicted to be complex and closely related to complex zeros of Riemann Zeta. For physical states the net conformal weight must be always real and this forces what I call conformal confinement and strong correlations between composite particles and could give the system liquid like characteristics. In the ordinary phase conformal confinement would occur already at single parton level meaning that quarks and gluons would be always conformal "singlets". One can of course wonder whether the difference between valence and sea quarks might relate to conformal confinement. Whether conformal confinement is needed at all or whether it really occurs for Bose-Einstein condensed gluons at color magnetic flux tubes and makes them to behave like a single particle, is a fascinating question. An equally interesting question is whether ordinary liquid flow could involve Bose-Einstein condensates of particles which are not "conformal singlets".Classical gravitation and color confinement
Just some time ago it became clear that strong classical gravitation might play a key role in the understanding of color confinement (see TGD and QCD. Whether situation looks confinement or asymptotic freedom would be in the eyes of beholder: one example of dualities filling TGD Universe. If you look the situation at the hadronic space-time sheet you have asymptotic freedom, particles move essentially like free massless particles. But, and this is absolutely essential, in the induced metric of hadronic space-time sheet. This metric represents classical gravitational field becoming extremely strong near hadronic boundary. From the point of view of outsider, the motion of quarks slows down to rest when they approach hadronic boundary: confinement. The distance to hadron surface is infinite or at least very large since the induced metric becomes singular at the light-like boundary! Also hadronic time ceases to run near the boundary and finite hadronic time corresponds to infinite time of observer. When you look from outside you find that this light-like 3-surface is just static surface like a black hole horizon which is also a light-like 3-surface. Hence confinement.Dark matter in TGD
The evidence for hadronic blackhole like structures is especially fascinating. In TGD Universe dark matter can be (not always) ordinary matter at larger space-time sheets in particular magnetic flux tubes. The mere fact that the particles are at larger space-time sheets might make them more or less invisible. Matter can be however dark in much stronger sense, should I use the word "black"! The findings suggesting that planetary orbits obey Bohr rules with gigantic Planck constant (see Gravitational Schrödinger equation as a quantum model for the formation of astrophysical structures and dark matter?) would suggest quantum coherence of dark matter even in astrophysical length scales and this raises the fascinating possibility that Planck constant is dynamical so that fine structure constant for these charged coherent states would be proportional to 1/hbar_gr and extremely small: hence darkness. This quantization saves from blackhole collapse just as the quantization of hydrogen atom saves from infrared catastrophe. The obvious questions are whether- black hole like objects/magnetic flux tubes/cosmic strings could consist of quantum coherent dark matter, and whether
- this quantum coherence is due to the conformal confinement. This would be of enormous importance even for the understanding of living matter since dark matter at magnetic flux tubes could be responsible for the quantum control of the ordinary matter in TGD inspired biology.
Description of RHIC events in terms of hadronic blackhole
The following view about RHIC events represents my immediate reaction to the latest RHIC news in terms of black-hole physics instead of notions related to big bang. Since black hole collapse is roughly time reversal of big bang, the description is complementary to the earliest one. In TGD context one can ask whether the fireballs possibly detected in RHIC are produced when a portion of quark-gluon plasma in the collision region formed by to Gold nuclei separates to form a larger space-time sheet separated from the remaining collision region by a lightlike 3-D surface (I have used to speak about light-like causal determinants) mathematically completely analogous to a black hole horizon. A formation of an analog of blackhole would indeed be in question. Of course, the relationship between mass and radius would be completely different with gravitational constant presumably replacement by the the square of appropriate p-adic length scale presumably of order pion Compton length. I have long time ago in the context of p-adic mass calculations formulated quantitatively the notion of elementary particle blackhole analogy making the notion of elementary particle horizon and generalization of Hawking-Bekenstein law. Could one then regard this space-time sheet as a larger space-time sheet to which matter from the exterior flows in? This would seem reasonable since p-adic length scale would be larger than p-adic length scale characterizing nucleons. It must be however emphasized that the hadrons have complex many-sheeted structure since quarks feed their em, color, and Z^0 gauge fluxes to different space-time sheets. The size L of the "hadronic blackhole" would be relatively large using protonic Compton radius as a unit of length. Pion Compton radius is a rather reasonable first order of magnitude guess for L. The density of partons would be very high and large fraction of them would have been materialized from the brehmstrahlung produced by the de-accelerating nuclei. Partons would be gravitationally confined inside this region. The interactions of partons or conformal confinement would lead to a generation of a liquid like dense phase and a rapid thermalization would occur. The collisions of partons producing high transverse momentum partons occurring inside this region would yield no detectable high p_T jets since the matter coming out from this region would be somewhat like a thermal radiation from an evaporating black hole. This space-time sheet would expand and cool down to QQP and crystallize into hadrons. For a more detailed discussion of the still continuing intense interaction between theoretical ideas and RHIC findings see the chapter TGD and Cosmology of TGD. Matti PitkanenWednesday, March 16, 2005
No Cosmological Constant After All?
