Stringy Geometry

fancier way of saying that is that in general, it's okay to model the space around us using the Euclidean metric. But the Euclidean model stops working when gravity becomes strong, as we'll see later. The Euclidean model for space

The magic square of "Albrect Durer" located in my index on the right is fascinating from the point of view that such a symmetry can be derived from the view of moving in an abstract space.

Trying to understand the implication of what is happening in a stronger gravitational field is an abstract journey for me as well, while I hold "thoughts of lensing" in my mind as a accumulative effect of something that is happening naturally out in space.

The move to Lagrangian points out in space is also an accumulative effect of thinking in this abstract way.

I not only think of the "magnetic field as as an associative value for that abstractness," it is a geometry that is the same for me, as I try to unravel the energy valuation of points(KK Tower) of any location in space. While the valuation of a circle on a 2 dimensional screen sees a string vibrating, I am moving this perception to valuations onto mathematical models.

I have nobody to help this way I have to push forward, knowing there will be mistakes, and that hopefully I am grasping the full scope of seeing in a abstract way.


Figure 2. Clebsch's Diagonal Surface: Wonderful.

We are told that "mathematics is that study which knows nothing of observation..." I think no statement could have been more opposite to the undoubted facts of the case; that mathematical analysis is constantly invoking the aid of new principles, new ideas and new methods, not capable of being defined by any form of words, but springing direct from the inherent powers and activity of the human mind, and from continually renewed introspection of that inner world of thought of which the phenomena are as varied and require as close attention to discern as those of the outer physical world, ...that it is unceasingly calling forth the faculties of observation and comparison, that one of its principal weapons is induction, that it has frequent recourse to experimental trial and verification, and that it affords a boundless scope for the exercise of the highest efforts of imagination and invention. ...Were it not unbecoming to dilate on one's personal experience, I could tell a story of almost romantic interest about my own latest researches in a field where Geometry, Algebra, and the Theory of Numbers melt in a surprising manner into one another.

Dr. Kip Thorne, Caltech 01-Relativity-The First 20th Century Revolution

It was the beginning of what might be called (and in fact is called) Stringy Geometry. The point is that strings are not points, and specifically, their extended nature means that in addition to being able to see the usual geometrical properties of a space that the theory like General Relativity can see, the strings can see other, intrinsically stringy, data. There is a quantity in the theory that is called the Kalb-Ramond field (or just the “B-field”) that can be used to measure how much the string can winds on or wraps a piece of the geometry, in essence. The parameter a that measures the size of a piece of the space that collapses when the geometry becomes singular, is essentially joined by another parameter, b, that sort of measures how much the strings have wound or smeared themselves on that piece of the space. The upshot is that a and b naturally combine themselves into a complex parameter that naturally describes the resolution process, solving the puzzle that the Mathematicians faced.

Beyond Einstein: Fixing Singularities in Spacetime

I am always trying to get the "visual models" of such proposals in terms of the B Field. Nigel Hitchin

Can you tell me, if the Dynkin diagrams and the points on a Sylvestor surface/ Cayley model have some value when looking at this subject?

Also, if it would be wrong to see "UV coordinates of a Gaussian arc" can be seen in this light as well?

I am recording this to help me understand how energy windings of the string may be seen as points on the Sylvester Surface?

See: What is Happening at the Singularity?

What is Happening at the Singularity?

WEll, some of the commentors like myself are not worth counting?:)Thanks for keeping it interesting Clifford of Asymptotia. I hope you won't mind the following quotes for consideration.( it was considered spam) so I reprint it here.

Quantum geometry differs in substantial ways from the classical geometry underlying general relativity. For instance, topology change (the "tearing" of space) is a sensible feature of quantum geometry even though, from a classical perspective, it involves singularities. As another example, two different classical spacetime geometries can give rise to identical physical implications, again at odds with conclusions based on classical general relativity. Brian Greene

Is there not some way presented by Susskind which can help one approach understanding of what is going on in the blackhole by incorporating his "thought experiment" in relation to the entanglement process?

