Demystifier said:
Why don't you take a look at his book or some of his papers?
I recalled now. I actually had Volovok book "The Universe in a Helium Droplet".
James Bjorken wrote the preface which discouraged me:
"It is often said that the problem of the very small cosmological constant is
the greatest mystery in cosmology and in particle physics, and that no one has
any good ideas on how to solve it. The contents of this book make a lie of that
statement. The material in this monograph builds upon a candidate solution to
the problem, often dubbed `emergence'. It is a solution so simple and direct that it can be stated here in this foreword. Visualize the vacuum of particle physics as if it were a cold quantum liquid in equilibrium. Then its pressure must vanish, unless it is a droplet - in which case there will be surface corrections scaling as an inverse power of the droplet size. But vacuum dark pressure scales with the vacuum dark energy, and thus is measured by the cosmological constant, which indeed scales as the inverse square of the `size' of the universe. The problem is
`solved'.
But there is some bad news with the good. Photons, gravitons, and gluons
must be viewed as collective excitations of the purported liquid, with dispersion
laws which at high energies are not expected to be relativistic. The equivalence
principle and gauge invariance are probably inexact. Many other such ramications exist, as described in this book. And experimental constraints on such deviant behavior are extremely strong. Nevertheless, it is in my opinion not out of the question that the diffulties can eventually be overcome. If they are, it will mean that many sacrosanct beliefs held by almost all contemporary theoretical particle physicists and cosmologists will at the least be severely challenged.
This book summarizes the pioneering research of its author, Grisha Volovik,
and provides a splendid guide into this mostly unexplored wilderness of emergent particle physics and cosmology. So far it is not respectable territory, so there is danger to the young researcher venturing within - working on it may be detrimental to a successful career track. But together with the danger will be high adventure and, if the ideas turn out to be correct, great rewards. I salute here those who take the chance and embark upon the adventure. At the very least they will be rewarded by acquiring a deep understanding of much of the lore of condensed matter physics. And, with some luck, they will also be rewarded by uncovering a radically di®erent interpretation of the profound problems involving the structure of the very large and of the very small.
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center James D. Bjorken
August 2002"
First he said "The material in this monograph builds upon a candidate solution to
the problem, often dubbed `emergence'. It is a solution so simple and direct that
it can be stated here in this foreword. Visualize the vacuum of particle physics as if it were a cold quantum liquid in equilibrium...".
We know our vacuum is not a cold quantum liquid in equilibrium, is it? So what's the point of writing about something that didn't exist. This was the reason I asked what really was Volovik version of the atoms in the vacuum where our particles were the phonons. It couldn't really be cold quantum liquid, is it?
Second, he wrote "So far it is not respectable territory, so there is danger to the young researcher venturing within.."
So James Bjorken already gave such a negative tone in the first page. Also he made it sound like it was only to solve the cosmological constant problem.
Has anyone read the book besides Demystifier? What are others views of it? It will take me 2 years to read it. Is the "cold quantum liquid" supposed to be literal? Has it not been falsified already? Does this fall under the subject of Subquantum Physics?
) are even less respectable territory, so you are the last person for whom I expect to be discouraged by not being in a respectable territory.