The article Primordial Inflation Explains Why the Universe is Accelerating Today by Rocky Kolb of Fermilab, together with Sabino Matarrese, Alessio Notari and Antonio Riotto has inspired an interesting discussion in Not-Even-Wrong. There's also a Fermilab press release about it today.
The pleasant surprise was that the usual crackpot abusing was absent and the discussion was exceptionally civilized and interesting. There was a nice comment about experimental problems related to the detection of acceleration of Universe. I had a temptation to comment but know that my comment would be probably doomed to be off-topic so that I represent my comment here and try to get through a short comment with a link.
The cosmological constant was assigned to what was called a super-Hubble perturbation of gravitational field extending over cosmological horizon. The first objection was that the situation outside Hubble patch cannot affect the dynamics inside it. Furthermore, super-Hubble fluctuations are equivalent with anisotropic cosmology: data are however consistent with isotropic acceleration. The latter objection sounds to me rather serious.
The idea about interaction with super-Hubble perturbations has some resemblance to TGD explanation based on the notion of many-sheeted space-time. In many-sheeted cosmology the cosmological space-time sheets larger than Hubble radius take the role of super-Hubble fluctuations and can affect the dynamics also in shorter length scales. In TGD framework the explanation of acceleration is based on a new delicate effect related to the manner how the photons from a remote object arrive at the detector. The second difference is that inflationary scenario is replaced with quantum criticality implying flatness of 3-space. Metric is fixed apart from a parameter fixing the duration of the critical period.
In many-sheeted cosmology each cosmological space-time sheet is characterized by its own cosmological constant decreasing with the size L of space-time sheet as 1/L^2. The spectrum of L is discrete and comes in powers of sqrt(2) by p-adic length scale hypothesis. Since the photons from a distant object arrive along space-time sheet having size at least of order of distance d to the object, the prediction for the observed cosmological constant is indeed acceptable and decreases with distance and thus with temporal distance.
Since gravitational energy density decreases when the size of the space-time sheet increases, Hubble constant increases and the increase of acceleration with the size of space-time sheet gives rise to an apparent acceleration with respect to cosmic time. Jerks in the acceleration are predicted when the size of space-time sheet carrying the photons increases by power of sqrt(2).
The paradoxes emerge when a collection of sub-cosmologies corresponding to different Hubble and cosmological constants is lumped to a single cosmology. This is of course unavoidable as long as one sticks to the standard view about space-time. As in elementary particle physics also now the fact that there is an entire hierarchy of scales resolves the almost paradoxes of single-sheeted physics relying on the existence of single scale characterized by Planck length. Of course, also now all length scales are expressible in terms of CP_2 size using p-adic length scale hypothesis.
Dark energy and matter have very natural identifications in TGD framework. The magnetic energy of magnetic flux tubes is responsible for the dark energy. Ordinary matter at magnetic flux tubes could be responsible for dark matter. The flow of matter between space-time sheets changes dark matter to visible matter and vice versa and this process has various applications in TGD. For instance, solar corona and recently observed too low chemical abundances at solar surface have nice explanation in terms of dark matter at flux tubes of solar magnetic field.
Matti Pitkänen
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
M-Domino Continues Falling Down
Science journalists are becoming increasingly aware about the catastrophic situation in M-theory, formerly called string theory, as the latest article Theory of everything' tying researchers up in knots demonstrates. Strong tensions are created in physics departments. In Boston University the conclusion that string theory is not physics was already made. Now Stanford physics department is split in two in the issue. There are good reasons to expect that dominoes begin to fall any time.
No doubt, the fight is now about jobs rather than between scientific ideas: thousands of string theorists have extremely narrow understanding about physics and it is inconceivable that all of them can find a safe place in math departments. And where the people specialized to the weird subject of string phenomenology could go?
I must honestly admit that this is my dream. Having been mercilessly suppressed and censored for two decades and decade ago I lost the possibility to get anything about my lifework published or to arXiv.org is only one aspect of what it is to lose human rights. And this for the sole and simple reason that TGD was too serious competitor of M-theory. After all that I have experienced during these 26 years I have to fight to keep my faith in humanity. Some of the last articles that I got to arXiv.org were about p-adic mass calculations at the time when second superstring revolution occurred. That Roger Penrose cites in US edition of The Road to Reality the first of these papers makes clear the motivations for the censorship.
Just sometime ago I learned from a person who had asked opinion of my colleagues in Finland about TGD that they are still telling that my work contains nothing which might be called mathematics even at the level of ordinary differential equations! This despite that Mathematical Subject Classification Tables have link to TGD in the section about new mathematics related to quantum theory! By the way, a decade or so I was accused of being too mathematical and philosophical but when it became clear that physics is becoming very mathematical they made complete strategic turn around!
But TGD is patiently waiting for its time to come. It will come sooner or later. There is no other option since physics is much more than these respected professors in their respected institutes and does not ask from them the permission to evolve.