So of course questions about "the horizon" are interesting.

Consider any physical system, made of anything at all- let us call it, The Thing. We require only that The Thing can be enclosed within a finite boundary, which we shall call the Screen(Figure39). We would like to know as much as possible about The Thing. But we cannot touch it directly-we are restricted to making measurements of it on The Screen. We may send any kind of radiation we like through The Screen, and record what ever changes result The Screen. The Bekenstein bound says that there is a general limit to how many yes/no questions we can answer about The Thing by making observations through The Screen that surrounds it. The number must be less then one quarter the area of The Screen, in Planck units. What if we ask more questions? The principle tells us that either of two things must happen. Either the area of the screen will increase, as a result of doing an experiment that ask questions beyond the limit; or the experiments we do that go beyond the limit will erase or invalidate, the answers to some of the previous questions. At no time can we know more about The thing than the limit, imposed by the area of the Screen. Page 171 and 172 0f, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, by Lee Smolin

TWO UNIVERSES of different dimension and obeying disparate physical laws are rendered completely equivalent by the holographic principle. Theorists have demonstrated this principle mathematically for a specific type of five-dimensional spacetime ("anti–de Sitter") and its four-dimensional boundary. In effect, the 5-D universe is recorded like a hologram on the 4-D surface at its periphery. Superstring theory rules in the 5-D spacetime, but a so-called conformal field theory of point particles operates on the 4-D hologram. A black hole in the 5-D spacetime is equivalent to hot radiation on the hologram--for example, the hole and the radiation have the same entropy even though the physical origin of the entropy is completely different for each case. Although these two descriptions of the universe seem utterly unalike, no experiment could distinguish between them, even in principle. by Jacob D. Bekenstein

The old version of string theory, pre-1995, had these first two features. It includes quantum mechanics and gravity, but the kinds of things we could calculate were pretty limited. All of a sudden in 1995, we learned how to calculate things when the interactions are strong. Suddenly we understood a lot about the theory. And so figuring out how to compute the entropy of black holes became a really obvious challenge. I, for one, felt it was incumbent upon the theory to give us a solution to the problem of computing the entropy, or it wasn't the right theory. Of course we were all gratified that it did. Black Holes and Beyond: Harvard's Andrew Strominger on String Theory

So we have these diagrams and thought processes developed from individuals like Jacob D. Bekenstein to help us visualize what is taking place. Gives us key indicators of the valuation needed, in order to determine what maths are going to be used? In this case the subject of Conformal Field Theory makes itself known, for the thought process?

Holography encodes the information in a region of space onto a surface one dimension lower. It sees to be the property of gravity, as is shown by the fact that the area of th event horizon measures the number of internal states of a blackhole, holography would be a one-to-one correspondence between states in our four dimensional world and states in higher dimensions. From a positivist viewpoint, one cannot distinguish which description is more fundamental.Pg 198, The Universe in Nutshell, by Stephen Hawking

So we are given the label in which to speak about the holographic notions of what is being talked about in the case of the blackhole's horizon.


Campbell's Soup Can by Andy Warhol Exhibited in New York (USA), Leo Castelli Gallery

Spacetime in String Theory-Dr. Gary Horowitz, UCSB-Apr 20, 2005

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Einstein's "miraculous year", 1905, when he formulated special relativity, and explained the origin of the black body spectrum and Brownian motion. In honor of this occasion, I will describe the modern view of spacetime. After reviewing the properties of spacetime in general relativity, I will provide an overview of the nature of spacetime emerging from string theory. This is radically different from relativity. At a perturbative level, the spacetime metric appears as ``coupling constants" in a two-dimensional quantum field theory. Nonperturbatively (with certain boundary conditions), spacetime is not fundamental but must be reconstructed from a holographic, dual theory. I will conclude with some recent ideas about the big bang arising from string theory.

