A new hope for ST? Hold the thought of Jonathan J. Heckman

[Fra]

I stumbled upon an article by Jonathan J. Heckman proposing a connection between string theory and rational inference that contains insight to a new perspective that seems to be very hard for people to grasp the potential of. This made me happy and IMO it gives a new hope to hope for new grips from WITHIN string world.

Statistical Inference and String Theory

In this note we expose some surprising connections between string theory and statistical inference. We consider a large collective of agents sweeping out a family of nearby statistical models for an M-dimensional manifold of statistical fitting parameters. When the agents making nearby inferences align along a d-dimensional grid, we find that the pooled probability that the collective reaches a correct inference is the partition function of a non-linear sigma model in d dimensions. Stability under perturbations to the original inference scheme requires the agents of the collective to distribute along two dimensions. Conformal invariance of the sigma model corresponds to the condition of a stable inference scheme, directly leading to the Einstein field equations for classical gravity. By summing over all possible arrangements of the agents in the collective, we reach a string theory. We also use this perspective to quantify how much an observer can hope to learn about the internal geometry of a superstring compactification. Finally, we present some brief speculative remarks on applications to the AdS/CFT correspondence and Lorentzian signature spacetimes.

-- https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3621

I just want to say that while this paper imho along by no means explains or solve the landscape problem or the apparently arbitrary starting point of a continuous string in a continuous space, it in my eyes represents a glimps of hope on new thinking that may contains keys to resolving current problems.

I have no prior knowledge of the author or of his "thinking" so maybe i see things that the original author didnt, but anyway. I felt this paper deserved to be commented on more bacause i didnt find a lot of follow ups on this?

I just found oddly enough these old comments from Lubos
https://motls.blogspot.se/2013/05/string-theory-bayesian-inference.html

Is the "hope" i tend to see in this paper which the author himself calls a "note" shared by others in string theory world? Or is the environment not yet ready to spin onto the seed? Comments on lubos blod seems mixed and confused. The questions is probably how to make the REAL step to proving that strings uniquely follow from a possible hypothesis that is sense hint in that paper?

/Fredrik

 

[kodama]

couldn't this "methodology" be used for any BSM physics from GUT to technicolor to inflation to LQG?

wouldn't a better statistical inferential approach would be assessing the probability of SUSY and extra dimensions being realized in nature in light of current LHC results?

 

[Fra]

couldn't this "methodology" be used for any BSM physics from GUT to technicolor to inflation to LQG?

wouldn't a better statistical inferential approach would be assessing the probability of SUSY and extra dimensions being realized in nature in light of current LHC results?

What i hinted here is largely in the eye of the beholder, i should make that clear.

The interacting inference perspective is drastically different from string approach, but my judgement is that out of the biggest well known BSM research programs string theory has, indespite of all its big trouble - som traits that make a connection more likely.

Remember this thread of yours? https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-string-theory-is-still-not-even-wrong.913168/page-2

The new hope i see, is a possible broader awareness of a route to the constructing principles that has the potential to maybe provide answers to some of string theories biggest issues. To make a big leap here: MAYBE we can see that a continuous string in a higher dimensional space FOLLOWS from an inference perspective of self-organizing communicating agents in the high complexity limit. Of course the new conjecture is that these agents follow rational actions. But MY view is of course that THIS strategy does not fall with string theory. IF we connect to ST, it would be nice for string community, and we can also connect to all work on the mathematical string impliciations that exists. But if we find that this does NOT leda to continuous strings but something else, then we might connect to another BSM model or need to rework something new. But what we find is not important, what is important is to get on track, which i personally think physics has lost decades ago. But the inertia of habit and current paradigm is strong, which is understandable as it has excelled for along time. This is also why i am quite sure that a lot of excellent physicists could more or less trip on the "key"we are all need, without seeing it.

If you make the same associations like me here you will see the analogy to economic game theory, nash equilibrium, evolution of social law etc. These analogies are good as they make you think using the right logic. But there are also big differences, which makes the critique against rational players invalid because the rationaly measure is observer dependenet, and observers are part of the game. The analogy is the the LAWS are emergent as the communication systems between agents, and the population of agents are nothing but matter, and the fundamental agents are elementary particles. Note that this would also solve the landscape problem by an evolutionary picture. The landscape does not really exist in the inside perspective, its just to the fallacious non-physical embedding that theorist has imposed.

But i have figured that this new perspective is hard to grasp, and hard to appreciate, which is why one has to make it in steps. I think the paper of Jonathan gives me at least a tiny bit of hope. Perhaps you may think the connection is far fetched at first (but we shold expect no les for the hard problems on the table should we?) but these things are so rare that we should highlight even the smallest grains of gold.

So didn't Jonathans note give any string theorists any ideas whatsoever?

/Fredrik