Pen State Lectures Feb 2004: Abhay Ashtekar

[wolram]

interesting overview

http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/frontiers/AshtekarHandout2-2004.pdf
Pen state lectures feb 2004 Abhay Ashtekar.


QUOTE.
"there was no emergence of the universe from nothing
because nothing simply does not exist".

"radiation or matter can transform into geometry and
vice versa".

"geometry is physical, it is so similar to matter that it can
change itself into matter".

 

[wolram]

QUOTE.
yet another consequence that Ashtekar and his colleagues are just
beginning to explore: the avoidance of the unphysical singularities at the center of black holes, similar to the case of big bang. Possibly even the notorious information paradox can be solved. "In our part of the universe, information which falls into a black hole is lost, but it reappears in a daughter universe," speculates Martin Bojowald. With a smile he adds:
"However only after it passes through a rather uncomfortable quantum phase at the central bounce.

 

[wolram]

QUOTE.
If one could observe nature with maximum possible enlargement, space and time would dissolve and the granular mesh of the spin network would come to light - or more precisely: the quantum physical superposition of all possible
configurations of these entities. There is 'nothing' between these graphs. Those entities rest only on themselves, so to speak. "The spin networks do not exist in the space. Their structures produce the space," Smolin stresses. "And they are nothing but abstractly defined relations which
determine how the edges come together and interlock at the joints ."

 

[wolram]

QUOTE.

Roger Penrose therefore also thinks. "So far string theory does not really agree with the world we see. It requires many complicated assumptions such as extra dimensions and supersymmetry, for which there are no empirical clues, and also provides no definite, univocal prediction for future experiments. All the main problems are unsolved," criticizes Rovelli. "I think it is time to try something else also," he says, advertising for quantum geometry. "Certainly this also has gaps and weaknesses. Like the transition of spin networks to classical spacetime is not yet completely understood, and the calculation of entropy of black holes creates some problems," says Kiefer

 

[wolram]

"geometry is physical, it is so similar to matter that it can
change itself into matter".
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
does anyone know how this transformation occurs?

does LQG support the multiverse theory?

if something has always existed why do we
need the BB?

how can geometry be physical?

 

[wolram]

the presumed Higgs boson that gives them mass. The bosons
(such as photons and also gravitons), which transmit the subatomic interactions and thus evoke the forces of nature, are encoded in certain excited states of the spin network as changing colors or labels on the graphs.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
does LQG require the higgs boson and the graviton, if not
why are they included in this description?

 

[wolram]

Even time only emerges from the variations of the excited states and the
links in the networks. In a certain way time is an illusion just as space is. Ashtekar quotes
Vladimir Nabokov: "Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
is time an illusion?

 

[marcus]

this article by the science journalist Rudy Vaas does provide
a broad evocative overview of quantum gravity.

Sometimes journalism can convey ideas better than technical writing.
Also popularizations (like Brian Greene "Elegant Universe" and the
Lee Smolin SciAm article "Atoms of Space and Time") can sometimes getconcepts across more effectively and can be of value to more people.

It looks to me like what happened is Rudy Vaas wrote this article last year for some magazine similar to SciAm or its German counterpart, and a scientist named Amitaba Sen translated it into English. Then Ashtekar used the English translation as a "hand-out" when he gave a public lecture in February of this year.

At the moment I can't think of any science journalist covering the QG and string scene who is more knowledgeable, or a better writer, than Vaas. He follows other research efforts besides LQG, by the way. Urs Schreiber reported a conversation with him at a conference this year and was later discussing on the internet another article Vaas wrote "The Duel, Strings versus Loops". Their friendly discussion was on the "String Coffeetable" message board. It seemed clear that Vaas was broad-gauge, not limited to covering one narrow beat.

but I don't know of any Vaas articles besides the one you found (at Ashtekar's site) and the other one I just mentioned: "The Duel".