Matti Pitkänen
Further Empirical Support for Many-Sheeted Space-Time
The notion of many-sheeted space-time has been continually receiving qualitative support from various anomalies. During last week I had opportunity to visit in the library of Helsinki University and read latest New Scientists. I find it fair to express my gratitude to the New Scientist as a journal which has kept alive my belief that there are still people doing real physics even in these gloomy days of M-hegemony. There were several articles telling about strange findings which could be understood using the notion of many-sheeted space-time.
First dark matter galaxy found
The New Scientist 26 February 2005, vol 185 No 2488 contained an article with title First Dark Galaxy Found. The galaxy is located at a distance of 10^7 light years. It contains 1 per cent hydrogen gas and and 99 per cent dark matter and is identified by 21 cm hydrogen line: hence the name VIRGOH21. The amount of dark matter counts as 10^8 average stars. The natural TGD inspired identification of dark matter is as matter at larger space-time sheets, possibly in macroscopic quantum state of astrophysical size with a gigantic Planck constant. For background for this and following considerations see the article Gravitational Schrödinger equation as a quantum model for the formation of astrophysical structures and dark matter? or the chapter TGD and Astrophysics. Dark galaxy would be only one example. Dark matter planets are also predicted and the two lowest Bohr orbits around Sun could correspond to dark matter flux tubes, less probably dark planets. A fascinating possibility is that even black holes would be in a more microscopic description structures consisting of dark matter inside horizon radius. Since the metric would be in the first approximation Schwartschild metric outside the horizon, these structures would look like black holes for all practical purposes. M-theorists have made a lot of hype about microscopic description of black holes: is even this victory of M-theory is illusory? Too cruel to be true?Chemical compositions at the surface of Sun and dark matter as matter at larger space-time sheets
Physics in Action, February 2005, vol 18, No 2 contained the popular article Chemical Controversy at the Solar Surface by J. Bahcall. The article describes the problems created by results reported in the article The Solar Chemical Decomposition by M. Asplund, N. Grevesse, J. Sauval (astro-ph/0410214). The abundances of C, N, O, Ne, Ar at the solar surface are about 30-40 per cent less than predicted by the standard solar model. This is the discovery. If these abundances are feeded into the standard solar model as input the predictions change in the range .45R-.73R of distances from solar interior (R is solar radius). In particular, sound velocity is predicted incorrectly. Interestingly, these abundances are consistent with the abundances in gaseous medium in the neighborhood of our galaxy. In TGD framework a possible solution of paradox comes from already old model of solar corona and solar magnetic field (see TGD and Astrophysics). Part of matter resides as dark matter at magnetic and Z^0 magnetic flux tubes of Sun (dark energy) and enters to the solar corona along these. That also gaseous medium in the neighborhood of our galaxy contains same abundances suggests that the formation of Sun has proceeded by a transformation of part of dark matter to a visible matter by leakage to space-time sheets visible to us. This is indeed what TGD inspired model for the formation of solar system based on quantal dark matter suggests.How to create dark matter in laboratory...
The creation of dark matter at laboratory is of course the crucial test. The hints for what to do come already from the findings of Tesla, which did not fit completely with Maxwell's electrodynamics (, which, using M-theory inspired jargon, had become "the only known classical theory of electromagnetism",) and were thus forgotten. To transform visible matter to dark matter in laboratory one might try to generate conditions in which visible matter leaks to larger space-time sheets. What one could try is to generate pulsed current of electrons. For instance, current could flow to a circuit component acting as a charge reservoir. When the circuit is opened, and current cannot leave the charge reservoir, a situation analogous to a traffic jam occurs and some electrons might leak to larger space-time sheets via join along boundaries bonds generated in the process. Di-electric breakdown along larger space-time sheet would be in question. Recoil effects and zero point kinetic energy liberated as ionizing radiation would serve as a signature of the process. The production of dark matter might occur also in the usual di-electric breakdown and lead to the appearance of electrons in much larger volume after it partially re-enters original space-time sheets. The change of zero point kinetic energy would be liberated as radiation and would cause formation of plasma. Tesla detected dramatic effects of this kind in experiments utilizing sharp pulses...or has it already been done?
Modanese and Podkletnov (see E. Podkletnov and G. Modanese (2002), Investigation of high voltage discharges in low pressure gases through large ceramic super-conducting electrodes, physics/0209051, have made a fascinating discovery suggesting that some new form of radiation is generated in the di-electric breakdown of a capacitor at low temperature. This radiation induces oscillatory motion of test penduli but, and this is very strange, its intensity is not reduced with distance. The TGD based explanation would be in terms of either "topological light rays" or what I call in honor of Tesla "scalar wave pulses" (much like a capacitor moving with velocity of light predicted by TGD but not allowed by Maxwell's ED). This radiation would induce the formation of join along boundaries bonds between atomic and larger space-time sheets and part of electrons from penduli would leak to larger space-time sheets and their motion would result as a recoil effect. The radiation would have only the role of control signal and this would explain why its intensity is not weakened. From the point of view of single sheeted space-time an over-unity device would be in question since the zero point kinetic energy would be transformed to kinetic energy. The transformation of visible matter to dark matter is in TGD Universe the basic mechanism of metabolism predicting universality of metabolic energy currencies and living matter in TGD Universe has developed a refined machinery to recycle the dropped charges back to the atomic space-time sheets to be used again. Combined with time mirror mechanism this makes, not a perpetuum mobile, but an extremely flexible mechanism of metabolism. Matti PitkänenSunday, March 06, 2005
About Role Models and Stagnation in Physics
Since I have a tendency of developing stupid addictions I visited also this morning Not-Even-Wrong and Lubos Motl's blogs although I have many times decided that I stop wasting time in this manner. Peter Woit's Not-Even-Wrong contained comments about Higgs search. I would have had a lot to say but it would be a waste of time to respond anything since Peter Woit carefully censors out every non-orthodox thought.