The purpose of this note is to provide a possible answer to this question. Rather than the radical modification of quantum mechanics required for pure states to evolve into mixed states, we adopt a more mild modification. We propose that at the black hole singularity one needs to impose a unique final state boundary condition. More precisely, we have a unique final wavefunction for the interior of the black hole. Modifications of quantum mechanics where one imposes final state boundary conditions were considered in [6,7,8,9]. Here we are putting a final state boundary condition on part of the system, the interior of the black hole. This final boundary condition makes sure that no information is “absorbed” by the singularity.Gary T. Horowitz and Juan Maldacena,

See: Stringy Geometry

The Triangle Descends into the Square

Mapping the Pathway Inside

Although [God] did make use of the relevant auxiliary causes, it was he himself who gave their fair design to all that comes to be. That is why we must distinguish two forms of cause, the divine and the necessary. First, the divine, for which we must search in all things if we are to gain a life of happiness to the extent that our nature allows, and second, the necessary, for which we must search for the sake of the divine. Our reason is that without the necessary, those other objects, about which we are serious, cannot on their own be discerned, and hence cannot be comprehended or partaken of in any other way.

Plato



I am not in any way here to argue the historical context that the image above has taken in all that we see in National Geographic or in the articles of archaeological significance. I am using this image in another way that you might not of considered before.

I have given concepts with which one can entertain ideas in relation to what happens from a mandalic, Liminocentric and Mind Mapping sequence of events that will allow certain things to unfold within one's own life? A foundational approach to see the circumstance of life beyond what is just found in the physical reality of the body. Beyond the workings of the physiological sequences of emotive and mental happenings, that "these could have amounted to beyond the realm of the understood."



Imagine for one moment, that the very surface of this sphere, is the sudsy oil based colourations, shimmering from one place to the next, is our mental and emotive states. Our mind (The brain), and it trappings hold the colouration of our reality in way that is not understood. But that colouration is beyond the matters that define the mind itself. Beyond the matters of the brain itself.

So I will "paint the colours of my reasoning for you" to understand the concepts I am putting forth. The conceptual valuations are a culmination of the person trying to organize all that they know in a pictorial sense, that we could see the mind of a Feynman or Dirac, whose skill had come forth? Can come forth in any of you.



It is important then that what you had always seen of earth from space, is more the truth of it, that the gravity now takes hold of this vision and helps you to understand it's place in the universe? While we focus on it's matters we see Grace has been mapped according to the measures used in that sense. I find this correlation of significance when we learn to see the emotive and mental states as such. I still recognize the matter the brain as I do the earth as a matter of fact too.

Is it organizational then that we might reveal aspects within one's own self that we learn to discover certain things about our very own nature. It does not exult us in any way to realize that when you had decided to become comfortable with who you are, that you get the thread that runs through all things for you. That you learn to see who you are in face of all the circumstances that unfold within the span of years from one place to the next? Life continues as it always has. We are just trying to perfect our understanding of who we are in face of all that has to take place for our living in this world.

Where is my home? Why all this travelling from one place to the next, and not finding who it is that speaks through all the information and meetings that take Place. What value all of this and we see we are the accumulation of time spent here and there.

So I gave a structure of a kind to help you understand something about the way I have learnt to see life. It is only a map given that saids what you have to do may have been found useful to help continue your own journey. Something that awakens something in you to say I am happy now that I have found who it is through those times. How I am through all the adversities of living that at the end of that day, who is it that sums all that had taken place?



That is your last judgement of things, that the weight of the feather and heart become symbolized in the scale weighting the feather of truth to your very own heart. Truth then becomes something of a clarifier to what you hold most dear at the same time, put in front of you the ideal with which you shall live. If you can honestly say you have lived your life to your expectations, then what had you accomplished?

Removing the Veil

"Death, so called, is but older matter dressed
In some new form. And in a varied vest,
From tenement to tenement though tossed,
The soul is still the same, the figure only lost." Poem on Pythagoras, Dryden's Ovid.

Benjamin Franklin in his epitaph call it an overcoat we put on, and the summation of this is the accumulation of life and all it trappings and wondering. How simple of any of us to think it is the "actual overcoat" when we know the deeper resonance such epitaph can make of one's entire life. As if, the life were a "book of a kind." With death to come the realization of an worn out cover.

