Recent content by mitchell porter

I thought of posting this under Particle Physics, but it does go slightly beyond standard model, and in a way that could point to some larger theories, so I post it here. "A path to confine gluons and fermions through complex gauge theory" (Amaral et al 2020) "New picture on the mesons mass...

Just to be clear, I claimed the problem was that chiral gravi-GUTs want to use SU(2)R as the gravitational gauge group, but in Pati-Salam you also need it to supply part of U(1)Y, the hypercharge gauge group in the standard model. Alexander et al's approach is to abandon that part of Pati-Salam...

I think the summary in Sabine Hossenfelder's new video is excellent. Many important points made, I have bolded two at the end that interest me the most: "The Nobel Prize winning observation heavily relied on regularities of [Type 1a] supernovae. They assumed that these stellar explosions...

Formally you could do it but that's not really a gravi-GUT any more, or at least the gravitational SU(2)R is no longer united with the observed forces. You just have SO(10)_1 x SO(10)_2, the first SO(10)_1 is a standard SO(10) GUT whose breaking passes through standard Pati-Salam, and then the...

If you're asking about vacuum selection, no one's even thinking about it. The focus in string phenomenology is still just to find vacua that look like reality, and to improve the ability to calculate their properties. Anthropic selection is the only selection principle that even gets mentioned...

I do not see anything in their argument that actually relies on the topic being quantum gravity. They could have written a paper, "Consequences of Undecidability for the Theory of Packing a Lunchbox", with the exact same structure.

The standard model gauge group is SU(3) x SU(2)L x U(1)Y. Before the Higgs mechanism comes into play, the latter two subgroups give rise to four massless bosons that Weinberg dubbed W1, W2, W3, B. After the Higgs field gets a VEV, W1 and W2 becomes the massive W+ and W- bosons known to...

Gravi-GUT theories turn out to play a major role in the alternative physics of the past several decades. E8 theory by Garrett Lisi (@garrett) is a gravi-GUT theory. So too, it turns out, is Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity, by a slightly roundabout route (in GU, our 4-dimensional world is a...

That's not the problem, the problem is that the existence of negative energy particles allows endless materialization without violation of conservation of energy, so long as they materialize paired with positive energy particles so that there's no net change of energy. Have you thought about...

I report two paper which provide examples of ingredients one might expect in a field-theoretic treatment of the sbootstrap. "Color gauge invariant theory of diquark interactions" (Wang, Zhang, Sun) "A - BCD dualities" (Amariti, Mantegazza, Rota, Zanetti) In QCD, we could say that the basic...

The problem with negative energy is not just "blasphemy", it is that you can have endless creation of something from nothing. You can go from a situation of net zero energy, to one with a positive energy particle and a negative energy particle whose energies sum to zero, or an arbitrary number...

Noncomputability is a different thing from nondeterminism. It's actually related to undecidability, as is seen in the halting problem. For a given computer program, the halting problem is the question whether that program would run forever, or eventually halt. It was an early discovery of...

There is no consensus about how anything physical, classical or quantum, manages to relate to consciousness; and yet there needs to be some kind of relationship, since the brain is physical. Also, Penrose himself never said anything as simple as "quantum mechanics explains consciousness". His...

I worked for Hameroff for a year. I consider their theory a great contribution, because of how mind-opening it is. In my opinion, if quantum information is genuinely part of cognition or consciousness, the microtubule is an excellent candidate for where it could be happening. There needs to be...

Yang-Mills is just ordinary quantum field theory; the strong and weak nuclear force are both Yang-Mills forces. But the reference to a membrane is peculiar and I didn't notice it myself. So far as I can tell, it is not meant to be anything real. It is analogous to the concept of a "test...