#he's doing algebra geometry and quantum equations all at once

[loquarocoeur]

Does Max ever do a cost benefit analysis and decide certain rules are worth breaking like he does on track? Like fineee he’ll have to go to the stewards (Charles) but he gets what he wants in the end?

Lmao he's sitting there with his little notebook trying to do the math like if I do this will Charles be mad as in like fuck me against the wall kind of mad, or mad as in like fuck my mouth mad or will he just roll his eyes and laugh at me staring at Charles over the edge of his little notebook and Charles is just there like what do you WANT

[2whatcom-blog]

Discovered A Quadrillion Methods for String Concept to Make Our Universe

Physicists who've been roaming the "landscape" of string theory--the house of zillions and zillions of mathematical options of the idea, the place every answer gives the sorts of equations physicists want to explain reality--have stumbled upon a subset of such equations which have the identical set of matter particles as exists in our universe. However that is no small subset: there are at the very least a quadrillion such options, making it the most important such set ever present in string idea. Based on string idea, all particles and basic forces come up from the vibrational states of tiny strings. For mathematical consistency, these strings vibrate in 10-dimensional spacetime. And for consistency with our acquainted on a regular basis expertise of the universe, with three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time, the extra six dimensions are "compactified" in order to be undetectable. Totally different compactifications result in completely different options. In string idea, a "solution" implies a vacuum of spacetime that's ruled by Einstein's idea of gravity coupled to a quantum area idea. Every answer describes a singular universe, with its personal set of particles, basic forces and different such defining properties. Some string theorists have centered their efforts on looking for methods to attach string idea to properties of our identified, observable universe--particularly the usual mannequin of particle physics, which describes all identified particles and all their mutual forces besides gravity. A lot of this effort has concerned a model of string idea through which the strings work together weakly. Nevertheless, prior to now twenty years, a brand new department of string idea referred to as F-theory has allowed physicists to work with strongly interacting, or strongly coupled, strings. "An intriguing, surprising result is that when the coupling is large, we can start describing the theory very geometrically," says Mirjam Cvetic of the College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Which means that string theorists can use algebraic geometry--which makes use of algebraic strategies to deal with geometric problems--to analyze the assorted methods of compactifying further dimensions in F-theory and to seek out options. Mathematicians have been independently learning among the geometric varieties that seem in F-theory. "They provide us physicists a vast toolkit", says Ling Lin, additionally of the College of Pennsylvania. "The geometry is really the key... it is the 'language' that makes F-theory such a powerful framework." Now, Cvetic, Lin, James Halverson of Northeastern College in Boston, and their colleagues have used such strategies to determine a category of options with string vibrational modes that result in an analogous spectrum of fermions (or, particles of matter) as is described by the usual model--including the property that each one fermions are available in three generations (for instance, the electron, muon and tau are the three generations of 1 sort of fermion). The F-theory options discovered by Cvetic and colleagues have particles that additionally exhibit the handedness, or chirality, of the usual mannequin particles. In particle physics lingo, the options reproduce the precise "chiral spectrum" of normal mannequin particles. For instance, the quarks and leptons in these options are available in left and right-handed variations, as they do in our universe. The brand new work exhibits that there are at the very least a quadrillion options through which particles have the identical chiral spectrum as the usual mannequin, which is 10 orders of magnitude extra options than had been discovered inside string idea till now. "This is by far the largest domain of standard model solutions," Cvetic says. "It's somehow surprising and actually also rewarding that it turns out to be in the strongly coupled string theory regime, where geometry helped us." A quadrillion--while it is a lot, a lot smaller than the dimensions of the panorama of options in F-theory (which ultimately rely was proven to be of the order of 10272,000)--is a tremendously giant quantity. "And because it's a tremendously large number, and it gets something nontrivial in real world particle physics correct, we should take it seriously and study it further," Halverson says. Additional examine would contain uncovering stronger connections with the particle physics of the true world. The researchers nonetheless must work out the couplings or interactions between particles within the F-theory solutions--which once more depend upon the geometric particulars of the compactifications of the additional dimensions. It might be that inside the house of the quadrillion options, there are some with couplings that would trigger the proton to decay inside observable timescales. This might clearly be at odds with the true world, as experiments have but to see any signal of protons decaying. Alternatively, physicists may seek for options that notice the spectrum of normal mannequin particles that protect a mathematical symmetry referred to as R-parity. "This symmetry forbids certain proton decay processes and would be very attractive from a particle physics point of view, but is missing in our current models," Lin says. Additionally, the work assumes supersymmetry, which implies that all the usual mannequin particles have companion particles. String idea wants this symmetry with a purpose to make sure the mathematical consistency of options. However to ensure that any supersymmetric idea to tally with the observable universe, the symmetry must be damaged (very similar to how a diner's number of cutlery and consuming glass on her left or proper facet will "break" the symmetry of the desk setting at a spherical dinner desk). Else, the companion particles would have the identical mass as customary mannequin particles--and that's clearly not the case, since we do not observe any such companion particles in our experiments. Crucially, experiments on the Massive Hadron Collider (LHC) have additionally proven that supersymmetry--if it's the right description of nature--is not damaged even on the vitality scales probed by the LHC, on condition that the LHC has but to seek out any supersymmetric particles. String theorists assume that supersymmetry is perhaps damaged solely at extraordinarily excessive energies that aren't inside experimental attain anytime quickly. "The expectation in string theory is that high-scale breaking, which is fully consistent with LHC data, is completely possible," Halverson says. "It requires further analysis to determine whether or not it happens in our case." Regardless of these caveats, different string theorists are approving of the brand new work. "This is definitely a step forward in demonstrating that string theory gives rise to many solutions with features of the standard model," says string theorist Washington Taylor of MIT. "It's very nice work," says Cumrun Vafa, one of many builders of F-theory, at Harvard College. "The fact you can arrange the geometry and topology to fit with not only Einstein's equations, but also with the spectrum that we want, is not trivial. It works out nicely here." However Vafa and Taylor each warning that these options are removed from matching completely with the usual mannequin. Getting options to match precisely with the particle physics of our world is among the final targets of string idea. Vafa is amongst those that assume that, regardless of the immensity of the panorama of options, there exists a singular answer that matches our universe. "I bet there is exactly one," he says. However, "to pinpoint this is not going to be easy." Read the full article