"As to you, Life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before." "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman

So while the understanding prevails us, what use this metaphorical language for any of us but to see that what starts off as the matter and order of things, had some geometrical presence before it become the model it did.

So you see the brain in the sphere. You see the "gravitational model of the earth" within the confines of of the sphere of development. No where had I yet explained the triangle and face of the pyramid. Should one use it as vertical line of reasoning, that the top of that line should direct the mind to a heaven, or for those of lore to the stars above?

Listen careful then as to the face of the pyramid shown. The foundational aspect is it's base, and, is earth. The face of this pyramid is used to colour the valuations of gravity in it's strength and weaknesses. Is used, to describe the mental and emotive states of being, from a matter orientated understanding of the matter( that based) to the every colouration of the mental and emotive states themself.

Mandalas as Mind Maps

While I respect Carl Jung and his thought on the personality, it would have made more sense to me that at death "perfection would be as best the soul is in it's attempts." To discover, one's nature and recognize that the living and working to perfect, "is the real success" for the work and perfection the soul quests for in attaining the clear light, instead of the fog.

CARL JUNG by Dr. C. George Boeree

The most important archetype of all is the self. The self is the ultimate unity of the personality and is symbolized by the circle, the cross, and the mandala figures that Jung was fond of painting. A mandala is a drawing that is used in meditation because it tends to draw your focus back to the center, and it can be as simple as a geometric figure or as complicated as a stained glass window. The personifications that best represent self are Christ and Buddha, two people who many believe achieved perfection. But Jung felt that perfection of the personality is only truly achieved in death

This blog entry is very important to me for a number of reasons. There is something very natural that can arise from a person's "subconscious state" that can explode(fire all the neurons) to become a person's paradigm change for their waking life. As if, the change and time according to the progression of a soul, is timely at a certain point in one's life. You had to make it happen yourself. No body told me about this, as I came to discover the deeper significances of the change that occurred.

It's also of wonder to me that this progression is signalled, and mark by the individual themself. That it had to come from a "previous existence." You had to used this "Mind Map" in previous circumstances unwittingly, by being a participant in the way this mandalas is set to ignite the soul with that new energy.

Of course you understand what a Mind Map is? Of course you understand what a mandala is? You understand what a liminocentric structure is?

What are Mind Maps?

The Alchemists attempted to perfect the One Thing of Hermes, what they called the First Matter, by using specific physical, psychological, and spiritual techniques that they describe in chemical terms and demonstrated in laboratory experiments. However, while the alchemists spoke in terms of chemicals, furnaces , flasks, and beakers, they were really talking about the changes taking place within their own bodies, minds, and souls.2

The Emerald Tablet, Dennis William Hauck, Chapter 10, Page 151

While I give a woodcut image of historical relevance, it is made to help one remember. The alchemist notion of distilling and perfecting one's very nature in life. Of course, there are current scientist perceptions that speak to the alchemist notions of Newton. I would again have to remind the good scientists about the alchemical nature being more then just the chymstry in a lab. The alchemist body was also a lab. It deals with the psychological aspects of our emotive and mental states.

If the context of these were understood as valuations measured in terms of the "circle within the circle" a topological review was done by me on how determinations of which line is which, arises as we look to unfold the "colour and valuations of being" at one time or another. While I place our individuality at the centre, it is around you that I speak to the unfolding, all the while a physiological process is unfolding in the states of those emotive and mental ventures. The outer most circle is the spiritual domain of our journeys.

Splendor Solis ("The Splendour of the Sun") is a well-known colorful alchemical manuscriptThe symbolic process shows the classical alchemical death and rebirth of the king, and incorporates a series of seven flasks, each associated with one of the planets. Within the flasks a process is shown involving the transformation of bird and animal symbols into the Queen and King, the white and the red tincture. Although the style of the Splendor Solis illuminations suggest an earlier date, they are quite clearly of the 16th century See:Newton the Alchemist

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

It is an image-centered diagram that represents semantic or other connections between portions of information. By presenting these connections in a radial, non-linear graphical manner, it encourages a brainstorming approach to any given organizational task, eliminating the hurdle of initially establishing an intrinsically appropriate or relevant conceptual framework to work within.

