[HN Gopher] Particle physicists puzzle over a new duality
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Particle physicists puzzle over a new duality
Author : kzrdude
Score : 106 points
Date : 2022-08-01 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| ISL wrote:
| Very pleased to see news like this -- observations of this sort
| are where the big theoretical advances sometimes emerge.
| nottim wrote:
| The first sentence of the abstract is a helluva mouthful: "We
| observe that the three-gluon form factor of the chiral part of
| the stress-tensor multiplet in planar N = 4 super-Yang-Mills
| theory is dual to the six-gluon MHV amplitude on its parity
| preserving surface."
|
| For any of you paper-writers out there, some advice: the abstract
| shouldn't contain undefined acronyms, and should be readable by
| anyone who you would expect to be at a conference where you
| present your paper. Exchanging a bit of the technical correctness
| for readability is the entire point of the abstract, and the
| source paper's abstract could really use some work.
| sebastialonso wrote:
| Context is king. It's the abstract of a paper, not simple
| Wikipedia. Everyone reading the paper itself is expected to
| either know or make the effort the become knowledgeable enough
| to understand. In any other context, I'd agree but we're taking
| about a paper on theoretical physics on a potential new
| interaction lol
| prof-dr-ir wrote:
| Do you maybe have a concrete suggestion for how you would
| rewrite it? Which parts do you think are not understandable for
| anyone attending, say, the annual Strings conference?
| civilized wrote:
| In a field like this, the abstract is more about conciseness
| than accessibility. It's for a fellow specialist skimming
| through dozens of papers looking for something interesting.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I take it as a sign that I would have to understand a bunch of
| prerequisites before I could understand the content of this
| paper, its implications, and the possibilities it raises.
| maxnoe wrote:
| It's a paper, not an introductory textbook...
| mannykannot wrote:
| Precisely...
| raverbashing wrote:
| > and should be readable by anyone who you would expect to be
| at a conference where you present your paper.
|
| Yes, I guess this is pretty much the case here. There's no much
| way to simplify this
|
| Conciseness is important in abstracts and it beats general
| simplifications.
| jarenmf wrote:
| Every writing course I attended in grad school told us that the
| first sentence of the abstract should be understandable by any
| scientist, the second sentence should be comprehensible to a
| scientist in a related field. After that, you address the
| specialists community. However, it seems that more and more
| people are skipping the first and second sentences and jumping
| directly to talking to specialists. I have mixed feelings about
| that. On one hand, it's nice to skip the generalities but at
| the same time some times its nice to have some context.
| ISL wrote:
| That sentence is very readable for anyone who would be at a
| relevant conference.
|
| As an experimental physicist, everything but the MHV (maximally
| helicity violating) was readable/comprehensible to me.
| Theorists in the field will read that as easily as breathing.
| coliveira wrote:
| They're not writing for you.
| joe__f wrote:
| I have a PhD in this field. I understood everything in the
| title straight off, apart from the context of which 'parity
| preserving surface' they were talking about (which was fine). I
| think this was a concise and well-written abstract, which was
| easily readable within the target audience. There are very many
| different concepts that you have to build on and learn to be
| able to write something like this paper. It's unfortunate that
| abstracts in the field are not more accessible to a wider range
| of people, but I don't see an easy solution to that. If you
| went to the yearly conference on this field and started asking
| people to define 'MHV' in their abstracts I don't think you'd
| get many converts. This acronym is cryptic, unintuitive and
| completely ubiquitous and ingrained in the literature.
| gfodor wrote:
| Can a physicist comment on the impact of this to the work by Nima
| Arkani-Hamed et al on the Amplituhedron
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron)?
| joe__f wrote:
| Great question! This result is in the same area as the work on
| the amplituhedron. It's not immediately obvious to me that they
| are directly related, and I didn't see a reference to any
| amplituhedron papers in the citations of this paper. Dixon et
| al. have essentially discovered a new symmetry which the
| scattering amplitudes (of N=4 Super Yang-Mills) must obey, and
| new symmetries generally lead to deeper understanding of the
| theory. This symmetry should then also be somehow encoded in
| the amplituhedron description of the theory; I imagine people
| would look into this in the future.
| joe__f wrote:
| I finished up my PhD in scattering amplitudes recently. I checked
| out the abstract of this paper, and it certainly looks like an
| interesting result and will likely be the basis for new results
| in the field. For perspective, I estimate that there are a few
| such results in the field per year which could have roughly the
| same quanta magazine article written about them.
| mmazing wrote:
| Any guesses what this could stem from?
| joe__f wrote:
| I think it's a bit of a feature of quanta magazine's approach
| to science journalism (and probably the current zeitgeist in
| science journalism in general). If you want to make work like
| this accessible then it's necessary for a large portion of
| the (pop science) article to be covering topics that are
| common to most of the recent work in the field, with a lot of
| the same analogies and motivations. I think it's nice that
| quanta magazine are trying to make this kind of work
| accessible and interesting for people, but I feel that their
| approach sacrifices perspective on how relevant that work is,
| which is why I tried to add some here.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I agree with everything here, but suspect the person you
| replied to was asking what caused the strange
| correspondence :P (or, even if they weren't, I'd like to
| ask for myself)
| cwillu wrote:
| "For Dixon, this is a tiny hint at a deeper physical connection
| between the two amplitudes, and a reason to think something
| similar might hold in the Standard Model. "But it's pretty weak,"
| he said. "It's, like, secondhand information.""
|
| This appears to be a development in a toy model. It might or
| might not apply to the standard model.
|
| Still, at least it isn't a condensed matter experiment being
| misconstrued as a particle physics breakthrough.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> misconstrued as a particle physics breakthrough
|
| Hey don't throw shade on quasiparticles, they're people too.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| When does a quasiparticle become "particle physics"?
|
| As far as I can tell, protons and neutrons are quark-gluon
| quasiparticles, but we're happy to call studying protons and
| neutrons "particle physics".
|
| From Wiki:
|
| > complicated system such as a solid behaves as if it
| contained different weakly interacting particles in vacuum
|
| That is, this description fits protons and neutrons relative
| to quarks and gluons: very cold quark-gluon regions behave
| _as if_ protons and neutrons exist.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle
| cwillu wrote:
| "I identify as Higgs"
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Queue "yo mamma" joke.
| legohead wrote:
| As a complete layman to all this, after reading the article it
| feels like more proof we are in a simulation.
| uoaei wrote:
| No one said the computer running the simulation used digital
| logic. If we could encode system dynamics into "energy+matter",
| you could call it an analog computer without much dissent.
| People do this in miniature: in fact, the first computers were
| entirely mechanical!
|
| If we accept this reasoning to imply that the universe is a
| giant computer, we only have the unknowable left: was it
| purposefully (intelligently) designed or did it spontaneously
| arise? As far as I can tell, the probability of either outcome
| is equal according to our limited experiences, and we will
| never have access to a definitive answer one way or the other.
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