Professor Stoica,
[First my pledge: goo.gl/KCCujt ] The positives for your essay are:
-- This is one of the best and most accurate quick summaries of both the basics and the edges of particle physics that I've seen. You manage to get to Clifford algebras in just a few pages, and to do so in a way that I think gives general readers a fighting chance to follow your points and arguments.
-- Your knowledge of the underlying physics and math appears to be both precise and well-researched, though I admit I did not try to check up on a few assertions with which I was less familiar. But your expertise is persuasive, and you clearly know what you are talking about.
-- I admit it: I really liked that you went towards geometries and topics such as Clifford algebras towards the end of your essay, rather than taking the Deep Dive into the Planck world that is so common these days even after 40 years of abject failure. That to me says you are facing the problem in a clear and thoughtful way.[1]
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Negatives for your essay:
-- I was really looking forward to seeing where you were going with your holomorphic (holographic?) Indra's net idea. But alas, your essay seemed to keep deferring that part in favor of summarizing the history of particle physics, until Indra's net became just a page of mostly definitions and assertions at the end.[3] Since I pretty much "got" your holographic encoding idea way back when I first read your title and subtitle, the paragraphs defining what you meant didn't really add much, at least for me.
-- You did at least take a good shot at justifying why an essay on your particular concept for unifying physics was "sort of" an explanation of what fundamental means, which of course was the real question of this essay contest. But for comparison you might want to take a look at the superbly on-target essay by Crowther, topic 3034.
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Thanks again for a really nice read! I am already planning to keep a copy of your essay in my library, and to explore all those summary points you made in more detail.
Cheers,
Terry Bollinger (topic 3099)
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[1] I am not much impressed by any version of Planck-level physics, either quantum gravity or its offshoot of string theory, mostly because Planck level physics postulates energy levels that likely do not exist anywhere in the real universe, which in turn means they are not subject even in principle to validation or falsification.
Also, there is this problem that at the Planck limit everything sort of falls apart in ways that make almost anything possible, just as in logic you can prove anything from a false premise. For example, if in string theory you accept the pathetically procedurally incorrect (ask any mathematician) assertion that 1+2+3+...=-1/12, well, pretty much anything can follow mathematically from that point on. Even worse is what happened in 1974, when Scherk and Schwartz [2] took the Deep Dive from real, genuinely interesting, highly constrained hadron-sized string-like vibrations (see Regge trajectories) down to Planck level of gravitons, based solely as best I can tell on the observation that these hadron vibrations were spin 2, just like the hypothetical graviton.
That had to be one of the least justified and most unscientific leaps of theoretical faith of all time, but quantum gravity was "in" at the time, so the Deep Leap was accepted almost without question. And the result? Well, the string-like vibrations at the hadron level were incredibly constrained and likely (research was mostly abandoned) led to no more than a handful of solutions. By removing all such silly experimental-reality-based constraints and upping everything else -- energies and dimensions for example -- to the max, the placid low-energy strings of the hadron scale became little unleashed monster capable of absolutely anything, including the 10500 minimum estimate of the number of vacuum states possible in string theory. S&S's deep leap of faith ended up distracting generations of good minds away from real, experimentally attached physics, and plunged them instead into the utterly unverifiable and magically malleable mind-muck of the Planck limit.
Other than all of that, I like quantum gravity and string theory just fine... :)
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[2] Scherk, J. & Schwarz, J. H. Dual Models for Non-Hadrons Nuclear Physics B, Elsevier, 1974, 81, 118-144.
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[3] I still think you have a really interesting idea going on there. You may just that you may need more time developing it. I noticed that you did mention the holographic principle in your very last sentence, while carefully avoiding the word "strings". Since I do not personally think that string theory per se is even relevant to the mostly geometric holographic principle, perhaps your future directions in this area could end up defining a version of the holographic principle that is not needlessly tied to the perplexing paradoxes of Planck level physics. That would be nice, since I strongly believe that the link between string theory and the general concept of a holographic universe is not much more than an accident of people and timing.