A mind map is similar to a semantic network or cognitive map but there are no formal restrictions on the kinds of links used.

The elements are arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts and they are organized into groupings, branches, or areas. The uniform graphic formulation of the semantic structure of information on the method of gathering knowledge, may aid recall of existing memories.

You would have to understand some of the blog posts I have done, in order to see that mathematical structures are derived from images, however they are described to take us as close as possible to the very "essence of the idea" being translated? This, is a universal language for scientists

Are mathematical truths invented or discovered? This is an age old question that I have seen around for some time. If you believe that every thing has already been thought of, then it would mean, that it is only to be discovered.

The Space you Provide

The mandala can also be an image of eternity cycling through time and as such images soul's and Nature's circular journeys, as they are reflected in, for example, the Native American Medicine Wheel, in seasonal, rebirth and karmic cycles, in mythic journeys of going out and returning changed to one's point of origin, and in the zodiacal wheel as life's twelve archetypal stages of personal growth.

This cyclic transformation is also at the heart of ancient Chinese meditation. When the spiritual light in the body moves through rhythmical breathing in a circle, all the opposite energies of heaven and earth, sun and moon, light and dark, are crystallised and form what the Chinese called the Golden Flower, an inner mandala imaging the balanced, open and centred heart.

How quiet do we have to be to recognize "that place" from which such ideas will emerge. A space and place from inside of you.

We can read all our lives and study, but what is it we will take from it all. What will we move forward that will become profound for you to realize all things become anew. Ideas change who we are. Ideas worked can become the ideals, and it this translation in our work, that such things become possible.

Ancient Dwellings

It was around 2002 my wife and I took a trip to Phoenix Arizona, and went to Sedona. We took in some of the sites as shown by the pictures of the dwellings once inhabited by different Indian tribes.



While extremely hot at the time we went, it of course brought wonderment to me how anyone could live in heat like that, even though the areas of Sedona are much higher. The very idea that they were set back into the cliffs was a very good idea in terms of temperatures so this was an ingenious way to stay warm and keep cool.



One of the things that we tend to now on our trips is try and takes in ancient places like these, or other sites like the large Medicine wheels at Bighorn that we travelled to a couple of years ago.

There are deeper reasons that we take on these journey's, that at a time in our lives with our children grown we can now take to to this. The cliff dwellings were drawn on a piece of paper many years ago when I awoke from a weird dream. It was as if I was travelling and came into to look at the cliff dwelling. I was wondering when on our journey whether I would see what I saw, before ever being there.

The Medicine Wheel is actually one of those Mind Maps I talked about, that was used by the Native Americans to house a lot of information about nature and the dealings Native Americans had with that Nature.

That particular model I also dreamt of, and had a profound experience that became part of the connection to the deeper understanding I have about the earth from a native perspective. A deeper understanding about how one comes so very close to one touching the very souls energy. This is why liminocentric structures are of such importance to me. Developing such maps are an important aspect of using the mind map to built this connection to what exists and our very centres.



I'll put a picture here from my trip(it is taken from the board located at the site). It's the Bighorn Medicine Wheel located by Sheridan Wyoming. It is about 9642 feet up and on Medicine Mountain. The walk was about a mile and half in and was about a 100 degrees that day.

The Old One

This is what Einstein called God.

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.

Einstein, Albert (1949). The World as I See It. Philosophical Library. ISBN 0806527900.

See:DiscoverMagazine.com

I found the magazine articles very interesting. I am sure those who are interested in Einstein's legacy will be equally interested as well.

Revealing the Mysterious

This picture while reading the magazine article, was taken from discovery magazine. It saids, "Playing along in 1931 Einstein and his wife Elsa posed at the Grand Canyon reservation with a Hopi group."

To me the native group looks like Navajo. So I am wondering about this.

