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something new is happening, indicated by John Baez starting that "Baratin Freidel" thread
I am starting this thread so that I can be excited without risking inadvertently spamming the other thread (with preliminary MISunderstanding and misguided attempts to be helpful)
it looks to me like they are finding the bones of a new dinosaur that they didnt know was in the ground
Baez has been to the dig and he knows what is emerging and so he started a thread to encourage us to understand twogroups ahead of time.
because if something new is coming out it helps to have a little preparation so that it does not sound totally strange
Beef (BF theory) seems to be important and in the usual BF theory the differential forms can be Lie group/algebra valued and I dimly suspect that you could have a BF theory that was twogroup-valued.
We had company to the house and all my arranged piles of papers all over the livingroom had to be picked up and put in a large pile in the study (which I never use) and for two days I can't find any paper. That is my excuse. We all have our excuses.
the main thing is that our whole civilization is built on the symmetry onegroup and we can't imagine anything more fundamental beautiful and basic than that----and when we were young impressionable college kids they told us about onegroups----and they NEVER MENTIONED TWOGROUPS. when we first heard twogroups mentioned it seemed that this was just another case of mathematicians doing what they always do and that it could not possibly be important[joke]. BUT NOW IT SEEMS POSSIBLE THAT TWOGROUPS MIGHT ACTUALLY BE a basic thing that is important to how the universe is being run. so I began to experience twogroup shock, and was actually wondering why, when I was young and happy and learning some of the most beautiful things in the world why didn't my teacher, Ralph Abraham, a very cool person, why did he not tell us about twogroups. so then we would have been prepared for this shock, if it is really happening. (he would have had to travel into the future to know that he should be introducing those as well as ordinary kind, so of course the omission is forgivable)
I am starting this thread so that I can be excited without risking inadvertently spamming the other thread (with preliminary MISunderstanding and misguided attempts to be helpful)
it looks to me like they are finding the bones of a new dinosaur that they didnt know was in the ground
Baez has been to the dig and he knows what is emerging and so he started a thread to encourage us to understand twogroups ahead of time.
because if something new is coming out it helps to have a little preparation so that it does not sound totally strange
Beef (BF theory) seems to be important and in the usual BF theory the differential forms can be Lie group/algebra valued and I dimly suspect that you could have a BF theory that was twogroup-valued.
We had company to the house and all my arranged piles of papers all over the livingroom had to be picked up and put in a large pile in the study (which I never use) and for two days I can't find any paper. That is my excuse. We all have our excuses.
the main thing is that our whole civilization is built on the symmetry onegroup and we can't imagine anything more fundamental beautiful and basic than that----and when we were young impressionable college kids they told us about onegroups----and they NEVER MENTIONED TWOGROUPS. when we first heard twogroups mentioned it seemed that this was just another case of mathematicians doing what they always do and that it could not possibly be important[joke]. BUT NOW IT SEEMS POSSIBLE THAT TWOGROUPS MIGHT ACTUALLY BE a basic thing that is important to how the universe is being run. so I began to experience twogroup shock, and was actually wondering why, when I was young and happy and learning some of the most beautiful things in the world why didn't my teacher, Ralph Abraham, a very cool person, why did he not tell us about twogroups. so then we would have been prepared for this shock, if it is really happening. (he would have had to travel into the future to know that he should be introducing those as well as ordinary kind, so of course the omission is forgivable)
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