Lubos Motl had already told with his characteristic besser-wisser tone that Higgs will be found, told also the probable mass of Higgs, and also made it clear that Higgs would be only few days celebrity. What would be less trivial would be finding discovery of SUSY. It is useless to try to discuss about possible lessons taught by the fact that Higgs has been believed to be found next year for two decades and is still missing. These people do not discuss, they know. In a second posting Lubos called in original Lubos-like manner Peter Woit as well as his readers idiots.
At Preposterous Universe Sean Carroll said with necessary do-not-take-me-wrong's in his posting "Science, Theatre, Audience, Reader" that Richard Feynman was a pretty narrow guy. To say something like this about a man who has served as the role model of particle physicists during several generations, was a sacrilege. Lubos Motl came to help Richard. After the warm paragraphs about Richard Feynman as a human being and a genius physicist the defense of Feynman had changed to a personal attack against Sean Carroll and the real motivations for the posting became clear. As becomes clear from Lubos's page, he is ultra-hawk and opportunist to extreme whereas Sean Carroll has more human attitudes about how we should live in this world. Two different opinions: therefore either person must be an idiot, and Lubos as a cowboy born in Czech do not hesitate to tell who.
It is difficult to not admire Richard Feynman but there is an old Buddhist saying "Kill Buddha if you meet him at the road". Sounds blood thirsty but what this says that in the road to self realization we must get rid of all role models, be they Buddhas, Einsteins or Feynmans.
What makes Lubos Motl and others behave like 10 year old boys telling that my father, be it Feynman or Witten, will beat your father? With the experience of few decades I find it easy to guess the answer. Feynman has been a role model number one for generations of theoretical physicists. Extremely intelligent, easy going, open, social, having a good sense of humor, not tolerating pompous fools. Feynman was a genius but had also the dark side. In particular, Richard Feynman felt disgust towards philosophical problems of physics, and this has made several generations of physicists philosophical dummies! Role models are deadly important.
In the year 2005 one cannot bypass Einstein. I once read Einstein's summary about this life and what fascinated me that he mentioned so many times the word "consciousness". Obviously he had become deeply aware that the mystery of consciousness is the biggest problems of physics and entire human kind. Why his message did not reach the physicists?
Perhaps the fact that Einstein is more like a God and therefore very dangerous as a role model. Quite many physicists having temptation to use their own brains have learned what happens to those who think they can do what is allowed for gods only. Perhaps this God likeness prevented Einstein's fatherly figure to become as a role model allowing also the physicist to philosophize. Freely-going Feynman won and still good manners prevent from uttering the word "consciousness" aloud as I have learned personally in Not-Even-Wrong. During last decade some notable exceptions have however appeared. Roger Penrose has done a fantastic favor by having the courage to propose even concrete ideas about the relation of quantum and consciousness. This has opened many flood gates but the majority of theoretical physicists continues to live in the past.