Vaas has impressive talent as a writer and seems exceptionally smart----maybe he is a scientist by training who moved over into popular writing: I don't know his background.

 

[marcus]

evocative science journalism works partly by mental images and
can raise a lot more questions than it answers
you have filtered out some questions---a lot actually---
there are more questions raised here than I can even begin
to try to answer
Someone should put Abhay Astekar on the spot to answer some of
these questions! after all he gave Vaas article as a hand-out at
his own lecture

I looked under Vaas name in arxiv and found just the two articles

http://arxiv.org/physics/0403112
The Duel: Strings versus Loops
Ruediger Vaas
Comments: Extended version from: Ruediger Vaas: Das Duell: Strings gegen Schleifen. Translated by Martin Bojowald and Amitabha Sen. - 10 pages, including 1 table and references
Subj-class: Popular Physics
Journal-ref: Bild der Wissenschaft (2004), no. 4, pp. 44-49


http://arxiv.org/physics/0401128
Beyond Space And Time
Ruediger Vaas
Comments: 7 pages, English translation by Amitabha Sen of the German article "Jenseits von Raum und Zeit" by Ruediger Vaas.
Subj-class: Popular Physics
Journal-ref: Bild der Wissenschaft (2003) no. 12, pp. 50-56

 

[wolram]

well Abhay Astekar is at the forefront in this area,
maybe some of this is just a mind game that has
reached the public, as you say MARCUS i have
picked only a few questions that can be asked
from this article, but is A Astekar or penrose the
only ones that know the answers, are these few
so far ahead and willing to publicize such thoughts

 

[wolram]

http://usparc.ihep.su/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=a+Vaas,+Rudiger

articles found under Rudiger Vass.

 

[marcus]

after saying all the good things one can say about Rudy Vaas
we still need to be clear about the distinction between popular science journalism and technical or scholarly writing

popular science writing is to some extent impressionistic
where technical writing is more careful and reliable
the good thing about popular writing is that it can suggest directions that
research might be going, express as-yet-unproven hunches, so one
gets to know some of the researchers' private thoughts, that they might not venture to say at a conference or have presented in a scholarly journal.

I'm still reading the article, and re-reading. Find more to think about each time I go back to it. thanks for flagging it.

I never saw any technical article say that matter could change back and forth with geometry but now it does not seem so impossible:
states of geometry are represented by labeled graphs

networks where some of the labels on the links and nodes determine geometric stuff like area and volume

but matter fields are also described by labeling the graphs too
so labeled graphs (penrose's spin networks) do provide a plausible framework for geometry to convert back and forth with matter

perhaps when a star collapses down to a black hole the matter is crushed out of existence and converted to the extreme geometry at the center of the hole--but I have never heard a mechanism proposed for this and I don't know what it could mean to say this---it is way out on the scary edge of speculation.

so that part of the article: the interchange of matter and geometry, it is too far out for me to contemplate----a shuffling of the labels by some transformation law that I never heard of---a meltdown of the distinction between geometry and matter---no idea what they mean.

but I do acknowledge that a spin network, or labeled graph, because the links are labeled both with matter fields and geometrical quantities, might provide an arena or a frame for describing this (whatever it means)

sorry I can't explicate Vaas article better
it is tantalizing and provocative

 

[wolram]

so that part of the article: the interchange of matter and geometry, it is too far out for me to contemplate----a shuffling of the labels by some transformation law that I never heard of---a meltdown of the distinction between geometry and matter---no idea what they mean.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
maybe he is thinking the Higgs Field is interchangeable with geometry?

 

[wolram]

a 1999 by John k Harmes
http://www.johnkharms.com/decay.htm
maybe this idea of interchangeability of mass
energy and gravity is not as new as i thought.

edit omission.

 

[marcus]

http://usparc.ihep.su/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=a+Vaas,+Rudiger

articles found under Rudiger Vass.

