14 years ago
Thursday, October 14, 2010
The Official Position
Both Matti and Mottle have now reacted to the inevitable rumours that SUSY has been seen at the LHC. Those experimentalists like to play games with the children. However, since SUSY is nothing more than a generalised kind of mathematical symmetry, which does not appear to add to the particle spectrum in any reasonable way, the rumours are no doubt just that: rumours.
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Certainly rumors. But supersymmetry is mathematically almost like a generalization of the number system. Nature would be extremely stupid if it would not apply it.
ReplyDeleteFor me the rumors give a good opportunity to explain TGD predictions, among other things the prediction that weak Regge trajectories might turn out to be one of the really big surprises in LHC.
If I take the rumors seriously I also get a from Higgsino mass estimate a prediction for Higgs mass consistent with the earlier prediction coming from different empirical inputs. Also the
mass of fermionic superpartner happens to be consistent with the identification as selectron with shortest possible p-adic length scale allowed by simple consistency argument.
And as I mention in the posting in my blog, Higgs mechanism is
not the massivation mechanism in TGD, probably it does not even give small contribution to the masses. It is however very difficult to cook up an argument that Higgs like particles would not be there.
It is amusing that I am regarded as a representative of an official position taking into account that I have worked 32 years without a single coin of support for my work and TGD means dramatic deviations from what establishment allows to think.
ReplyDeleteWell, this is my blog, Matti ... not Physics World! Unfortunately, I have no spare pennies to give away.
ReplyDeleteSupersymmetry is the only plausible way to unify exterior symmetries of spacetime with internal symmetries. This is a consequence of the theorems of Coleman & Mandula plus Haig's. So there are some rather compelling reasons to think SUSY does operate in nature.
ReplyDeleteNo, Kea, I think that was already a BIG MONEY.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I do not chritizise you, only I try to understand. Usually Lie algebra and category theory is used to describe the clumping process of energy, but clumping means topology and geometry. Non-locality is something else. It is like the pressure of the whole universe, something that we usually describe to gravity.
Lawrence, given that we are discussing particle spectra with abstract braids, and no classical spacetime symmetries in sight, these theorems are pretty effing irrelevant to my perspective. Like one great scientist once said (who?): theorems in physics have a tendency to be wrong.
ReplyDeleteKea,
ReplyDeletethere is enormous amount of empirical support for the connection between space-time symmetries and conservation laws discovered by Emmy Noether. To high degree quantum theory has reduced to representation theory for groups, and more general structures such as super groups, and related algebras (Lie algebras, super Virasoro, Kac-Moody, Yangian,...) . If you want to throw away all of this, you have a tremendous challenge since you must reproduce all the successes of symmetry based approach.
I have nothing against braids nor even high-browed notion of operad. Braids pop up in TGD naturally and can be seen as correlates for finite measurement resolution. But as you know braids alone give only topological quantum field theories and also topological QFTs involve gauge groups naturally. Operad emerges in the realization of symplectic QFTs as a hierarchy of discrete algebras.
The inclusion of the crucial Poincare symmetries is almost by definition impossible to topological QFTs. One can of course always claim that this or that represents mass (we had long discussion in viXra related to this) but to obtain without Poincare symmetry a 4-plet of numbers transforming just like four-momentum under those physical operations we identify as Lorentz boosts is not an easy task.
I see category theory, operads, braids and whatever as an addition to the conceptual and technical arsenal of physics, not something forcing to throw away all that we know to work.
Supersymmetries emerge also at deeper level as super-conformal symmetries. In TGD framework they imply the analogs of necessarily broken space-time super-symmetries as has turned out after long period of yes/no:ing.
ReplyDeleteIf one accepts generalization of Einstein's program meaning the reduction of physics as a spinor geometry of world of classical worlds and also 4-dimensionality of space-time, one ends up with an extension of super-conformal symmetries of string model as symmetries associated with light-like 3-surfaces (or vice versa).
The gamma matrices of world of classical worlds define super-generators of the super-variant of infinite-D isometry algebra of WCW. Infinite-dimensionality of this algebra is required by the mere existence of Riemann connection: a result first found for loop space. Infinite-dimensional geometry and physics are unique. WCW is union of symmetric Kaehler spaces whose points are geometrically equivalent so that one has excellent hopes about calculability. Also imbedding space symmetries are absolutely essential for the existence of WCW geometry.
What exists is what can exist geometrically. This is what I see as a good "axiomatic" guideline.
And the geometry will never be understood except in purely category theoretic terms. Heh, I've watched people like Alain Connes FOR DECADES ... trying to recover the standard model with a very sophisticated form of geometry that still isn't good enough! He might care more for the Riemann Hypothesis than the physics, but you cannot accuse him of being unaware of the richness of the role of classical symmetries in physics (as you can dumb blonde me).
