A sad funeral call for Twistors, this Friday.

**arivero** · Jul1-04, 01:52 PM

Tomorrow Friday, at 9.10 in Paris, Ed Witten will deliver his reading on twistors.

At a high probability, this date will mark the sad end of this mathematical structure. It will become embedded in a hundred of papers unfocusing any previously known detail of Penrose' objects, which will adquire past tomorrow a completely new meaning.

Of course it is happening since December, and Witten's article has already got over 40 citations.

Anticipating Marcus, I will review Spires:
FIND T TWISTOR OR T TWISTORS AND DATE
1999 -> 6
2000 -> 10
2001 -> 10
2002 -> 0
2003 -> 6 (Incl. 0312171)
... BEFORE 2004: 258 papers
2004 -> 16

The top-cited papers on twistors

180) Edward Witten, TWISTOR - LIKE TRANSFORM IN TEN-
DIMENSIONS.
Nucl.Phys.B266:245,1986.

169) R. Penrose, M.A.H. MacCallum, TWISTOR THEORY: AN
APPROACH TO THE quantization OF FIELDS AND SPACE-TIME.
Phys.Rept.6:241-316,1972.

163) Dmitri P. Sorokin, V.I. Tkach, D.V. Volkov,
SUPERPARTICLES, TWISTORS AND SIEGEL SYMMETRY.
Mod.Phys.Lett.A4:901-908,1989.

159) R. Penrose, NONLINEAR GRAVITONS AND CURVED TWISTOR
THEORY.
Gen.Rel.Grav.7:31-52,1976.

113) R. Penrose, TWISTOR ALGEBRA.
J.Math.Phys.8:345,1967.

61) Ingemar Bengtsson, Martin Cederwall, PARTICLES, TWISTORS
AND THE DIVISION ALGEBRAS.
Nucl.Phys.B302:81,1988.

60) A. Galperin, E. Sokatchev, A TWISTOR LIKE D = 10
SUPERPARTICLE ACTION WITH MANIFEST N=8 WORLDLINE
SUPERSYMMETRY.
Phys.Rev.D46:714-725,1992.

57) Y. Eisenberg, S. Solomon, THE TWISTOR GEOMETRY OF THE
COVARIANTLY QUANTIZED BRINK-SCHWARZ SUPERPARTICLE.
Nucl.Phys.B309:709,1988.

Witten's hep-th/0312171 has already got 41 citations.

**marcus** · Jul1-04, 02:27 PM

Originally Posted by arivero

...

At a high probability, this date will mark the sad end of this mathematical structure...

Sólo una cosa no hay. Es el olvido.

**PRodQuanta** · Jul5-04, 05:04 PM

yes, the negligence.
Paden Roder

**meteor** · Jul5-04, 06:51 PM

My contribution to the funeral is the last paper in arxiv where you can find the word twistor in the abstract
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0406251
The affine ambitwistor space as the moduli space of SUYM in $AdS_5\otimes S^5$
Authors: Bo-Yu Hou, Bo-Yuan Hou, Xiao-Hui Wang, Chuan-Hua Xiong, Rui-Hong Yue

By enlarge the $gl(2,2)$ symmetry with the twisted $U(1)\times U(1)$ reparametrization symmetry, we find a gauged WZNW action of YM field. The left and right twistor structure of left and right $\alpha$-plane glue into a ambitwitor. The affine dressing symmetry enables to find twisted monopoles. We argue that its moduli space will be the moduli of N=2 SUSY.

**marcus** · Jul5-04, 08:08 PM

Originally Posted by meteor

My contribution to the funeral is the last paper in arxiv where you can find the word twistor in the abstract
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0406251
The affine ambitwistor space as the moduli space of SUYM in $AdS_5\otimes S^5$
Authors: Bo-Yu Hou, Bo-Yuan Hou, Xiao-Hui Wang, Chuan-Hua Xiong, Rui-Hong Yue

By enlarge the $gl(2,2)$ symmetry with the twisted $U(1)\times U(1)$ reparametrization symmetry, we find a gauged WZNW action of YM field. The left and right twistor structure of left and right $\alpha$-plane glue into a ambitwitor. The affine dressing symmetry enables to find twisted monopoles. We argue that its moduli space will be the moduli of N=2 SUSY.

that is funny meteor
perhaps the worms have already arrived even before the funeral
but seriously if it is good mathematics then it lives on

I just watched the 3 hour-long lectures that Penrose gave at princeton
in october 2003, entitled "Fashion, Faith, Fantasy"
they are on video that one can download from

http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/

(the link is from Woit's blog)

each hour is about one of the three things
"Fashion" is about string theory
"Faith" is about what he sees is wrong with Quantum Theory and
why he expects a revolution in QM when gravity is included

has anyone else watched the lectures?