23 articles, going back to 1990
a lot more than the two I knew about

 

[Mike2]

so that part of the article: the interchange of matter and geometry, it is too far out for me to contemplate----a shuffling of the labels by some transformation law that I never heard of---a meltdown of the distinction between geometry and matter---no idea what they mean.

I think it means that matter must be some submanifold of the overall space-time manifold. How can a single point exhibit characteristics? There are no features "on" a point to calculate. But a manifold, or submanifold, can have properties that are calculable features of the submanifold - global topological features, or frequencies of variations of space-time on the submanifold, etc.

 

[wolram]

Originally Posted by wolram
so that part of the article: the interchange of matter and geometry, it is too far out for me to contemplate----a shuffling of the labels by some transformation law that I never heard of---a meltdown of the distinction between geometry and matter---no idea what they mean.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
this was origonally posted by MARCUS.

 

[wolram]

it seems the idea of interchangeability of gravity, mass and energy
has been around for sometime, but hasn't been taken into the
mainstream view, now Baez has bought it into the open by the
back door, maybe its a good thing to speculate that everything
has one origin.
thanks for post MIKE2

 

[wolram]

Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: warwickshire england
Posts: 849 http://www.nature.com/nsu/991111/991111-3.html

In 1915, Albert Einstein showed that, in effect, every blob of matter creates a dimple in space-time that diverts the path of a moving particle. The more massive the blob, the deeper the dimple. When one body is accelerated by the gravitational field of another a small fraction of its mass gets converted to energy according to his equation E=mc2, and this is radiated away as 'gravity waves' which spread outwards through space-time

 

[wolram]

The energy to separate and polarize the zero energy state was borrowed from the gravitational energy of the Universe. The Universe borrows heavily from its gravitational energy to finance the creation of more matter (Hawking, 1993). Thus, the comparison picture appears as three important equations:
etc-----.

 

[wolram]

As described by the gravity text, singularities may be created where opposite waves and opposite spins cancel each other. This is because the void that generates the gravitational field, in both the "particle" and the "wave" approach to gravity, should be equivalent viewpoints. Thus, incoming gravitational radiation may be canceled-out by matter or the radiation may enter a singularity-type wormhole at a massive bodies center-of-mass. This singularity would be the end point for the incoming gravitational radiation. Such radiation then leaves our Universe through hyperspace.

 

[wolram]

by MIKE2
I think it means that matter must be some submanifold of the overall space-time manifold. How can a single point exhibit characteristics? There are no features "on" a point to calculate. But a manifold, or submanifold, can have properties that are calculable features of the submanifold - global topological features, or frequencies of variations of space-time on the submanifold, etc.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
hi, Mike2, i have been looking for papers that support the ideas of
Abhay Ashtekar, Martin Bojowald,Roger Penrose, and Hawking shown on this thread, with no luck to date, it seems you and MARCUS have a mathmatical theory as to the interchangeability of gravity,mass, energy, but how do they relate to the real world?

 

[wolram]

this from the J K Harmes manuscript.

The idea that matter is constructed from the fabric of space-time is not new. This conception has had the support of many great natural philosophers such as W. K. Clifford, Arthur Eddington, Herman Weyl and Albert Einstein (Wolff, 1990). That matter is a geometric property of space is also an idea supported also by this author. If one asks the question: If matter is composed of waves, what's waving? The answer is the space foam itself, a mixture of photons and photon holes. Matter is a dense region of photon holes in the space foam.

 

[Mike2]

by MIKE2
I think it means that matter must be some submanifold of the overall space-time manifold. How can a single point exhibit characteristics? There are no features "on" a point to calculate. But a manifold, or submanifold, can have properties that are calculable features of the submanifold - global topological features, or frequencies of variations of space-time on the submanifold, etc.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
hi, Mike2, i have been looking for papers that support the ideas of
Abhay Ashtekar, Martin Bojowald,Roger Penrose, and Hawking shown on this thread, with no luck to date, it seems you and MARCUS have a mathmatical theory as to the interchangeability of gravity,mass, energy, but how do they relate to the real world?

