Recent content by eigenguy

The math of spin does apply: spin-0 means lorentz scalar, which is where "scalar" comes from. There is the dilaton of ST.

A rabbi and priest in a rowboat...

What's the simplest system one could play with in which the same basic issues being discussed here arise?

Fantastic. Thanks!

Hi urs, So was lethe correct in saying that string theory is really just 2D QFT? Or maybe it's correct to say that perturbative string theory is just 2D QFT? Was lethe also correct in saying that it is incorrect to think of yang-mills theory as meaning anything other than a QFT and that...

I guess he believes that all interactions should be quantized using the same procedure so if it doesn't work for YM, it's wrong.

Distler just posted this, Baby & Bathwater So now, the party line is that Thiemann’s quantization is some clever new method of quantization, completely unrelated to canonical quantization, that no one has thought of before. This is not only my interpretation, but Thomas Thiemann himself...

selfadjoint, do you agree that the reason that thiemann gets no anomaly is that he doesn't use the original formulation of refined algebraic quantization?

I thought that in quantum theory poincare picks up no anomaly. So maybe momentum distributions aren't relevant (unless you are talking about a different kind of momentum).

That's what I think too. But I was trying to decipher a paper by edward witten and near as I could tell, this use of NCG was distinctly different from the D-brane thing and had something to do with the antisymmetric B-field in the massless bosonic sector. Anyway, I just ordered a copy of...

I'm definitely not at the leading edge of anything. Right now I'm just struggling to understand basic string theory and will likely not be in a position to say anything except in the broadest terms for quite a while. To the best of my knowledge though, no testable (or maybe any) predictions have...

Fine, but for what its worth, my question about D-branes was how do you reconcile the fact that they are described by the born-infeld action with your statement that string theory is really just a 2D QFT.

Well, X is bosonic anyway: It is both a spacetime and world-sheet boson. The kind of fields I'm talking about are defined as such because of their "point-likeness":, i.e., they have no internal degrees of freedom. The mass squared of an open bosonic string state is a sum of a zero mode term...

Hi wolram I know this isn't precisely what you were asking for, but I think it will help you think about this. It has to do with a useful term that philosophers of science have come up with called "theory-laden". The idea is that scientific concepts necessarily derive their various meanings...

It's no one's fault that in some areas theory has far outpaced our ability to check ideas experimentally. What would you have us do in the mean time? Further, I think that were always on the look out for some way to generate testable predictions from our theories, whether or not current...