Quantum Gravity and the Standard Model (Sundance + PI)

[marcus]

I guess I should keep my mouth shut in this thread.

here we have group-brain and group-mouth, so no one is responsible to say anything

anyone who wants (for any reason) to NOT say something, does not have to say it! I like this. the reason is that the group-mouth will take care of it----someone else will accidentally say what is necessary

so we live in a relaxed situation without those kind of requirements on us

Maybe I did not explain this clearly, but it doesn't matter: not an important thought

yes, well Baez wrote TWF on Saturday 20th, and on Tuesday 23rd he was planning to talk to the author(s) of the Sundance paper.

In the course of time whatever is true in the Sundance paper will coagulate as pure metal and whatever is not true will burn up and go away as smoke. I think there ARE valuable ideas in that paper and I am very happy to wait until it is obvious what they are. I am not in a hurry, personally, to find out.

Maybe Smolin made an impossible leap in this paper (!) Creative people sometimes do this. they jump across the grand canyon and then discover a minute later that it was impossible to do that. We will find out sometime how it went.

The leap is this: CAN YOU HAVE PARTS OF A SPIN NETWORK WHICH HAVE SOME DISTINCTIVE TOPOLOGICAL CHARACTER WHICH MAINTAIN THEIR INTEGRITY? these have to be inclusions in the network which don't dissipate in the normal interaction with the rest----by ordinary "moves" performed on the network. these are like gems in a rock. or like fossil shells in clay. they have to propagate freely WITHOUT LOSING THEIR INTEGRITY by too much interaction.

this seems like a "tall order". this seems like something that is impossible to ask to happen in a spin network.

Anyway that is my understanding of it. I suppose this could happen by KNOTTING. When someone has long hair and gets small tangles in the hair that will not be combed out, it is called "snarls". Maybe a spin network can have "snarls"

Or maybe not. I feel happy about this, knowing that Baez and Smolin got together on Tuesday 23rd to talk about it. I think when you get creative people together who know how to talk business, that eventually WE WILL FIND OUT HOW TO GET MATTER TO ARISE IN SPIN NETWORK, or else in beef, and they will very likely have made some steps of progress!
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if anyone actually knows anything about progress in that area, and wants to say anything about it, that would be delightful, but it is not necessary
what I post here are just my first guesses at the moment you mentioned it

 

[lqg]

You are right.

 

[lqg]

By the way, since Lee never stepped in this forum, I gave him the link today. I wish he would take a few minutes to come by and say something here, not just in this thread. He knows everything I have done on the project and surely much more than that.

 

[marcus]

By the way, since Lee never stepped in this forum, I gave him the link today. I wish he would take a few minutes to come by and say something here, not just in this thread. He knows everything I have done on the project and surely much more than that.

time too valuable IMHO
need him to pull the train and not take time talking to the passengers

you are actually better as a connection with that program, lqg.
it is a case of "impedance matching" (to make an electical engineer comparison)

from time to time Prof. Smolin posts at Woit's blog when there is a hard misunderstanding there and a real need for clarification in some argument between academic people. that is a good use of his time.

here it would be just like handing out free tickets to the circus.

but John Baez comes here sometimes, so why not?

 

[CarlB]

I saw Smolin's (crowded) lecture on the Sundance braid theory at the APS meeting in Dallas. The basic problem is that their theory fails to give three generations, and their method of expanding to multiple generations fails to explain why there are only three low mass neutrinos.

For a while I thought that I could make my preons into a braid theory. There is sort of a hint as to how to do this in the literature. I'm purely algebraic, no braids, but I'm using Clifford / Geometric algebra. There's a paper by the Cambridge geometric algebraists showing a relation between twistors and algebra here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0603037
Also see:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0008072

Also, Koide has written a paper referencing mine on the neutrino masses. The papers are here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0605074
http://brannenworks.com/MASSES2.pdf

also, Alexei Smirnov, an invited speaker at the LHP conference in Tehran, mentioned it in his lecture:
http://physics.ipm.ac.ir/conferences/lhp06/notes/smirnov3.pdf
The audio is apparently available here, though I haven't listened to it:
http://physics.ipm.ac.ir/conferences/lhp06/program.pdf

Carl

 

[Kea]

There's a paper by the Cambridge geometric algebraists showing a relation between twistors and algebra...

Hi CarlB

Alternatively, one might observe that circulants are naturally associated to the Hall polynomials that quantum group people like. Note also that 3x3 circulants A, in particular, are characterised by the relation

P_{3} A = A P_{3}

where P_{3} is the S_{3} permutation (circulant) with 0,1,0 in the first row.

Hmmm...

 

[Kea]

Update

Smolin's slides from Loops07 are available here:

http://www.matmor.unam.mx/eventos/loops07/talks/PL5/Smolin.pdf

They indicate that the old loopy idea on mass generation has been abandoned in favour of a much more sensible approach (see slide 38), although details are lacking.