I have to move on here, that beside this point, the history of people is a strange thing when we can walk through the villages, now ruins, and get a sense and flavour of the people that were actually living there.

The Flyby Anomaly

Galileo flying by Earth Galileo, launched in 1989, flew by Earth twice for gravity assists on its 6-year journey to Jupiter. Credit: Michael Carroll


Researchers Investigate New Cosmic Mystery: The Flyby Anomaly by By Amir Alexander

A new study by researchers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows that spacecrafts that swing by the Earth are subject to a small but unexplained increase in their velocity. Is an unknown physical force at work, or something far more mundane? As of now, scientists don't know, but they have already given this mysterious phenomenon a name: "the flyby anomaly."

Asch conformity experiments

One of the pairs of cards used in the experiment. The card on the left has the reference line and the one on the right shows the three comparison lines.

The Asch conformity experiments

which were published in 1953, were a series of studies that starkly demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. These are also known as the "Asch Paradigm".

One of the pairs of cards used in the experiment. The card on the left has the reference line and the one on the right shows the three comparison lines.
One of the pairs of cards used in the experiment. The card on the left has the reference line and the one on the right shows the three comparison lines.

Experiments led by Solomon Asch asked groups of students to participate in a "vision test." In reality, all but one of the participants were confederates of the experimenter, and the study was really about how the remaining student would react to the confederates' behavior.

The participants — the real subject and the confederates — were all seated in a classroom where they were told to announce out loud their judgment of the length of several lines drawn on a series of displays. They were asked which line was longer than the other, which were the same length, etc. The confederates had been prearranged to all give an incorrect answer to the tests.

While most subjects answered correctly, many showed extreme discomfort, and a high proportion (32%) conformed to the erroneous majority view of the others in the room when there were at least three confederates present, even when the majority said that two lines different in length by several inches were the same length. When the confederates were not unanimous in their judgment, subjects were much more likely to defect than when the confederates all agreed. Control subjects with no exposure to a majority view had no trouble giving the correct answer.

Of course people can make mistakes. While one reads and participates what value would you give someone who was critical? Offer their perspective freely, so that we can judge for our self.( Help the patient help themself) Whether or not, something is fruitful in regard to research and moving a subject to a new plateau for new perspectives to be developed?

Conformity can have it's affects, just as some can "belong to something" by saying what may like to be heard. Build accordingly to the order of things, while being lead while sleeping, have faintly agreed to complacency. Challenge them, and yourself to understand.

A New Cosmological View?

Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.

- Hermann Weyl

Perspective has been push back in a reductionistic sense and understanding in a cosmological sense. The limit to which this process could incorporate a relativistic explanation would have been a glorious one indeed?

Navier-Stokes equations

The Navier-Stokes equations, named after Claude-Louis Navier and George Gabriel Stokes, describe the motion of fluid substances such as liquids and gases. These equations establish that changes in momentum in infinitesimal volumes of fluid are simply the sum of dissipative viscous forces (similar to friction), changes in pressure, gravity, and other forces acting inside the fluid: an application of Newton's second law to fluid.

They are one of the most useful sets of equations because they describe the physics of a large number of phenomena of academic and economic interest. They may be used to model weather, ocean currents, water flow in a pipe, flow around an airfoil (wing), and motion of stars inside a galaxy. As such, these equations in both full and simplified forms, are used in the design of aircraft and cars, the study of blood flow, the design of power stations, the analysis of the effects of pollution, etc. Coupled with Maxwell's equations they can be used to model and study magnetohydrodynamics.

The Navier-Stokes equations are also of great interest in a purely mathematical sense. Somewhat surprisingly, given their wide range of practical uses, mathematicians have yet to prove that in three dimensions solutions always exist (existence), or that if they do exist they do not contain any infinities, singularities or discontinuities (smoothness). These are called the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problems. The Clay Mathematics Institute has called this one of the seven most important open problems in mathematics, and offered a $1,000,000 prize for a solution or a counter-example.