[fluxsci]

The Torrent – Why Is Science So Hard?

|| by matthew

A young boy at the age of ten used to think that science wasn’t interesting at all. It was that thing that doctors used to cure people. It was pretty hard, requiring tons of memorization of vocabulary and the most annoying attention to detail. But a year later, he himself was considering becoming a doctor. The difficulty was a thrill – a challenge to him to see how deep he could go. It turned into a respect for the scientists that came before and managed to discover all of these things, sometimes by themselves. Before the boy knew it, he was fourteen, knowing facts not only about the human body, but also the physical world. Somehow the experiences of high-school gave the adolescent a greater awareness of the veil between the technical and real; the numbers and the world that uses those numbers. It wasn’t too long before the pursuits of science led to a desire for a deeper dive. After educating himself on the requirements of becoming and practicing as a doctor and looking at the various fields within science, he decided on a new path. Upon moving on to college, he decided that engineering would give him great satisfaction…even though he would later realize that that was a mistake (shout-out to the quietly weeping engineers).

No matter your age or your affiliation with the sciences, you have likely asked the question that this young man asked: Why is science so hard?

The question, for some, is a hypothetical one. They might implicitly understand why science is difficult, but can’t explain it. But for most, that answer doesn’t come easy. And because the answer isn’t easy to discern, the solution is also problematic.

But the answer is simple.

Science is an amalgamation of study since the inception of humanity. We collect new knowledge every day. As such, the depth of information that exists make it hard to widely communicate. This is a problem – one that will catch up to us sooner than later if we do not start putting priority on reviewing how we do things. Sure, it is true that you can amass all science related to chemicals and reactions under chemistry, for example, which segments all of the information and makes it easier for specialists of chemistry to communicate. However, if there’s so much information to digest, why isn’t the equally-deep topic of history divided into more categories than Social Studies, US (or whatever country) History, and World History?

There are inconsistencies with convention. You will, after spending time with me, understand that science is incredibly unconventional.

The main difference between something like history and science is the inability of history to change. Over time, with the addition of new knowledge, the textbooks must be rewritten, as it were. But does splitting the subjects make it easier? I would argue that it doesn’t.

Order to Chaos

I said earlier that a priority should be put on reviewing how we do things, or, in other words, how we organize. Organization could be defined as giving an “order” to something. That order is determined by what makes sense to the general population. We define that as convention, which we use to figure out the unknown by relating it to what is known or to create systems based on what we know. In other words, the system we use to communicate science is according to what made sense to us in the past, whenever science was first organized in this way.

So, there was a purpose in it being organized this way. Where did it go wrong? Do people even believe that it has gone wrong?

Take a walk with me for a second, let’s see.

What happens when a child goes from preschool to college? Simple “math” becomes algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. Then it becomes pre-calculus, calculus, multivariate calculus, and differential equations. Simple “science” becomes biology, chemistry and physics. Then we reach physiology, anatomy, and genetics, organic chemistry, engineering and quantum mechanics. The engineering disciplines take the advanced mathematics and interfaces them with the advanced science. And guess what? That creates new subjects as well. From one, comes multiple. But, as I said, we collect knowledge every day. The subjects that we see here will remain and grow, but there will eventually be newer, more advanced subjects added underneath the respective umbrella. There is beauty in the sequential branching of easier subjects into harder ones…but does that sound like order to you?

Now take the opposite perspective – chaos. Something about the word itself implicitly draws discomfort. There will always be a lack of comfort in disorganization. But your chaos can be someone else’s order. Learning why they consider it order can lead to a breakthrough in your thinking that may be limited by the convention that you have followed. In other words, do not assume that chaos is ineffective; chaos is merely disruption of convention.

I make this quick deviation to make an argument.

While science is implicitly hard to teach due to its own depth, its even harder to learn because what was once simple in elementary school magnifies in difficulty by the time one is in college.

But, if science is on a similar path to that of history, then science, despite the difficulty of doing so, can also be told linearly with as few branches as possible. This defies the order of starting from the simplest topics first, separating them according to their properties and diving deeper into those categories.

What would happen if you started from what we know now as the beginning – the smallest particles of the universe – and worked our way to the farthest reaches of human knowledge? What if, instead of separating science into more topics than necessary, we acknowledged the connection between chemistry, physics and biology from the start, and taught science that way? I figure, by the time you get to the parts of existence that you can see with your own eyes, they will be far easier to understand.

To those that are joining us on this journey, welcome. I can only hope that your stay will be enlightening as we not only explore where we’ve been, but where we must go.