Role models and ten-year-old syndrome
I have seen a very touching TV document about a person who had suffered a blow in this head and returned to the boy age. Outsider's did not notice appreciable changes but his wife had painfully experienced the tragic of how a man and lover becomes a little boy spending hours looking trains on the station and loses something about what it is to be a mature adult. A physicist without philosophy is like a person who has remained in pre-puberty for all his life. This ten-year-old boy loves all kinds of technical things, is extremely practice oriented, and admires technical skills more than anything else, be it computer hackerism or symbol manipulation. This 10-year-old seems to lack the reflective level of consciousness, interest and ability to talk about what he feels, what it is to be conscious. Building an atomic bomb is just an interesting technical challenge for him. The social skills of this ten-year-old are extremely limited: typically open aggression and fight or flight reactions. This is just what I see again and again in these physics blogs. And I am afraid that these blogs are only scaled down versions of our society: consider only these top executives receiving salaries having absolutely no correlation with their contributions to the well-fare of society. These people are continually making bitter comments about too high taxes! A little bit self reflection, ability to imagine what it to be that another person, and the ability to see oneself with the eyes of other people would tell how a-social this kind of behavior is. But ten-year-old is too young for this. If the philosophical thinking of physicists is at the level of ten year old boy, it is clear that it must have a decisive effect to physics itself. After days of Einstein and fathers of quantum physics nothing genuinely new philosophical ideas has been discovered in physics. Even gauge theories were relatively straightforward generalization of QED, the mathematics involved was implicitly contained in general relativity. String models are nothing more than quantum dynamics of strings in N-dimensional space. All ideas have been methodology oriented. For instance, path integral as a definition of quantum theory have become a taboo, discussions are only about technical tricks like Wick rotation, and how to construct action principles with required symmetries and how to calculate. Lubos Motl characterized quite precisely the situation when he compared one of his string heroes to a computer cracker. In the following I make a list of the problems which I see as having bottleneck role. I do not pretend that I would not have proposed solutions to these problems during the long 26 period of developing TGD to a mathematically sound physical theory with a sound interpretation. In fact, I have become conscious of these problems via TGD. I however do not say much about these solutions and want to reminder about the necessity of killing all Buddhas whom you meet at the road.Problems of quantum measurement theory
The paradoxes of the quantum measurement theory require a theory of observer. Physicists is modelled at fundamental level as a conscious physical system able to have intentions and realize them. Not as an outsider inducing state function reductions and preparations as nowadays. This requires the understanding of mathematical and physical correlates of consciousness, cognition, sensory experience,... The physics of living systems provides the obvious application for the new physics to be discovered when this challenge is taken seriously. The notions of macroscopic and macrotemporal quantum coherence would be very attractive as far as the physics of living systems is considered. Unfortunately, the standard physicist suffering ten-year-old syndrome and loving various technical instruments is absolutely convinced that universe above molecular length scales is also machine, and denies the possibility that engineer might be something more than a machine.The problem of time
The paradoxical relationship between experienced time and geometric time of physicist tells that something goes badly wrong when we identify these two times. Consider only the irreversibility of experienced time and reversibility of geometric time. It seems incredible that professional scientist could just completely neglect this kind of problem but so they do. Energy is quantum mechanically dual to time, and indeed, the notions of inertial and gravitational masses do not seem to be quite equivalent although Einstein postulates in his Equivalence Principle. In particular, inertial energy is conserved unlike gravitational energy.Reductionistic dogma
The dogma of reductionism is cherished and empirical facts which do not fit with it are not empirical facts. I believed for a long time that chemistry must be something which is nothing but Schrödinger equation for so complex systems that we cannot deduce the notion of chemical bond from basic principles. But when TGD led to the realization that chemical bond can be understood as a non-trivial space-time topology, floodgates of my mind opened and I started to realize how enormous self deception our belief on reductionism is. Reductionism fails in every transition between two physics, be they quark- and hadronic phyiscs or atomic- and molecular physics. It became also clear what are the reasons for long lasting stagnation in nuclear physics manifesting as endless number of models explaining some observations but failing in some other aspects. The stagnation of particle physics which has lasted now 20 years is the nuclear story scaled down to the hadronic length scale. M-theory performs the final super-reductionistic scaling down to Planck length scale. The outcome is a theory which even at the level of principle is unable to predict anything testable and now the message is that physics community should accept this. For a decade ago they still predicted low energy super-symmetries but not they make only statements of form "If A then B". The concept of self-organization is one of the developing ideas based on the empirical realization that hard boiled reductionism does not work. It does not seem to have effect on the naive mind frame of average particle physicist.The notion of (conscious) information
Although theories of quantum computation are being developed, there still exist no genuine measure of information, even less that of conscious information in standard physics framework. Only the notion of entropy exists which means that only change of information identified as the negative of entropy gradient is definable in this conceptual framework. Deeper questions relate to the physical correlates of experience of understanding, of conscious information processing, cognition, mathematical thinking: the list is long. I have proposed for a couple of years number theoretic information measures generalizing Shannon entropy existing in the case that entanglement probabilities are rational (or even algebraic) numbers: absolutely no response. These ten-year- olds believe that all interesting about information measures was said by Shannon.Dark matter
Dark matter is one of the great mysteries of recent day physics. Ten-year-olds solve this problem instantaneously: postulate just some exotic particle with suitably fine tuned properties, christen it X-on, and that's it. As a 54-year old I am convinced that the solution of this problem involves unforeseen revolution in the world view, that dark matter and living matter are closely related, that macroscopic quantum coherence in astrophysical length scales is involved, and even that the Planck constant might be actually dynamical although quantized. TGD leads to a rather detailed theory about this and there are some extremely intriguing experimental findings supporting the theory.Symmetries and symmetry breaking
