Saturday, August 09, 2008

Low energy physics need not be dirty and ugly

I have not had much time for blogging since I have had very difficult life situation after the funding which lasted for half a year ceased. It was a wonderful time. Now I must try to find some job and must leave TGD for some time. Beware of billionaires interested in quarter science (even worse idea than quarter economy);-)!

Despite my life situation and working for a long time near the burnout limit, I have been following blog discussions and the lively Higgs debate in Tommaso Dorigo's blog inspired me to write some lines.

I think very highly of Lubos Motl as a theoretical physicist. He has a lot of realism and realizes that theoretical physics at the top level is very very abstract thinking. What however astonishes are some of his dogmatic beliefs. The first belief you can guess. Second dogmatic belief is the belief that coupling constant evolution implies that the low energy physics must be something chaotic and unpredictable. Why so? Could it be that all this stuff looks ugly because we do not understand it? Could there might missing something important from our conceptualization?

The generalization of real physics to a fusion of real and various p-adic physics identifies this missing something and indeed leads to beautiful formulas at low energies. The basic vision is that p-adic physics at short distances corresponds to real physics at very long distances: the mere continuity and smoothness in p-adic sense give extremely powerful constraints on real physics at long scales. There are also powerful number theoretic existence conditions involved: consider only the generalization of Boltzman weight to integer power of p quantizing p-adic temperatures to T=1/n appearing in mass calculations relying on p-adic thermodynamics for mass squared represented as scaling generator L0.

Therefore the two (or actually very many) notions of nearness (p-adic for various primes and real) change the situation completely by allowing to approach coupling constant evolution from two directions. Low energy physics ceases to be the dust bin containing the dirty things. Simple universal formulas based on p-adic fractality emerge. For instance, the discretization of coupling constant evolution to half octaves in length scale and octaves in time scale brings in a hierarchy of mass scales coming as half octaves and p-adic primes near powers of 2 are strongly favored. Masses are precisely predictable, etc... The most important applications are in biology and one of the basic predictions is direct connection with biology and elementary particle physics via assignment of .1 second time scale to electron in zero energy ontology: alpha rhythm defines indeed a fundamental time scale in biology.

What is so beautiful that p-adic space-time sheets whose most point are at spatial and temporal infinity in real sense make their presence directly visible via mass formulas. The notion of infinity ceases to be something for mystics only and receives a strict physical meaning.

One particular implication related also to the problem of Higgs mass is that elementary particles can appear in several mass scales differing by a power of 21/2. Quarks do so in TGD based model for hadron masses. This explains also why neutrinos seem to appear in several mass scales. Also Higgs could appear in two mass scales as experiments giving two values of mass differing by a factor of 8 suggest: this I have discussed somewhere in my blog already earlier. The average of these masses would have been not too far from 170 GeV predicted by the non-commutative variant of standard model of Alain Connes and is now excluded. The discussion in Tommaso's blog was discussed by the recently reported bounds 115-135 GeV for Higgs mass. Recall that the data discussed in earlier posting suggested mass values which were around 31 GeV and 420 GeV with quite wide error bras (really!).

In TGD framework the new bounds would correspond to those for a heavier version of Higgs: the evidence for a much lower mass from other experiments must be still there. p-Adic length scale hypothesis would predict mass 129 GeV for k=94 which is near the upper end of the allowed interval 115-135 GeV. k=91 gives 45.5 GeV which could correspond to a lighter variant of Higgs. k=91 would give mass 363 GeV. All these mass values and even others could be there depending on experimental conditions. Perhaps it is time to start thinking about the basics again instead of just taking averages or neglecting half of the data!

6 comments:

Javier said...

I am sad to read that you have economic problems, hope you could find some funds, or, at least, some work that would leave you engought free time to continuate doing physics.

On the other hand if your production rate slowdowns maybe I could get time to read some of that so many entries that you have been writing recently.

Matti Pitkänen said...

Sorry for slow response. I have had bad problems with computer. Yesterday I got help of computer specialist and we learned that my computer had been pumped full of viruses and that some port making possible remote control of computer is under an intense and continual bombardment of viruses.

