Can someone explain to me a flop transition in laymen's terms?

[Trollfaz]

Can someone explain a flop transition to me in laymen terms? And what consequences does it have on the universe? Thanks

 

[PAllen]

The only flop transition I know of is a feature of string theory, in which case this the wrong forum section to discuss it. It should be in the beyond the standard model subforum.

 

[jedishrfu]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flop-transition

Basically, the universe shrinks and the spacetime tears and gets repaired with different properties. What those changes are is harder to describe? After the tear, perhaps you would perceive time traveling backwards but we don't know.



https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/elegant universe/section4/page/3/

Throughout 1992, Greene and Plesser attempted to gather mathematical evidence of mirror-perspective Calabi-Yau spaces. Greene decided to spend the fall of 1992 at the Institute for Advanced Study with mathematician David Morrison and Greene’s Oxford classmate Paul Aspinwall. Over the course of that fall, Morrison, Aspinwell, and Greene proved mathematically that flop transitions did not destroy mirror symmetry. Around the same time, Witten had also established, by different methods, that flop transitions occur in string theory. Witten went beyond Greene and his coresearchers’ findings to show why flop transitions do not trigger cosmic catastrophe: when a tear occurs, an adjacent string encircles and reconstitutes it. Together, Greene, Morrison, Aspinwall, and Witten mathematically demonstrated the existence of topology-changing transitions (a more technical name for flop transitions). These findings, Greene predicts, will lead to a revolutionary revision of Einstein’s general relativity.

 

[PeterDonis]

The only flop transition I know of is a feature of string theory, in which case this the wrong forum section to discuss it. It should be in the beyond the standard model subforum.

Yes, it should, and now it is; thread moved.

 

[jedishrfu]

Here's a more technical layman description featuring a lot of big words with associated images of spaces and the flop transition is mentioned in passing:

https://publicism.info/science/elegant/12.html

 

[MathematicalPhysicist]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flop-transition

Basically, the universe shrinks and the spacetime tears and gets repaired with different properties. What those changes are is harder to describe? After the tear, perhaps you would perceive time traveling backwards but we don't know.



https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/elegant universe/section4/page/3/

Reality is stranger than fiction for sure.

And a good tune to listen to:
Movement for the common man by styx.

 

[mitchell porter]

A flop transition would be a particular kind of slight change in the shape of the extra dimensions in string theory. Without quantum mechanics it would be a discontinuous process, but quantum mechanics makes it smooth in a way that is of theoretical interest to Witten, Greene, etc.

In string theory, the shape and size of the extra dimensions determines particle physics properties, which is why a change could be "catastrophic", e.g. affecting the very existence of atoms. However, it requires big-bang energies to produce such a change, so the only place in physics where such changes are discussed, is in the context of the very early universe, a time when extra dimensions may indeed have been changing. The possible shapes of the extra dimensions are connected by a web of "flop transitions", "conifold transitions", and other kinds of topology change. From the paper cited in Wikipedia's article in flop transitions, I learn that in that context, there may be a tendency for the geometry of the extra dimensions to stabilize close to the edge of a flop transition.

There is no connection to time travel.