Sunday, September 15, 2013

String theory and Mulla Sadra

Mulla Sadra is a notable Iranian philosopher, among whose concepts is one that is translated into English as "substantial motion". I do not have a scholar's precise understanding of the notion, but my rough understanding is that the previous notion of change in an entity was that its "accidents" might change but its essence would remain the same, whereas Sadra proposed that it could change in its being. Thus, rather than change just being motion through space, it could also take the form of change "within" a substance.

This reminds me of an elementary duality which appears early in the development of string theory. The string is a one-dimensional entity moving through an n-dimensional space. But it may also be conceived as a one-dimensional space in itself, with a number of fields existing within it. The values of these fields within the string, correspond to the position vectors of the points on the string, in the first picture. Thus this duality exchanges motion of the string through space, for substantial motion within the string. The second perspective is arguably the basis of perturbative string theory, which employs conformal field theory to describe the dynamics of fields within the string (worldsheet fields) corresponding to motion within a particular geometric background.

Monday, September 2, 2013

Proton mass and top quark mass

"In this picture, we discover that Mp ∝ mt2/27: despite the negligible population of virtual top-antitop pairs in the nucleon, the top-quark mass influences the proton mass."

This is not some wild-eyed vixra prophet of numerology speaking, but Chris Quigg, who has had a long and very respectable career, working especially on hadrons.

Koide-ologists ought to take a keen interest in this claim, for several reasons.

First, the "Brannen phases" for the triples u-c-t, d-s-b, e-mu-tau, are all multiples of 2/27.

Second, the centrality of the top is consistent with Rivero-ist ideas such as the waterfall (in which the quark masses can be understood as arising from a chain of Koide triplets starting with t-b-c) and the sbootstrap (in which all the SM fermions are superpartners of quark-(anti)quark composites of the 5 "light" quarks, i.e. everything but the top) and even "84"-ism.

Third, it legitimizes, in a new way, the appearance of QCD scales as "Brannen mass scales" for e-mu-tau and s-c-b.