/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10888231
a lot of people resent him though, cuz they're jelly. they grow up wanting to be like him and even get into PhD programs before they realize how insanely smart he actually is, and once they realize they'll never get there, they get defensive and act like he's bad and try to lambast his work (ahem, peter woit and sabine hosstardfelder).

that mentality is for jerks. a person who is honest with themself should be happy that humanity has someone of his caliber to tackle the deepest questions. he is in many ways the vanguard of human understanding, and we should appreciate it. (and not be contrarian shills trying to sell books.)

and based ed is down to earth and humble af, even considering how towering of a figure he is. in the second video in OP he says how family life is more important than string theory and how much he loves his kids. and how he would choose family life over discovering the "final theory". he's a good man. (not all great physicists are douches like Feynman)

>>10831673
damn bro, this entire board BTFO

>>10756336
eternally /ourguy/ by a fucking longshot.

>>10717562
actually your idea is what string theory says. one string, two strings, however many strings; it’s all the same theory. in fact the “number” of distinct strings is inherently fuzzy. the picture you should have in mind is a single closed string splitting into a couple of closed strings, and then those can split (or join) too. pic related

just to wax philosophical for a moment, the idea of spacetime in string theory is emergent from the underlying string dynamics. really it’s just one big worldsheet, and it very well may originate from one primordial string splitting its first time (or the one primordial string cake from an earlier joining of strings before the big bang). it’s all a very open world of ideas to explore. i like string gas cosmology

https://www.ias.edu/ideas/conversation-robbert-dijkgraaf-and-edward-witten

thoughts?

i'll start.

>so, well, physicists usually are not much interested in the details of mathematical proofs, which means that usually even physicists, in his work, modern mathematical ideas are important, might not really understand deeply the ideas that they're working with, and on the other hand, since the difficulty for mathematicians to understand quantum field theory has endured, it makes it extremely difficult for mathematicians to understand what physicists are really trying to do
bam, sick burn. mathematicians BTFO. can't into QFT. losers.

>Graham Farmelo: Go back to string theory. Do you see that as one among several candidates or the preeminent candidate or what? I mean what do you see the status of that framework in the landscape of mathematical physics.

>Edward Witten: Id say that string slash M theory is the only really interesting direction we have for going beyond the established framework of physics by which I mean quantum field theory at the quantum level and classical general relativity at the macroscopic scale. So where where we've made progress that's been in the string slash M theory framework where a lot of interesting things have been discovered. I'd say that there's a lot of interesting things we don't understand at all.

>Graham Farmelo: But you’ve never been tempted down the other route. The other options are not.

>Edward Witten: I’m not even sure what you would mean by other routes.

>Graham Farmelo: Loop quantum gravity?

>Edward Witten: Those are just words. There aren’t any other routes

>Graham Farmelo: Okay, all right, fair enough.

>Graham Farmelo: Go back to string theory. Do you see that as one among several candidates or the preeminent candidate or what? I mean what do you see the status of that framework in the landscape of mathematical physics.

>Edward Witten: Id say that string slash M theory is the only really interesting direction we have for going beyond the established framework of physics by which I mean quantum field theory at the quantum level and classical general relativity at the macroscopic scale. So where where we've made progress that's been in the string slash M theory framework where a lot of interesting things have been discovered. I'd say that there's a lot of interesting things we don't understand at all.

>Edward Witten: But you’ve never been tempted down the other route. The other options are not.

>Edward Witten: I’m not even sure what you would mean by other routes.

>Graham Farmelo: Loop quantum gravity?

>Edward Witten: Those are just words. There aren’t any other routes

>Graham Farmelo: Okay, all right, fair enough.

>Elementary particles have an intrinsic quantum-mechanical ‘spin’. Most particles can spin in a right-handed or left-handed sense around their direction of motion, but neutrinos always spin in a left-handed sense (Fig. 2). Like chirality in biology, this property may conceivably have its origins in a chance event, in this case an accident of the Big Bang. Such an intrinsic chirality is impossible for particles with mass (because the direction of spin of a massive particle can be changed by rotating the particle in its rest frame), so physicists concluded that neutrinos must have zero mass. But there is a problem with this argument, and it has to do with antimatter. Every particle of elementary matter has a corresponding antiparticle, with the same mass but opposite electric charge. For example, the antiparticle of the electron, e-, is the positron, denoted e+. Similarly, the neutrino has an antiparticle: the antineutrino. The antineutrino has the opposite chirality to the neutrino — it always spins in a right-handed sense around its direction of motion. Apart from their chirality, how can you tell a neutrino from an antineutrino? They are both electrically neutral, so we cannot distinguish them by their electric charge. But there is another apparently conserved charge in interactions between elementary particles: the lepton number. The electron and the neutrino are leptons, and the positron and the antineutrino are antileptons. The number of leptons minus the number of antileptons in an interaction is called the lepton number. Leptons and antileptons can be created by many processes, such as the decay of a neutron to a proton, an electron and an antineutrino. In this example, there are no leptons at the outset (the neutron is a ‘baryon’), then one lepton (the electron) and one antilepton (the antineutrino) are created, so the lepton number does not change. Indeed, it is conserved in all the usual elementary particle processes.
1/2

the multiverse is just a 1D string flying in 11D spacetime splitting apart into millions of little strings

prove me wrong.
protip: you can't