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...
It's not a state that leads to self-annihilation because it's not about having an atom and an anti-atom in the same branch of the wavefunction, it's about having a quantum state which has some probability to be an atom and some probability to be an anti-atom. It seems very weird to me, but if it...
This is an alert about a claim regarding the standard model, that got a burst of attention in the past two weeks.
The original paper came out last year:
"The electroweak η_W meson" by Gia Dvali, Archil Kobakhidze, Otari Sakhelashvili (2024)
The recent follow-up and other responses are...
May I emphasize that the authors are talking about Euclidean 4-space. The point being that QFT calculations are often carried out in a context of 4 space and 0 time dimensions, because the mathematics is more tractable, and then the answer is transformed "as if" it had been carried out in a...
An almost-phenomenological paper has appeared which cites some of this work:
"Fixed points of classical gravity coupled with a Standard-Model-like theory" by Latham Boyle, Neil Turok, Vatsalya Vaibhav
Apparently the motivation is to look for special QFTs which, when coupled to quantum...
A previous paper by this author was discussed in this thread in posts #251-252, and the author himself appeared at #262. I commented on his research program here.
Of all the ingredients in his calculation of fermion masses, the idea that I find the most credible, is that there might be some...
I can first name the two papers that I mentioned:
"Path integral for the Hilbert-Palatini and Ashtekar gravity" (Alexandrov and Vassilevich 1998)
"Generalized Symmetry in Dynamical Gravity" (Clifford Cheung et al 2024)
Also see the last paragraph of this comment from last year.
The 1998...
Fermion doubling is just one form of a broader phenomenon, in which de facto extra fermions are brought about by the existence of extra zero-energy modes or "zero modes" of a fermionic field. A version of this actually occurs in string theory - the number of generations produced by a Calabi-Yau...
This is a response to an article from five years ago (Chae et al 2020) claiming to detect an effect of MOND (the "external field effect") in a particular population of galaxies. The authors of the present paper say, if true this would be the first violation of general relativity detected, so...
I have no time to think about this, but I will just mention that coincidentally, a very similar issue came up in a physics discussion the other day. It was about Eric Weinstein's theory of everything, and the other person insisted that "any gravitational theory requires infinite higher spin...