This kind of situation is very stressing psychologically. Updated files are replaced with old ones, they disappear completely, or their names are changed. You feel that you are a victim of targeted terror but you also feel that you cannot be so important that someone would see the trouble. You must also remain silent of the terror because otherwise you will be labelled as a paranoid.

It would be interesting to know who these people behind this terror are and what are their motivations.

In any case, the problems with computer should be over now!

Anonymous said...

Just wondering whether you are aware of the work of M.S. El Naschie.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleListURL&_method=list&_ArticleListID=911862838&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000017318&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=334567&md5=e407721776e6ab186b59c9a3777c756e

Anonymous said...

desteni.co.za

Matti Pitkänen said...

I have tried to understand Naschie's work a couple of times but failed. Golden Mean is central in Naschie's speculatoins. Somewhat amusingly, I encountered Golden Mean just to-day while working with the calculation predicting fine structure contant and other gauge coupling strenghts and their evolution as a function of IR resolution characterized by p-adic length scale. Golden Mean .61... and its inverse 1.61... play a role of fundamental scaling represented as exponent of hyperbolic angle.


Matti Pitkanen

Sven Gunnarson said...

It is extremely simple to understand Mohamed El Naschie`s work. John Wheeler once said that when we understand nature than we will understand Quantum Mechanics. Then we will be shocked how simple it is. We will ask ourselves how we could have not noticed it all the time. The fantastically profound and simple discovery is that Golden Mean algebra is nature`s quantize calculus. At low energy, integers, fraction and certain weakly irrational numbers are sufficient to model nature. However at ultra high and quantum resolution the only exact number system is that based on the Golden Mean algebra. Some esoterically inclined people think the ancient Egyptian came from outer space and that they know all about Quantum Mechanic. I still think this is nonsense. However I am stunned by the fact that the Golden Mean seems to be the fundamental architectural principle in designing the pyramids at Al Giza near Kairo and that Mohamed El Naschie is Egyptian. That seems like a very long shot. Nevertheless the Golden Mean is everywhere in plants and flowers. It is in art and music. It is in KAM-theorem of nonlinear dynamics. It is the Hausdorff dimension of a random Cantor set. It is the eigenvalue of a two degree of freedom oscillator with unit mass and unit stiffness. It is the basis of non-commutative geometry using Alan Connes dimension function. It appears nearly everywhere suddenly in fundamental mathematics. El Naschie has shown that scaling up and scaling down using the Golden Mean is equivalent to integration and differentiation corresponding to the original Gauge theory of Hermann Weyl. El Naschie`s theory demonstrates all that and derives the mass spectrum of elementary particles and the fundamental constant of nature in unheard of simplicity. He shows that spacetime is a fractal. It is based on a Hilbert cube. This Hilbert cube although infinite dimension it has two finite dimensions. The Menger-Urysohn topological dimension 4 and the Hausdorff dimension 4.236067977. This value is the inverse of the Golden Mean to the power 3. El Naschie connects Menger-Urysohn dimensional theory with Felix Hausdorff`s dimensional theory. He did use, that the empty set has a dimension – 1 and a Hausdorff dimension equal to the Golden Mean squared. From these simple relations he connects to non-commutative geometry and string theory. His theory is extremely simple and that may be the reason that Physicists used only two extremely difficult integro differential equations and hundreds of pages of difficult algebraic manipulation and computer simulation find this simplicity hard to swallow.
A young promising scientist who seems to have started to work in this direction is Professor T.N. Palmer from the University of Oxford. Palmer is still at the very beginning. However he is in the right direction. His papers are mostly published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. That is probably why they are not well known. A new article by Mark Buchanan published in the New Scientist this year sheds light on this theory. I hope my remarks explain the situation a little better. A great number of references on this subject may be found in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. The authors are Je Huan He as well as L. Marek-Crnjak, S. Nada, G. Iovane and many others. They can be found on Elsevier`s science direct, particularly Volume 42 of 2009.