Symmetries and symmetry breaking have been the basic themes of physics of the last century. There is a huge variety of generalizations of standard model creating more problems than solving them. Experiments however seem to point out unequivocally to a simple conclusion: standard model symmetries are something much more deeper than originally thought. In particular, proton is stable which suggests strongly that lepton and quark numbers are separately conserved. Unfortunately, the existing theories in the market give not a slightest idea about why this is the case. For instance, in M-theory the symmetry group can be practically anything. In TGD framework the highly philosophically oriented vision about physics as a generalized number theory allows to understand the standard model symmetries purely number theoretically being naturally associated with quaternions and octonions. Higgs is the black sheet of standard model. After decades of optimistic search Higgs has not been found and it is matter of years when the situation is believed to be settled finally. One might imagine that this kind of situation could have inspired deeper questions about the real mechanism of particle massivation instead of a purely technical problem of modelling it by the conventional recipes of gauge field theory. But, as we already know, ten-year-olds do not philosophize. Neutrinos as extremely weakly interacting particles at all energies is also an instance of cherished beliefs that characterize the mental landscape of a ten-year-old. Despite the accumulating experimental evidence for the opposite at very low neutrino energies, this dogma remains unchallenged and Peter Woit censors out everything suggesting that this belief might be wrong. A fascinating example about symmetry breaking is chiral selection in living matter meaning that bio-molecules of only second handedness appear in living matter. This is extremely difficult to understand in the framework of standard model where parity breaking is predicted but is ridiculously small as compared to the breaking needed to explain chiral selection. I have talked for about two decades about the solution of this problem in terms of classical long range Z^0 fields predicted by TGD but in vain. All that relates to weak interactions are taboos for ten-year-olds. As also that which relates to strong interactions at nuclear physics level: consider only the furor that the claims about cold fusion created.Quantum gravitation and theories of everything
Quantum gravitation is nowadays identified as a synonym for the theory of everything. The problem is seen as unification of general relativity and quantum theory. Taboos so typical at cognitive level of a ten-year-old prevail also there.- The ad hoc assumption about Planck length as the single and only fundamental length is forced by the reductionistic dogma. This despite the fact that the most obvious fact from particle mass spectrum is the presence of several mass scales. No one in publishable literature has asked whether mass scale might appear as one parameter in mass formula and possibly provide deep understanding of the particle masses using simple general mass formulas.
- The actual existence of black-holes is taken as a fact despite that black holes represent mathematical singularity of general relativity. In the similar manner big bang singularity is taken as blind faith.
- Quantum theory is defined as path integral formalism without any questioning of tricks like Wick rotation. No one is worried by the fact that path integral formalism is abstracted from quantum mechanics based on Newtonian notion of time, is not absolutely necessary from the point of fundamental quantum theory, and is ad hoc generalization from that applying in wave mechanics, and is mathematically poorly defined even there. The nice feature of path integrals is that they give meaning to the classical limit of the theory. But also Bohr orbits do this. Could one perhaps make a partial return to the early days of quantum mechanics? What about trying to follow the steps of Bohr to solve black hole collapse by introducing quantum theory just as Bohr solved infrared catastrophe in case of hydrogen atom? This with a very good reason since there is considerable evidence about Bohr orbit like quantization in astrophysical systems but with a gigantic value of Planck constant. No-one considers the possibility that classical theory might be much more than product of stationary phase approximation and perhaps definable by a generalization of the notion of Bohr orbit. No one asks whether one might generalize Einstein's program of geometrizing classical physics to geometrization of quantum physics. No. This would be philosophizing.
- Why the space-time dimension is four? This is one of the basic problems of unified theories, or was before TGD answered it. For 20 years ago when super-strings emerged it was still believed that this problem would be soon understood. After the failure of Kaluza-Klein approach and subsequent brane world approach, the brave conclusion was that we just happen to live on brane which is 4-dimensional: there is nothing fundamental involved. Only a ten-year-old could have the arrogance to claim as a final truthsomething which has not a slightest empirical support.
Anomalies
A good manner to begin a lecture related to standard model is to say "The problem of standard model is that is has no problems". This statement could not be farther from truth. During these 26 years I have gone through the entire physics from early cosmology to bio-systems and again and again encountered anomalies put under the rug by the establishment. The mere listing of these anomalies would make a 2-hour lecture and therefore I mention only some examples. Biology represents a gigantic collection of anomalies. What makes bio-matter living, chiral selection, self-organization, self-assembly,... There is a whole bundle of anomalies related to the notion of "free energy": free energy experimenters are of course labelled as crackpots. The usual comment is that these fellows have not heard about the law of conservation of energy, second law of thermodynamics, etc.,etc.. No one takes them seriously although already experimenters like Faraday and Tesla observed phenomena challenging even so cherished a theory as Maxwell's electrodynamics.Methodologically competent idiocy
There are also meta problems and methodologically competent idiocy relates very closely to ten-year-old syndrome. The over-emphasis of methology has led to a situation that the construction of the theory of everything is seen as a problem of guessing the action defining path integral giving rise to n-point functions and S-matrix. This of course sounds ridiculous and is ridiculous, and only ten-year-olds could take this kind of dogmatism seriously. Path integrals do not exist mathematically. Hence one might think that even most hard boiled technician might be ready to consider the possibility that something is fatally wrong, and that finding what this something wrong is, might add one person to the gallery of role models of physics. Unfortunately, it was Feynman who discovered path integrals, and it would be a professional suicide to philosophize that Feynman might have been somehow wrong. Therefore the unsuccessful war against infinities continues just like the unsuccessful war against terrorists. Certainly a real progress in physics requires that physicists grow finally adults. This means adopting a problem centered approach instead of narrow-minded thinking of a computer genius.Concluding
I do not pretend of not feeling deep frustration. During these 26 years I have developed an extremely refined unified theory extending physics to a theory of consciousness, predicting a revolution in world view, and suggesting even completely new technologies making possible things which we have not even dared to dream of. And most importantly, this theory explains the existing facts from space-time dimension to the standard model symmetries, and makes testable predictions for a new physics. Huge bursts of creative activity in physics could be initiated at any time. But, how on Earth can I communicate all this or anything to ten-year-old infantiles? Matti PitkanenFriday, March 04, 2005
About civilized blog behavior and neutrinoless double beta decay
In Not-Even-Wrong there was a comment about The Rare Symmetry Violating Processes (RSVP) project in which the goal is to detect processes like photon-less conversion of muon into electron. This inspired me to send a comment about neutrino-less double beta decay for which some evidence is claimed to exist. The message was rejected.
