> These equations do not require a preexisting space-time, making it possible to realize the concept that space-time and all structures therein arise as a result of the collective interaction of the sea states with each other and with the additional particles and "holes" in the sea. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
Earliest appearence of this stuff seems to be around 2000, cf. arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0001048, there's a few talks etc. but I can't find anything that Finster is not directly involved in.
Almost 20 years is a rather long time for no one to pick this up independently :P
@nattyover There are various other candidates for a theory of everything, eg Alain Connes' noncommutative geometry, Asymptotically Safe Gravity, causal fermion systems, E8 theory. The statement that M-theory is the only candidate isn't only misleading, it's plainly wrong.
@enumaris Can't find any, but starting to read arxiv.org/abs/1605.04742 I can see why - it's not wrong, but it doesn't give you any motivation as to why we're looking at the things we're looking at in the first few pages.
Starting to read the article I linked, I almost immediately go "???" when "actions" are introduced that do not look like ordinary actions, and several classes of objects are defined without any indication as to why one would care about these objects.
@enumaris That one 1. was written by a mathematician with prior acclaim 2. purported to solve a major outstanding conjecture 3. had precedent in Wiles' proof of Fermat's theorem also being a major body of work.
well with regards to point 2., purporting to be a theory of everything is surely at least as compelling as purporting to solve a major outstanding conjecture.
Point 1. is kind of appeal to authority...point 3. I'm not sure what you mean. Like Wile's proof was also really long and complicated so it made mathematicians more likely to read another long and complicated thing?
I'm not making any statement on whether it is fruitful to consider this causal fermion thing seriously, but only wondering why some theories get read and some others don't. Is it...politics? Fame and reputation? Audacity of the claim? Simplicity of the work? hmmm
what if causal fermions was written by Steve Weinberg? You think people would read it and take it seriously?
so this guys is 1. not famous (-), 2. making a big claim (+), 3. hugely convoluted (-) while the ABC conjecture guy was 1. famous (+), 2. making a big claim (+), 3. hugely convoluted (-)
I mean, if you're a Field's medal winner I'm willing to read through a lengthy paper of yours before declaring it bollocks. If you're someone I've never heard of and the first few pages of your work seem iffy already, I'm probably gonna stop reading. I see where that's a concerning attitude but otherwise theorists would just spend most of their time reading through the kind of stuff that gets published on viXra by the dozen.
@enumaris Apparently? I mean, as I said, the stuff doesn't seem outright wrong. It's not "crackpot" level, it just has major deficits in convincing me it actually relates to reality, which is par for the course for a lot of theory :P
well with a physical theory it should be if the postulates are not too contrived, and they lead to a wide class of predictions and those predictions are correct, then one should "believe" them.
if he can show, e.g. that his theory clearly reduces to all the known and experimentally verified theories in the appropriate limit, then I would start taking him pretty seriously :P
heh, I didn't do theory building at the level of coming up with new theories
but my work is theoretical in the sense that I was simulating previously unsimulated enviornments
These days, there's a dearth of unexplained phenomena in fundamental physics - sure, we have dark matter and stuff, but there's no really concrete observation we have to explain
This was much different in the 60s, when the particle zoo provided a wealth of mysterious but concrete observations to develop your theory against.
@enumaris I also have to say that the writing/citation style in this paper is rather concerning. Usually, when a grand new theory is proposed, you'd want to connect it to what came before, citing established mainstream in support of your theory. This is the opposite: Every page has about 5 citations to the authors own papers, and only very sparing citations of anything else
First major issue I note is that he defines an operator that produces values of wavefunctions at specific points. But anyone familiar with the actual mathematics of the "contemporary physics" of wavefunctions knows that the value of a wavefunction as a single point is ill-defined/cannot be physically important
The reddit people were referencing this article. 'in all honesty in this article they just say "and then here we plug in the leptons of the SM" or "and then here we plug in Einstein's field equations". Just because you can take things and put them together in a basket doesn't mean you're unificating them.'
And then he claims that the "follwing sections" will elaborate on this connection between Dirac wavefunctions and his weird operator set, but he never returns to this and instead stumbles on to "general spacetimes" etc.
He defines "wavefunctions" after this that are...operator valued and have no visible connection to the actual wavefunctions he watned to compare them to
@ACuriousMind hmm. i don't know. if you were pretty good at it, you probably could do it? I don't know if Solidworks or a CAD program is the best way to do it though - it's for technical modeling.
that would probably be far beyond me if you wanted it to look any good, though. and then, even if you make the model, you'd have to 3d print it or something, and that decreases the quality/makes it expensive/generally means it's a single color.
@heather Well, I didn't think this through. My typical style of planning means that I'd usually have about one day between knowing which mini I need and actually needing it :P
@heather Depends, but I'd be fine with mono-color and hand-painting them after. Huh, I just remebered I still have a set of hand-painted minis at my parents'. Dammit.
@heather Anyway, I'm not sure I'm actually looking for minis :D But I just penned the finale to a years-long RPG campaign and my mind is racing for props/ways to make our next one have higher "production quality" :P
@bolbteppa The unversioned link always gets the most recent version. You don't want a version indicator unless you really mean v3 and not some later version with the (presumptive) bugs fixed.
@ACuriousMind that's cool =) i've kinda wanted to get into table top games for a bit but a. i don't have the time and b. i don't really know anyone else who does play them. i tried playing a simple one they recommended over in the rpg chat w/ my mom and about 15 minutes in we were just staring at each other with complete confusion.
