[HN Gopher] A "knot dominated era" may have existed in the early...
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A "knot dominated era" may have existed in the early universe:
study
Paper in Physical Review Letters:
https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/s3vd-brsn
Author : wglb
Score : 74 points
Date : 2025-10-23 00:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| DerekL wrote:
| I think the title removed the wrong words to make it fit into 80
| characters. The actual title is "The key to why the universe
| exists may lie in an 1800s knot idea science once dismissed".
| Removing "why the" makes the title ungrammatical. Removing just
| "science once dismissed" from the end would work better.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| For convenience @dang, the new suggested title is
|
| The key to why the universe exists may lie in an 1800s knot
| idea
|
| When I first read the existing title I was also very confused
| dang wrote:
| I agree that that would be a good way to shorten it, but the
| title itself needs to be changed (" _Please use the original
| title, unless it is misleading or linkbait_ " -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). "Key to
| why the universe exists" is linkbaity, and "1800s knot idea"
| appears misleading, since the intersection between what
| Kelvin said and what these researchers are saying appears to
| be just "knots".
|
| Edit: The mention of Kelvin's original idea does make the
| article more interesting though!
| dang wrote:
| The article's title is too baity for HN so I lifted a phrase
| from the paper itself. More at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45696368
| snozolli wrote:
| _In 1867, Lord Kelvin imagined atoms as knots in the aether._
|
| I had never heard of this before, and I find the idea absolutely
| delightful. As I understand it, the "knots" are stable vortices
| in the aether. It was popular from 1870 - 1890, and it blows my
| mind that only a few years later the electron was discovered
| (1897), and less than 50 years later (1938), the scanning
| electron microscope was invented! 1955 was when the atom was
| first imaged.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_theory_of_the_atom
| perihelions wrote:
| I was literally just reading about this (see in particular
| "arguments in favor of")
|
| https://webhomes.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/mfaknot.pdf (
| _" Geometry and Physics of Knots"_ by Atiyah)
|
| It's interesting that the mathematical theory of knots was
| initially developed in response to Kelvin's proposal (i.e.
| Tait's work), because people were motivated trying to work out
| its implications for atomic theory. A branch of mathematics
| created by wrong physics.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| Oddly close to to the QFT view while missing the fundamental
| nature of fields.
| jordibc wrote:
| I think the idea of knots as a basis for everything has come
| and gone several times. One of those were in the 90s, which is
| when I became aware thanks to the excellent "Gauge Fields,
| Knots and Gravity" by John Baez and Javier P Muniain, that was
| part of the "Series on Knots and Everything" [1]. Those are
| really intriguing ideas.
|
| [1] https://www.worldscientific.com/series/skae
| datameta wrote:
| The more we learn the more I'm unsure of whether it is a wonder
| anything exists at all or whether considering the scales of time
| involved (and hypothetical metaverse) whether it was all
| inevitable.
| kulahan wrote:
| You can take it back out even further and ask why a universe in
| which chemistry is even possible popped up. A single small
| change and either everything becomes unbelievably heavy and
| collapses, or everything stays unreasonably light and we never
| get past hydrogen and helium.
|
| Fun fact: it's very easy to rule out a multiverse theory where
| travel between universes is possible.
|
| If the multiverse theory is correct, every possible combination
| of universe is out there. This means there is a universe which
| formed in exactly the right way such that the citizens all
| decided to leave their universe and invade our specific one.
| They formed 10 billion years ago and completely annihilated all
| matter in our universe.
|
| Since we are still here, either the multiverse is false, or
| travel between universes is impossible.
| debugnik wrote:
| You're assuming that that particular set of universes is
| possible. Maybe it hasn't happened because getting them to
| agree is not scientifically possible.
|
| This reminds me of Stephen Hawking telling John Oliver that
| the latter dating Charlize Theron is beyond the bounds of
| scientific possibility in any of the infinite parallel
| universes.
| hvs wrote:
| Calculations show that everything we see today, from atoms to
| galaxies, exists because just one extra particle of matter
| survived for every billion matter-antimatter pairs.
|
| Everything about the Universe boggles the mind, but I was unaware
| of this.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| As a former non-atheist, with plenty of people I know in the
| church that stubbornly refuse to acknowledge accepted science -
| I've long experimented with theologies in my head to fit the
| concept of God as they understand it into a cosmological model.