Myth about extremely interacting neutrinos
The most probable motivation of Peter Woit for censoring was the naive text book wisdom about neutrinos as those elusive particles which traverse through kilometers of steel without interacting. Of course, standard model neutrinos are extremely weakly interacting, yes, but this statement has been experimentally verified only at sufficiently high neutrino energies, and there exists a lot of evidence that at poorly tested low neutrino energies situation is different. Tritium beta decay anomaly is one example: that even tachyons have been proposed to explain this phenomenon tells how strong the myth about extremely weakly interacting neutrinos really is. There is also evidence that the mass scale of neutrino depends on the environment: something in a complete contradiction with the myth about elusiveness. Also evidence for oscillations of weak nuclear decay rates in astrophysical time scales exists. All these anomalies have been put under the rug. The links given at the end of the posting contain references related to these anomalies. TGD indeed predicts at very low neutrino energy range something which cannot be read from popular text books. In particular, the age old mystery of chiral selection of bio-molecules essential for bio-catalysis finds a nice explanation from classical long ranged Z^0 force predicted by TGD to exist and play key role in bio length scales. During these years I have found that questioning of the neutrino myth gives you immediately the label of crackpot. Everyone knows the stories of Koch and Wegener but it is difficult to realize that the power of collective stupidity in science community is still the same.Methologically competent idiotism
The extreme narrow mindedness of so many colleagues (of course, I sincerely hope that those making most of the noise in physics blogs are exceptions) makes me really sad. There are too many theoreticians (especially M-) whose competence is obviously restricted to a mere mechanical application of very advanced mathematical methods. The deeper understanding of physical theories and, most importantly, the understanding of their limits of applicability, is lacking. Sometimes crackpots have much better overall view about the limits and anomalies of existing theories than these young methodological genii. One can learn the limits of existing theory only by developing a new theory. Although Peter Woit does a good job in pointing out the situation in M theory, it has become more and more clear that his real motivation is not the state of M-theory but the inability to tolerate any new ideas. I do not however want to believe that the motivations relate to the personal competence as a theoretical physicist as his group theoretic musings "Wick Rotation", which inspired the nasty comment "theatre critics should never start acting himself", might suggest. All of us of course make blunders sometimes.Cowboy mentality
My visits to physics blogs have been valuable and helped to understand why the situation in theoretical physics is what it is, and why it is so difficult to change it. The colossal arrogance of particle physicists is familiar to me but I was surprised that 90 percent of discussion is exchange of personal insults in blogs. Here I must express myself more accurately: the mad house like blogs have been in US. If you try to inject some fresh point of view with good argumentation and references about the intended topic of discussion to these blogs, the changes are fifty-fifty for getting it through while these casually written insults full of typos get through without any difficulty. Is it that the real motivation is the desire of the blog keeper to remain the king of the hill? Or is it indeed that these people as Americans feel themselves somehow superior? How American phenomenon this cowboy mentality is and how much of it is a result of natural selection in jungle like academic environments like Harward? I visited in some physics blogs at the old continent, and found that the situation was much better: people seem to behave most of the time like intelligent human beings with civilized manners.Neutrinoless double beta decay and TGD
After this lengthy and emotional (sorry, I have not learned to tolerate academic stupidity) introduction some words about the topic. Neutrinoless double beta decay (NBD) process is possible only for Majorana neutrinos and according to New Scientist September 4, 2004 there is some experimental evidence for a process looking like NBD. In TGD NBD is not possible but classical Z^0 force and the presence of condensed matter neutrinos make possible a double beta decay in which either or both of decaying neutrons absorb condensed matter neutrino so that the net energy of emitted electrons is larger than for the normal double beta decay and a signature resembling that to identify NBDs experimentally results. The classical Z^0 force causes the correlated double beta decay instead of strong force and the dramatic prediction is that double beta decay could occur for neutrons belonging to different nuclei having distance even of order cell size! The verification of this prediction would be a triumph for TGD and a death blow for the standard model and all the competing theories that I am aware of. For more details see the article Processes Looking Like Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay as a Crucial Test for Standard Model and TGD? and the chapter TGD and Nuclear Physics where many anomalies related to neutrinos are discussed. Also other chapters such as TGD and Condensed Matter and Anomalies Related to the Classical Z^0 Force contain discussion about neutrinos and references.Web of dualities
In TGD there are dual descriptions of the world of classical worlds which I call CH and CHO: number-theoretical compactification states that 3-surfaces can be equivalently regarded as "living" in either
H=M^4xCP_2 or
HO=M^8 (hyper-octonionic 8-space).