ReplyDeleteIn fact, Connes (who is just one example here) has Grothendieck as a devil ... he said it himself once. Matti, I did not just pick up a bit of category theory with the aim of churning out papers on topological field theory (which I also studied for many years) etc. You cannot be right about everything, and you should probably try harder to remember that.
Matti said this better than me. I also know it is unfair to you Kea, because nobody knows. But you are the one who has taken the fight with the unsaid.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is - how transform the non-locality into braids and topology. I do realize that the geometry is a result of this, perhaps the best choice we ever have, but how make the diffuseness into braids?
Probably category theory allows to develop new insights to the formal structures of geometry. I however take geometry as an abstraction of simple visual ideas rather than abstract nonsense with arrows. I am also against throwing out all that we have learned during these 500 years since Newton.
ReplyDeleteThe mathematics developed by von Neuman, Connes and others is a key element of TGD. The Clifford algebra defined by Gamma matrices of WCW is a basic representative of hyperfinite factor of type II_1 and emerges just from the generalization of classical Kahler geometry to infinite-D context. Also HFFs of type III_1 emerge naturally form WCW spinor fields.
To my humble opinion the failure of Connes approach is that introduces non-commutativity in wrong context- at space-time level and as a purpose rather than tool. Endless variety of non-commutative QFTs have been constructed without any real progress in the understanding of physics. The modification of the line element ds introduced by Connes at space-time level remains completely obscure to me.
The non-commutative mathematics emerges however beautifully in WCW context as a tool rather than purpose from very every-daily notion -finite measurement resolution- realized in terms of inclusions of HFFs. This brings in also the braids and it is important in all scales. Transition from finite-D to infinite-D geometry, not from finite-D to finite-D non-commutative geometry.
This -as I humbly believe- is the correct manner to proceed. It is also a natural continuation to QFT program where one fights in attempts to mathematize infinite-D structures and for some mysterious reason has failed to realize that geometry is the most natural starting point.
A little comment about Higgs. It might be possible that we can agree about the ontological status of Higgs to certain extent. Also John Ellis has raised existential questions about Higgs.
ReplyDeleteUlla's question about Mexican hats was very useful since I realized that I can actually try to understand the details of Higgs mechanism using weak string picture. I have been blundering with this for a couple of days now. The outcome is what looks like a nice understanding of massivation without Higgs potential explaining how Higgs is eaten by gauge bosons and how one obtains correct Z/W mass ratio: these are the victories of Higgs potential approach.
In TGD framework Higgs corresponds to SU(2) triplet and singlet as do also gauge bosons and the surprise was that internal consistency suggests that photon eats the "photonic" Higgs and gets very small mass which guarantees. The analog of this would apply to all massless particles so that twistorial approach to M-matrix is free of IR divergences. No Higgs components would remain to be detected at LHC. Higgsinos would be however there as also pseudo-scalar counterpart of Higgs.
OK, I can agree that the munched Higgs is a useful picture for interpolating between the Higgs free braids (with triplets galore) and the old local form of the Standard Model.
ReplyDeleteI do not want to throw away successful theories of physics. I want them to be derived from OUTSIDE their own context. No decent theory in physics has ever done otherwise.
Happy my questions can be of any use. But I had to ask many times :)
ReplyDelete"I want them to be derived from OUTSIDE their own context." - is that possible? Maybe you will have to create new physics of how to tie probabilities. But that is a new Higgs potential only? Why invent the wheel again?
And the DM must be there. A property as Life depends on it. Try to explain Life without DM/DE.
Ulla, theoretical physics is all about reinventing the wheel. The mathematics is like a big sandy beach, with a bunch of noisy children making castles and throwing sand at each other. No wheel is permanent, but we have to keep reinventing it so that we don't forget what it is.
ReplyDeleteMy own position (arxiv:0910.4793, 0710.1526, and hep-ph/0512065) is that the combinations of selectron, smuon and stau where already observer in the last century, as well as the 12 sneutrinos. In fact, my view of susy actually predicts three generations and the special role of the top quark.
ReplyDeleteSo, if there are some foundation in these rumours, I would expect it to be related either with the gauginos or the higgs content.
What worries me about having a MSSM higgs content is that it exhausts the place in the 128-multiplet, not leaving room for the graviton. No problem if gravity is emergent, or course. But it should be very shocking to have a sugra theory without the 4D graviton. Nor to speak of how to deconstruct a 11D spin 2 into 4D spin 0 and 1 only.
Thanks for mentioning this, Alejandro. I apologise for not remembering everything as I go along ...
ReplyDeleteAu contraire, it is me who must thank you for allowing to recall this point. I understand that it slips out of memory for the same reason that most of the papers, arxived or vixred: because they are not of immediate utility to other's work. Still, I had expected that the claim for the first scalar-fermion to have been discovered already in 1946 by Cecil Frank Powell (and confirmed in 1947 by D. Perkins) should be shocking enough for people to remember :-)
ReplyDeleteLets hope they find some gaugino there in the LHC.