The vixra of politics

I keep an eye on vixra.org. Another site I keep an eye on is unz.com. They are an odd couple, and might seem to have nothing in common, except that both were founded by physicists (Phil Gibbs, Ron Unz).

But both serve as a source of shunned news and views. Vixra, of course, started life as a haven for physics papers that were kept off the arxiv. Unz.com, meanwhile, is "A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media". The powers have no interest in Vixra, it is left to sink or swim on its own, but Unz.com carries material that is considered genuinely dangerous (mostly from the right, but also from the left), and I would be unsurprised to wake up one day and find that it has been taken down by some politically motivated campaign.

Vixra oddities of 2019

Obviously I focus on physics here, but sometimes I like to sample some of the other oddities that show up on vixra...

2800+ pages of "a novel hermeneutical science", written in the dense frantic style of someone overflowing with thoughts. Could it be as significant as Hegel or Heisman? Someone would have to try to read it, to find out.

200+ "refutations" of everything under the sun, apparently derived by a system of logic original to the author.

Glimpse of the neo-Vedic world civilization that could exist 500 years from now, latest work of S.V. Balasubramanian, himself a glimpse of the kind of ideas that contemporary India can produce.

A numerologically rich revision of today's physics from small to large, that incorporates the "Kotov cycle" and the "Sternheimer Biological scale factor". What gets me is that there are nine authors. Usually something like this is the work of one person. Though it's always possible that some of those coauthors are there without their consent; there is a note at the end from Atiyah saying, "please do not use my name in any way other than referencing a published paper"...

Uncanny dual

Lubos Motl just posted an essay, "Quantum gravity from self-collisions of the configuration space". It makes an analogy between a property of strings, and how quantum gravity in the larger world may work. Namely, a string may appear to be a self-contained world, but if the worldsheet fields approach the same values as those on another string - or even elsewhere on the same string - then interaction can occur, because both strings are actually moving in a larger space, and having worldsheet fields with the same values, means the strings are at the same place in the larger space.

So Lubos says, this may be a property of quantum gravity in general, that when quantum fields in different places approach similar values, there is some possibility for the formation of a wormhole connecting them.

What has me in mild shock is that this is the best rationale yet for something like Sheldrake's "morphic resonance", and for any number of alleged paranormal phenomena. The attempt to influence something far away by making a copy of it used to be called sympathetic magic, and is sometimes used as an example of pre-scientific or pre-causal thinking. And here we have the perfect mechanism for it!

Furthermore, there's no reason why these connections should be purely spacelike... For more details, see these future thoughts of mine.

Atiyah

Sir Michael Atiyah came out of left field and made sensational claims (proved the Riemann hypothesis, calculated the fine-structure constant) more characteristic of a vixra physicist. And indeed, his Riemann preprint has been uploaded to vixra, though I don't know if it came from him.

I started a forum thread on the physics of his claims. I have not succeeded in properly deciphering his procedure to produce the value of 1/α. The integer part is Eddington meets Bott, but no-one has been able to motivate the next few digits.

But one interesting thing came up in that thread. Atiyah speaks of an iterated process that he calls renormalization, and "Auto-Didact" remarked that it resembles something out of bifurcation theory. And as I have posted here previously, 1/α is approximately equal to 2π times the square of Feigenbaum's constant.

So if - against the odds - there is anything to Atiyah's baroque conceptions, I think it would involve the Feigenbaum connection. But for now, I expect nothing. It was stimulating, it stirred things up, but I think it's a blind alley.

Historical interlude

Yet another subgenre of parodic scholarship has made its first appearance on vixra. An author whose name is Korean for "true history" overturns existing theories of the "Hwan-Suomi hyperwar", a clash of ancient supercivilizations unknown to normies and mundanes, but known to the cognoscenti of 4chan's "History and Humanities" board. Suomi means Finland, but these were hyperborean True Finns, superior to any modern stock; while the Hwan were the ancestral Korean master race, known to us thanks to the Handan gogi, a 20th-century work of "nationalist pseudohistory" (so say the killjoys at RationalWiki). Sometimes, fiction really is stranger than truth.

Koide from S-duality

1) Crackpot idea of the day: "the bottom quark is S-dual to the rho meson".

Gorsky et al conjecture that holographic QCD has a "flavor S-duality" in which vector mesons are dual to baryons. This is to be realized in string theory by a web of 5-branes.

Quark-hadron duality shows a kind of continuity between properties of quarks and properties of hadrons.

And the mass of the rho meson has been estimated at sqrt(6) times the constituent quark mass; while in the simplest version of Rivero's waterfall, the bottom quark mass comes out as 2 . sqrt(6) . sqrt(6) times the constituent quark mass. Also, the Brannen mass scale of the Koide triple containing the bottom quark equals the mass of the proton, the prototypical baryon.

2) Vague bonus idea: Koide relations are an echo of this S-duality.

This just comes from Brannen and Sheppeard's discussion of the discrete Fourier transform, in the context of circulant matrices (they obtain Koide masses as eigenvalues of a circulant). One might start with the realization of geometric Langlands via S-duality, and then look for analogues over finite fields. Sheppeard has occasionally hinted at something like this.

Various news II

I would divide my physics development into two stages, one in which I was studying general frameworks like quantum theory, and another in which I was interested in the details of particle physics. As discussed here, it was Marni Sheppeard who really set me on the second road, when she exhibited her decomposition of the CKM matrix in terms of circulants, and I wondered if this could be obtained from F-theory. But it was Alejandro Rivero who ended up being my biggest stimulus in that way - trying to implement his ideas and constructions led me to learn a lot of orthodox theoretical physics.

Two weeks after Carl Brannen returned to vixra, Sheppeard has come out with her first phenomenology paper in years. My thoughts: I disagree with most of the details, but the spirit of it is something to emulate.

Meanwhile, Rivero's constructions have reached the point where they all but single out specific string vacua for investigation. For me, the most valuable ideas are still some of the earlier versions, but it's impressive that he has come this far.