There are also other dualities such as HQ-coHQ duality (3-surface can correspond to either hyper-quaternionic or co-hyper-quaternionic space-time surface). The question is how these dualities relate to each other and other dualities, such as electric-magnetic duality conjectured for a long time ago. The understanding of HO-H duality at both configuration space (world of classical worlds) level and concrete hadron physics level has been increasing rapidly and following represents some comments about this.
1. What is Kähler function in the dual of the world of classical worlds?
Space-time surfaces can be either hyper-quaternionic or co-hyper-quaternionic (briefly HQ or coHQ). Vacuum extremals with vanishing Kähler field would be extreme examples of HQ phase whereas CP_2 type vacuum extremal would be an extreme example of coHQ phase. For a generic 3-surface both HQ and coHQ type space-time surface is expected to exist so that the notion of classical space-time depends on phase! The Kähler functions of configuration space for two kinds of surfaces need not be same and the question is how they differ. If HQ-coHQ duality is analogous to a coordinate transformation relating two different coordinate patches, one expects that the two Kähler functions differ only by a real part of holomorphic function of complex configuration space coordinates: this guarantees that Kähler metric of configuration space does not depend on picture used. There are two options concerning the identification of Kähler function on coHQ phase.- Kähler calibration is defined by the local minimum of Kähler action density. The dual of Kähler calibration would be naturally defined by its maximum. The dual calibration would maximize the absolute value of contribution to Kähler function in each region where the action density has definite sign. Contrasts between regions of positive and negative action density would be maximized. One could argue that this implies unstable Universe: on the other hand quantum criticality suggests large fluctuations and after 10 years of TGD inspired theory of consciousness I cannot resist the temptation to add that quantum criticality makes Universe optimal perceiving system. One might say that HQ and coHQ pictures correspond to the cautious view of a conservative energy saver and exaggerating view of radical artist about what all this is. The duality of p-adic length scales L_k and L_p, p=about 2^k, suggests that the dual of Kähler coupling strength alpha_K(k) is alpha_K(p) and vice versa.
- The dual of Kähler function is defined by the dual of Kähler action defined by the projection of CP_2 Kähler form to the normal space of space-time surface rather than to its tangent space. For this option dual action vanishes for CP_2 type extremals. The fact that CP_2 Kähler action appears as a fundamental constant in the basic formulas of TGD (say formula for gravitational constant)disfavors this option.
2. Summary about the web of dualities
It is good idea to try to summarize the recent picture. It seems that HO-H duality involves an entire web of dualities suggested by the general structure of TGD.- Electric-magnetic duality conjectured already more than decade ago and corresponding to the possibility for defining flux Hamiltonians coding configuration space geometry by using fluxes associated with space-like partonic 2-surface of timelike string orbits.
- The purely geometric duality of hyper-quaternionic (HQ) and co-hyper- quaternionic (coHQ) 4-surfaces, which would be naturally equivalent with electric-magnetic duality.
- Parton-string duality which string theorist would probably call closed-open string duality and equivalent with HQ-coHQ duality.
- 7-3 duality stating that either space-like 3-surfaces in the intersections of space-time surface with light-like 7-surfaces \delta M^4{\pm}xCP_2 or light-like 3 surfaces X^3_l at which X^4 metric becomes degenerate can be taken as causal determinants.
- ew-color duality described in previous posting,
- p =about 2^k <--> k duality of long and short p-adic length scales,
- duality of colored current quarks carrying no spin and ew spin and static quarks carrying no color,
- duality of hadron and quark level descriptions.
3. Predictions of HO-H duality
HO-H duality leads to concrete predictions. Some of them are already verified (SO(4) chiral symmetry of low energy hadron physics and explanation of proton spin crisis). Some of them might be testable (colored quarks should not contribute to right and left electro-weak isospin of hadrons). The most important prediction is that both standard model of electro-weak interactions and QCD are in a precisely defined sense wrong theories. One might hope that this might allow to develop an experimental arrangements proving or disproving this prediction. Spin-statistics paradox was the crucial observation leading to the introduction of quark color. The 2-dimensionality of partonic and stringy surfaces allowing anyonic statistics, or probably equivalently, the presence of configuration space degrees of freedom, allows to circumvent the spin- statistics paradox otherwise implied by the fact that H spinors do not carry color as spin like quantum number and HO spinors do not carry spin and ew spin. For more details see the chapter TGD as a Generalized Number Theory: Quaternions, Octonions, and their Hyper Counterparts. Matti Pitkänen
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