Recent content by sneutron

Wiki, Loren, just follow the links in my post.

Sorry, the article with those (hadron) calculations is actually arXiv:hep-ph/0208098v1.

The following is not the answer to the question you asked, but try this for starters: The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhand_knot" . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ropelength" is expressed as a ratio to thickness and depends heavily (for simple knots) on crossing number (3 for trefoil)...

Hi, Naty1, good topic for another debate! See also my 2nd post. I'm inclined to think the string theorists haven't actually delivered (yet) on coherent models, though the range of their potential models is absolutely breath-taking.

Hi, Arivero! Does that mean "don't go there?" :smile: Wouldn't you say knot theory is (at last) coming of age? Progress in Physics and Maths seems to be less of a march, more a drunken stagger. It's scary to speculate how much current activity will be seen in 100 years' time as fumbling in a...

It's a bit premature to conclude the LHC won't find Higgs or SUSY but... There are a few ideas kicking around that use knots (braids, strings, strands, knotted dimesnsions or whatever) to "explain" the Standard Model. One that catches the eye for its explicit particle mass calculations is...

Thanks for that, Sir. Could someone help with another of my layman probs? Ghosts are usually thought to be wreckers in string theories. Do they pair with positive mass partners with identical quantum numbers? If so, what would be wrong with taking "reality" as the sum-of-squares mass (as in...

Sorry, Arivero, if you'd got bored with this thread... You started with a Furey paper that cited FDT Smith's 1993 paper, then posted a link to Smith's home page. This contains a lot of stuff - most of no interest to me, whatsoever, but also much post-1993 including quite a lot of calculations...

Lovely, ta very much!

@surprised, you've made me think even more about "twists". Are your wrapping numbers allowed to be negative? Even though it may be impossible to specify winding sense around an isolated hole, there must be configurations of several holes where the net result of a cycle does depend on the...

@surprised, that was really helpful - thanks a lot! It's moved me on a fraction and even nudged me gently to go back to my 30-year-old linear algebra, group theory and diff. geometry. They may just make a bit more sense this time around...

The answers will probably be "it ain't as simple as that" but here's trying, anyway. 1. Is current thinking that strings have to wind "around" something? If so, must the compactified space have at least one hole? 2. With just a single hole, presumably there can be just one topologically...

Brilliant forum, wish i'd spent time browsing it years ago. In my layman's "understanding" of string theory six dimensions are compactified and usually presumed to be of very small size. My questions are: 1. Is there any mathematical or (better still) physical reason why this space does...