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Physicists Discover Geometry Underlying Particle Physics

Posted by Soulskill on from the amplituhedron-is-the-word-of-the-day dept.

New submitter Lee_Dailey sends this news from Quanta Magazine: "Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality. 'This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,' said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work. The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like "amplituhedron," which yields an equivalent one-term expression."

6 of 600 comments (clear)

  1. Re:hmmm.... by quantumghost · · Score: 4, Informative

    Had the same thought. His name is Garrett Lisi

  2. It's a time cube by Russ1642 · · Score: 4, Informative

    EARTH HAS 4 CORNER
    SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY
    TIME CUBE
    WITHIN SINGLE ROTATION.
      4 CORNER DAYS PROVES 1
    DAY 1 GOD IS TAUGHT EVIL.
    IGNORANCE OF TIMECUBE4
    SIMPLE MATH IS RETARDATION
    AND EVIL EDUCATION DAMNATION.
    CUBELESS AMERICANS DESERVE -
    AND SHALL BE EXTERMINATED

  3. Re:hmmm.... by AliasMarlowe · · Score: 5, Informative

    Lisi's E_8 conjecture is somewhat more complicated than this one. For a start, the geometry of the E_8 group is richer than that of a mere amplituhedron. Others may note that Lisi's conjecture also includes gravitation in its unification, while TFA appears to be only about particle families.

    --
    Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
  4. simply nonsense by Browzer · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Slashdot headline, not the physics.

    http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

  5. Re:Relevance of theory to the real world is unknow by Guy+Harris · · Score: 5, Informative

    If one assumes that Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are correct, and there is no observational evidence that they are not, then Yang-Mills theory, or something very much like it, is inevitable. It arises from the need for conservation of the various charges each force.

    A Yang-Mills theory, based on {pick-your-favorite-group}, may be inevitable. Whether it would be the N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory is another matter; it won't be.

  6. Re:42 by ByteSlicer · · Score: 5, Informative

    Also, computing proteins folding is probably going to get a serious performance boost too. If this proves to really work genetic engineering is going to enter a new phase.

    Probably not.
    This just speeds up some mathematical methods used to calculate probability fields in quantum mechanical problems. So it will provide a certain linear speedup of those calculations (for example 1000 times faster).
    It will not however help with NP hard problems (like protein folding), because these would need real quantum computations (on a quantum computer) to reduce the exponential order of the problem into a lower order one.
    If a problem would take many times the age of the universe to calculate, then dividing that time by a small factor will not help much.