The question is where would these submanifolds that produce the particles come from? What natrual mechanism would give rise to such geometries? It seems difficult to imagine that they come about simply because there is an overall space-time manifold in which to describe them.

I would like to propose a theory in which the submanifolds are the boundary of the overall manifold. The theory works something like this: The initial manifold of reality is a manifold without boundary. It consists of the 4 dimension uncurling and expanding. There are no particles yet. There is only space-time. At the very beginning, at the differential level, each point in space has the same properites as its neighbors. Since the universe is expanding, each tiny region is expanding at the same rate. The rate at which the universe expands is proportional to the emount of space that exists. The universe expands at an exponential rate. There is nothing to prohit this expansion. So it can expands faster than light. Still there is no matter in the universe.

So the expansion gets faster and faster until finally space-time begins to tear. This opening in the fabric of space-time forms a boundary to the space-time manifold. This boundary is a natural geometric object formed within the overall manifold. In 3D, the tear would be a closed 2D surfaces and appear to be a submanifold within the bulk. Of course, such a boundary can be divided and be distributed throughout the rest. Each tiny 2D sub-boundary would be closed and have various features associated with its geometry that would affect how it would interact with others. I suppose that the space-time metric on the surface of these submanifold/particles would have zero-point waves on them that would keep them from collapsing. Since these quantum levels of metric waves on the surface of these boundary/particles would not permit the metric on the surface to change on average, the prior speed of universal expansion would now be slowed by the refusal of these particles to expand on their surfaces. I believe this is all consistent with the inflationary model of the universe where there is an initial exponential expansion rate followed by the creation of matter at the end of inflation.

 

[wolram]

Mike2, your explanation has a beauty about it, I'm no expert for sure
but i understand you, i strongly resisted the idea that our universe
is simply geometry, and everything came from that geometry, but as
i read more and understand more my resistance reduces, its a fascinating
topic, and i hope to find more about it.

 

[wolram]

"geometry is physical, it is so similar to matter that it can
change itself into matter".
this statement confuses me, what does he mean, "geometry is physical",it
is as if he is saying it dosent need a major event for geometry to transform
into matter.

 

[Mike2]

"geometry is physical, it is so similar to matter that it can
change itself into matter".
this statement confuses me, what does he mean, "geometry is physical",it
is as if he is saying it dosent need a major event for geometry to transform
into matter.

Or, he may mean that physics has a geometric description. If we necessarily have to use the math of geometry to describe physics, curvature, geodesics, etc, then how can you possible separate them since there is no other math to describe it?

 

[wolram]

Mike2
i have read a little more on spin networks, but can only go so
far without understanding the math, i presume Baez has included
the higgs boson and graviton because they are fundamental
in his theory, "even though the graviton is not included in LQG
models", I'm not sure how this fits in.
the higgs bosons would be products of a sub manifold in this theory,
if i understand correctly, and would give geometry mass, and the
ability to do work.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

the presumed Higgs boson that gives them mass. The bosons
(such as photons and also gravitons), which transmit the subatomic interactions and thus evoke the forces of nature, are encoded in certain excited states of the spin network as changing colors or labels on the graphs.

 

[wolram]

Mike2
i have read a little more on spin networks, but can only go so
far without understanding the math, i presume Ashtekar has included
the higgs boson and graviton because they are fundamental
in his theory, "even though the graviton is not included in LQG
models", I'm not sure how this fits in.
the higgs bosons would be products of a sub manifold in this theory,
if i understand correctly, and would give geometry mass, and the
ability to do work.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

QUOTE.
the presumed Higgs boson that gives them mass. The bosons
(such as photons and also gravitons), which transmit the subatomic interactions and thus evoke the forces of nature, are encoded in certain excited states of the spin network as changing colors or labels on the graphs

 

[wolram]

this paper may be of interest,
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0112/0112038.pdf .