Perhaps Planck length is simply the minimum distance needed to keep two strings from joining [string fusion?].

One Planck length may allow for perturbation while two Planck lenghts may allow for background independence.

Loops may simply have a zero helical angle while orthogonals have a 90 degree helical angle.

while many young people were sobbing when they found dostoyevsky, dmitry seems to have been fed. a friend of mine & i were discussing the originations of impressive work. there’s a definite correlation between precocity and, well, precocious parents. in that sense, i don’t believe his work is as fabulous. the pragmatic implications certainly don’t change, but the struggle, the discovery, the epiphany — yes, they all change.

furthermore, to downplay dmitry with weasel words like “well-rounded,” “oh he’s such a wonderful kid AND he’s brilliant! omg!” is /patronizing/ to the boy. i’m sure he has a deeper personality than the one our media purports. not every brilliant kid has to be nice, fluffy, or cute.

this is only /part/ of the reason a lot of us give up becoming mathematicians. the b word isn’t ‘beauty’ anymore, it’s ‘billboard’. in fact, it always has been. just — every year, we grow up a bit more, and we lose that naïveté a bit more, too.

i’m not trying to say dmitry’s work was unimportant. no matter how many paths someone takes to a conclusion, the results are static. i’m expressing fear that, because he grew up in an environment like this, his style might be stifled, and so might his intentions. who knows? maybe he /was/ pressured into competing by his family. maybe the “conspiracy” lies not within the string theory community, but within his own home? i know, i just spoiled the mood. i can’t help being so cynical.

cheers, hope i didn’t derail any important discussions. have a safe night♥

This might be the best thing ever to come out of the String Wars. Seriously. I mean, now we know that the M in M-theory stands for Mordor!

He is Otho or Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, or equivalent. The rest of the Fellowship, I propose, would be actually working physicists who know more about what they are talking about, don’t you think? Or the analogy has some problems.

The Return of the Cosmological Constant Thing… excellent.

Hey! Maybe I am Gollum!!! Excellent!

-cvj

This has made me laugh aloud (and I couldn’t stop laughing about the poor deluded children earlier)

But! I am afraid that Peter must be Frodo (the suffering!) and Lee is obviously Aragorn.

However, who is Gandalf? And Galadriel? And the rest of the Fellowship?

You see this proves everything - Peter/Lee are right! - there are too many in the forces of darkness and not enough in the forces of the light.

Gollum, anyone?

I suggest “The Lord of the Strings”.

Part 1: The Research Fellowship of the String.

Part 2: The Two Ivory Towers.

Part 3: The Return of the Cosmological Constant Thing.

I’m so eeeevill.

-cvj

-cvj

(sorry, but this thread is better than television)

Stop exploiting a child’s mathematical results in the name of String Theory! Is there no end to your shame? The people must know!

There is no shame in ignorance. THe shame is in either not making the effort to learn more by asking questions, or by pretending to know a lot about that which you don’t. Please… questions are good. But beware of answers from those who have not studied well the subject about which they speak. This is why you should go and read more. Try Tony Zee’s “Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell”, as an excellent conceptual starter book about modern quantum field theory. It is a breath of fresh air.

A wonderful sentiment!

I love Tony Zee’s Nutshell book, and I’ve been working through it systematically in my “copious free time”. Most days I feel like I forgot more QFT than I ever learned, and any chance to build (or re-build) a solid understanding is a welcome opportunity.

Without working in that field I know enough to see the connections to structures that exist in string theory, and why results there could have impact on research in string theory. On the other hand, your claim that it has nothing to do with string theory is idiotic, given that -amusingly- the very article you triumphantly presented to us us as evidence that it is nothing to do with string theory is written by authors who are themselves so much under the impression that it is related to string theory that they lectured at a conference that explicitly discusses the connection to string theory. See my comment here where I point these things out and which you seem to have ignored. See also the comments from others on this thread pointing out the connections -you’ve ignored those too. These are more examples of why it is becoming harder and harder to take you seriously. Your motives seem to have nothing to do with the science. It’s very confusing at times - why would you go to such lengths to deny a connection that is so obviously there?

Are you not embarrased by continuing along this spectaculary failed line you’ve taken in this thread? This is too funny.

-cvj

I’ll leave it to readers of this blog and of mine to decide for themselves whose arguments are “ill-informed” and whose are based on purely “gut feelings”.

It’s pretty hilarious to be having this whole discussion about who is ill-informed in the comment section of a posting devoted to exploiting a student’s mathematical result that you don’t understand a thing about in order to attack string theory critics in a sleazy way.

Yes I have heard of that stuff, and as I said I’m interested in 3+3 dimensional system which deals with gravity in a way I like (making checkable predictions). I didn’t say the Standard Model QFT is limited to 3+1 dimensions, but as physics that’s where it comes from!

It’s a bit shocking that people misunderstand this. Maybe they do understand it and are just pretending to be fools.

nc, Jesus Christ! Have you ever heard of Landau-Ginzburg? Of the Ising model? Of the Schwinger model? QFT, just like quantum mechanics, can be defined in any number of dimensions.

Yes, those guys deserve to have their papers hosted on arXiv and published in peer-reviewed journals when checked.

Also, what about all those people studying quantum field theories in two and three dimensions in order to undertand condensed matter systems? Don’t they count? Don’t the experiments done there verifying these QFTs in other dimensions interest you?

-cvj

QFT comes from empirically evidence in 4-d experimentation measurements, and only in that way is 4-d.

I didn’t define it 4-d, I’m veryinterested in extra dimensions and have repeatedly mentioned one particular extra-dimensional unification: ‘Gravitation and Electrodynamics over SO(3,3)’ on CERN document server, EXT-2003-090 by D. R. Lunsford. It was peer-reviewed and published but was deleted from arXiv. It makes predictions, eliminates cosmological constant. It’s 3 orthagonal time dimensions and its elimination of the CC mean it fits a gravity mechanism which is also predictive.

-cvj

Best,

-cvj

-cvj