Recent content by dpackard

Well, this is really a classical mechanics question, but I'll answer it and leave it to mods to move the thread if they desire. You are confusing a couple things. Noether's Theorem deals with the consequences of transformations that leave the action invariant along ALL paths, and in particular...

Yes, mathematically that is obviously true. I was speaking imprecisely, forgive me. But, to belabor the point, translation operators don't actually "translate" states either - they map vectors that we interpret as being at position to vectors at another. Observables map states that are...

I don't know about that. The operator of an observable operates on states by returning the possible values one can measure. One could just as well say that there is no "meaning" in saying we have rotated or time translated a state except in the context of what is being measured. So your gripe is...

In finite spaces Hermitian works fine, but I agree that for infinite dimensional spaces self-adjoint is the better term.

The function of the universe is to make actions stationary just like it is a falling body's telos to be at the center of the earth. It doesn't seem to me you're adding any new information by describing things in terms of functionality, but returning to a teleological view that is unnecessary...

I too would like to know how it is we know quantum effects become important in this regime. Other than knowing we need QG before we get down to a singularity, what in particular makes us think the Planck scale is selected by nature as the transition scale?

Regardless of your feelings about state regulated marriage licenses, they exist, and the state cannot discriminate against gay couples by not allowing them to receive said licenses. Why should gay people have to arrange for all the benefits of marriage themselves? Why can't they just get the...

I don't understand people who bring up different forms of relationships asking whether those should now get marriage status (polyamory, incest, bestiality, dendrophilia, furries, etc.) as if that's an argument against allowing gay marriage. They seem to be missing the point entirely. The...

atyy basically answered my question, sorry I was vague marcus. I was simply referring to the non-renormalization of straight-forwardly quantizing GR (unless it turns out to be asymptotically safe). I was trying to sort out whether Lisi's approach addressed this problem at all since the...

Will the gravitons in E8 theory not be plagued by the non-renormalization problems of other quantum gravity attempts?

If Lisi's theory is unable to produce the three fermion generations, then Garibaldi is correct and the one generation SM embedded in E8 isn't very interesting. So clearly this should be Lisi's future direction if he wants to stick with the E8 idea. So there isn't much of a controversy or...

What you're missing, darkside, is that just because you do not (yet) understand the math on which the theories are based on does NOT imply that the maths/theories do not make rational sense. In other words, this isn't just dressed up numerology (except for that M. S. El Naschie fellow and his...

How can a classical field theory like GR and a quantum field theory like the SM be unified in a single algebraic structure like E8? I guess this question applies to the GraviGUT step specifically. Is it merely that there is a spin-2 boson in the theory that matches the graviton, as is seen in...

Hmm, the bit in that paper about the time operator producing unphysical eigenstates in standard QM is strange. Wish I understood that. How could the time operator have unphysical eigenstates? Superpositions of time states?

This is unclear. There is no a priori reason we cannot speak of time as a property that belongs to a particle in the same way you speak of space. In principle, we could define a set a time states that would correspond to the particle existing at each instant of time. You're simply restating the...