| Stuff like this is fun for me to point to. Maybe a watchmaker
| (set it in motion and then stepped away) "god" tipped the
| scales ever so slightly here (to be clear, I don't believe
| this, but communicating science to religious people can help to
| frame things in this way). To me this creates a much more
| powerful deity than some guy who somehow only created the
| universe 6,000 years ago but also for some insane reason made
| it look billions of years old.
| chr1 wrote:
| Fitting the concept of god into a cosmological model is
| rather easy.
|
| If we agree that everything we see is described by physics,
| then everything including us is simply a computation. And in
| principle someone can build a machine to carry out such a
| computation.
|
| People in such a machine will be more or less like us, and
| the creator of that machine will be exactly like god, outside
| of space and time, omnipotent, omniscient but having to run
| the simulation to see what everyone does.
|
| From this point of view creating universe 6000 years ago and
| making it look billions of years old does not look that
| insane, just a workaround for finite machine time.
|
| So the main disagreement is not about existence of god, or
| materialism vs idealism, but whether a human is equivalent to
| a computation or not.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Alternately, an individual set things in motion that they
| couldn't control or stop, and thus the universe was born.
| God could just be a random entity that got in over their
| proverbial head. We think creating a universe requires
| thought or intention but it could be a big mistake.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Fitting the concept of god into any scheme is easy, because
| the existence of god isn't falsifiable.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Why did that almighty watchmaker create anti matter in the
| first place that anihilates the normal matter? They could
| have just created the normal matter and zero anti matter. Why
| carefully fine tune these number?
|
| All of these situations are quite convoluted if you want to
| fit a designer in there.
| _factor wrote:
| Maybe it "looked away" to give its creation a bit of free
| will unconstrained by its own awesome deterministic power.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| As a fun aside, have you heard of Nominative Determinism?
| From a purely rational standpoint, it is mere coincidence
| that I know a dentist with the last name "Pullum" and an
| electrician with the last name "Cable". My confirmation
| bias doesn't account for the 99.9% of other people with
| unremarkable names.
|
| But then I realized... whenever I create fake people for
| unit tests I give them names that correspond to what they
| do. Could this be a sign that the universe is a simulation?
| And, that God is just a QA running some tests on it?
|
| So maybe we're living in an edge case!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
| kingkawn wrote:
| Overarching intellectual models exist for the sake of the
| problems they solve, rather than to stake claims of supremacy
| over all other models. Religious-style thinking has important
| meaning in certain contexts, especially crises and periods of
| apparent helplessness. Scientific rationalism is useful for
| solving certain classes of problems in certain ways. To posit
| universality to either betrays a medieval relationship to
| thought, not that the person, whether religious or
| scientific, may be close to succeeding at their position's
| impossible sense of their own centrality.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Huh... considering such annihilations should have left nothing
| but energy behind, from our standpoint, how could we
| distinguish which of these sequences of events actually
| happened?
|
| * The early universe produced slightly more matter than
| antimatter, and they annihilated until matter and energy
| remained.
|
| * The early universe produced overwhelmingly normal matter and
| energy, and almost no antimatter.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| If you put a lot of energy into a small place, you end up
| producing particles. We know this and in fact we can do it in
| particle accelerators. We understand how this happens with a
| very high degree of precision. The big bang was, essentially,
| just a huge amount of energy in a tiny place. So according to
| everything we know about particle physics, lots and lots of
| matter-antimatter pairs should have been produced. We also
| know there are some tiny violations of matter-antimatter
| symmetry that might have caused only one kind to remain after
| things spread out and cooled down. We know this because we
| have observed the weak nuclear force violate that symmetry in
| experiments. But these violations are so tiny that it seems a
| truly ridiculous amount of matter was necessary in the first
| place. The only assumption here is that what we currently
| know about particle physics and quantum field theory still
| holds true somewhat close to the big bang. I understand that
| this might seem unsatisfactory on many levels (and it still
| is to many physicists), but assuming that only one kind of
| matter was created in the big bang would require a completely
| new mechanism beyond any currently known physics.
| NoSalt wrote:
| I had a mathematics professor in college whose specialty was in
| knots. I naively, and probably too bluntly, asked him how his
| work fit into the world; a question I have regretted to this day.
| Anyhoo ... I guess this is where it fits into the "world". If you
| are interested, here is his Wikipedia page:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morwen_Thistlethwaite
| whatshisface wrote:
| The article didn't say, but a soliton is a solution to a
| nonlinear PDE that keeps its shape while traveling. One real-
| world example is a tall ocean wave.
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