19 June 2013

Phenomenological quantum gravity - getting paid for waiting.

Phenomenological quantum gravity is the research topic of Frau Hossenfelder. Her post is interesting. She is looking for experimental results in quantum gravitation. She gives a long list that nobody found any. In fact, she is waiting for others to find such result. Indeed, she writes
What I do believe in ... is that it is possible for us to find experimental evidence for quantum gravity if we ask the right questions and look in the right places. 
This is her research: to wait! To wait for something that will never happen. She gets a salary for that. Frau Hossenfelder is waiting, and calls this research. Mind you, she organizes conferences on this topic (i.e. on waiting); she writes papers on it, gives talks, etc. It looks like research. But in reality it is just  
waiting.
We should not be astonished. In particle physics, everybody is waiting, at present. Read arxiv/hep-th or arxiv/gr-qc. Nobody is searching for new ideas. Humanity is paying all these researchers for waiting. Waiting for the correct ideas.


5 comments:

  1. Good point, Clara!

    Here I am sitting waiting for Christoph Schiller to calculate the particle masses and coupling constants from the Strand Model. I have just been assuming that it is too hard for me, but who knows? I could have an unusual idea how to do the determination and get lucky.

    OK, so, p321 of Motion Mountain vol.6 says

    1. Mass is inertial and gravitational.
    2. Gravity (which is curvature) is due to fluctuations of tails and vacuum strands around a tangle core.
    3. Inertia (which is the frequency and wavelength of the rotating phase vector in the Dirac equation) is due to fluctuations due to the type of tangle knottedness.
    4. So mass is just a measure of propensity to fluctuate.

    So the more tangled up it is, the less easy it is for everything to flap around, and so the more massive you call it. (When everything is tangled up so tight that nothing can hardly move, that's the horizon of a black hole. Really massive!)

    I suppose you have to take each basic tangle, ie. elementary particle, and work out how flappy it is relative to every other basic tangle -- or rather, how constraining it is upon the flapping around it -- and that's its mass.

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  2. Replies
    1. Sorry, I think I got it a bit mixed up. I just read p254, '...energy is the number of crossing switches per time...' I forgot about that.

      So there must be two things:
      1. More flapping about where there are less tangles to inhibit it.
      2. The little flapping that there is around tangles is more likely to produce crossing switches.

      OK now I can guess a reason for the anomalous mass of the down-quark tangle:

      The down quark tangle is more symmetrical. Maybe that means it inhibits general flapping about just slightly less than the others. Since flapping around tangles is more likely to result in crossing switches, and since there is more flapping around the down-quark tangle, the extra flapping results in extra crossing switches -- and that's why the down-quark is extra massive.

      (About the inhibiting of flapping by tangles, what I was thinking was that a wave of fluctuation coming from one direction (riding on the tangle's tails and on the vacuum strands) is going to get messed up by an asymmetrical tangle and so interfere with the wave when it comes out the other side -- and if then there is hardly any flapping left, how are any crossing switches going to happen?)

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    2. 2. The little flapping that there is around tangles is more likely to produce crossing switches.

      Why do big tangles produce more crossing switches then?

      'We know roughly how the belt trick influences the mass differences. A larger tangle core and a larger number of strands makes the belt trick less probable, and thus increases the mass value.' -- p331.

      OK so the belt trick must be a fluctuation of a tangle that doesn't produce any crossing switches. If the belt trick can occur easily, crossing switches won't happen. Therefore big tangles -- for which the belt trick is less likely -- produce more crossing switches when they are flapped about, so they are more massive.

      So...

      'In the strand model, mass appears due to overcrossing at the border of space. But mass is also due to tangle rotation and fluctuation. How do the two definitions come together?' -- p315.

      Is this the answer:

      Overcrossing at the border of space makes the tangles. Tangles are not observable; crossing switches are. Flapping around tangles makes crossing switches. Flapping of tangles that only results in the belt trick doesn't cause any crossing switches. Big tangles don't do the belt trick so easily, so flapping the big tangles produces more crossing switches. So big tangles are more massive.

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  3. I'll try to get Schiller to read this.

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