So where is that? Where is the "perfect fluid" and what has this to do with the current state of the universe? The "effect of collisions" which produce a Cerenkov effect. Is this a "faster then the speed of light" from such a process being encapsulating in that early universe condition?

As perplexing as this sounds, it sets up the understanding that Super Cosmologists have to think outside the box. If no information is lost, then where did the information come from? There is a topological unfolding here that speak to mathematical designs all the while it integrates the Navier-Stokes equations in terms of it's relativistic explanation, derived from the very moments of that creation?

"Helium-3 experiment replicates colliding-brane theory of cosmology."

So as silly as some would have you believe that new models do not have any chance from a mathematical perspective of having lost touch with reality, is the need to explain the process in terms of natural occurrences that are going on around us, which we were not previously aware of.

Information Scrambled, Yet Reassembled

Brian Greene-

My area of research is superstring theory, a theory that purports to give us a quantum theory of gravity as well as a unified theory of all forces and all matter. As such, superstring theory has the potential to realize Einstein's long sought dream of a single, all encompassing, theory of the universe. One of the strangest features of superstring theory is that it requires the universe to have more than three spatial dimensions. Much of my research has focused on the physical implications and mathematical properties of these extra dimensions --- studies that collectively go under the heading "quantum geometry".

Quantum geometry differs in substantial ways from the classical geometry underlying general relativity. For instance, topology change (the "tearing" of space) is a sensible feature of quantum geometry even though, from a classical perspective, it involves singularities. As another example, two different classical spacetime geometries can give rise to identical physical implications, again at odds with conclusions based on classical general relativity.

Superstring theory is most relevant under extreme physical conditions such as those that existed at the time of the big bang. Recently, we have formed a new institute at Columbia called ISCAP (Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics) dedicated to understanding the interface of superstring theory and cosmology. One primary focus of ISCAP is the search for subtle signatures of string theory that may be imprinted in the precision cosmological data that will be collected through a variety of experiments over the next decade.

In levitation post I try to explain how using Susskind's thought experiment we may derive information about the geometrical conditions being developed from "Bob" entering the blackhole on the back of a elephant.

First let me remind you of where you had been taken in terms of your view of the universe. Had you realized that you are now given a micro perspective on the very nature of this universe? That given the circumstance, the elephant takes on a whole new meaning in terms of searching to understand quantum gravity at a level not considered before.

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a WALL!"


The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, "Ho, what have we here,
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 'tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a SPEAR!"

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a SNAKE!"

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he:
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a TREE!"

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a FAN!"

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a ROPE!"

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

So what does Susskind do? You see the very question about interpreting events in this way, ask that we push our perceptive toward topological inferences of continuity? There are no current geometrics that can be explained from inside the blackhole. Pushing perspective needed a method to help us orientate what is happening at that geometrical level.

Quantum Gravity: A physical theory describing the gravitational interactions of matter and energy in which matter and energy are described by quantum theory. In most, but not all, theories of quantum gravity, gravity is also quantized. Since the contemporary theory of gravity, general relativity, describes gravitation as the curvature of spacetime by matter and energy, a quantization of gravity implies some sort of quantization of spacetime itself. Insofar as all extant physical theories rely on a classical spacetime background, this presents profound methodological and ontological challenges for the philosopher and the physicist.

Unfortunately I lost the link to a introduction of a book below yet showed this, to help one define the context of the work that has to be done.

Quantum gravity is perhaps the most important open problem in fundamental physics. It is the problem of merging quantum mechanics and general relativity, the two great conceptual revolutions in the physics of the twentieth century. The loop and spinfoam approach, presented in this book, is one of the leading research programs in the field. The first part of the book discusses the reformulation of the basis of classical and quantum Hamiltonian physics required by general relativity. The second part covers the basic technical research directions. Appendices include a detailed history of the subject of quantum gravity, hard-to-find mathematical material, and a discussion of some philosophical issues raised by the subject. This fascinating text is ideal for graduate students entering the field, as well as researchers already working in quantum gravity. It will also appeal to philosophers and other scholars interested in the nature of space and time.