My Naive View of Particles and String Theory

Ideas about how a world with more than three spatial dimensions would work - what laws of physics would be needed, how things would be built, how people would do things and so on.

My Naive View of Particles and String Theory

Postby PatrickPowers » Sat Apr 06, 2019 2:49 am

Here's another view. String theory posits the 3+1 ordinary dimensions, 6 compact dimensions, and a shadowy dimension which is a limit of the other dimensions. String people are terrible at providing intuitive explanations to laymen, but I'll do my best. The idea seems to be that elementary particles like electrons and neutrinos are knots in the 6 compact dimensions. They aren't knots of energy or matter, they are knots in space itself. Each knot is a self-contained miniscule universe. They are like black holes, except we don't know how they are held together or what makes them become that way, or why every electron is identical to every other electron. Not likely the answer will come up soon. But it DOES make sense that such objects would have energy, the size of the knot is the wavelength, and that knots have two possible chiralities. That's good.

Now the simplest knot in our 3D world is the circle. That's a 1-sphere, an N-2 sphere. In the 6 compact dimensions the simplest knot would be the 4-sphere. That's an even number of dimensions, so there are two orientations.

Now note that in this scheme time plays no role whatsoever. The knot doesn't care about time. It doesn't change at all. It comes into and out of existence, but that is all. It doesn't move, not in it's own frame of reference. It just sits there. The wavelength of the object is simply it's diameter. The concept of "frequency" of the "wave" has no meaning. The knot has nothing to do with time. So while we call this property the wavelength, it isn't a wave at all.

The 3+1 dimensions then are strictly relative. They are concerned only with the interactions between the knots. They are irrelevant to the knot itself.

So...would two 4-spheres with opposite chirality have opposite spin? I'd be more inclined to think they are matter and anti-matter. One wonders what such chirality of a space would mean. A rather odd concept. But not THAT odd. It is well known that weak force interactions are chiral, and always in the same direction. Hmm.

Anyway, all this is far beyond my power to make any sense of. Good enough for an Internet post, though.
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Re: My Naive View of Particles and String Theory

Postby wendy » Sat Apr 06, 2019 12:31 pm

Gosh, and i have been playing around with particles as holes in space, where space accumulates to hide it.
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Re: My Naive View of Particles and String Theory

Postby PatrickPowers » Mon Apr 15, 2019 2:33 pm

Messing around further with this:

The Dirac equation has 4 complex dimensions. We can think of that as 3+1straight dimensions and 4 curved.

String theory has 3+1 straight dimensions and 6 possibly curved.

However this does not necessarily mean that the dimensions themselves are curved. What if electrons and so forth are knots in the 6 dimensions? In 6 dimensions knots are 4D. So the dimensions are only curved locally due to being knotted.

The 4 curved dimensions of the knot then correspond to the 4 curved dimensions of the Dirac equation, while the 6 dimensions are those of string theory.

Not that I take any of this seriously....
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Re: My Naive View of Particles and String Theory

Postby student91 » Mon Apr 15, 2019 6:10 pm

PatrickPowers wrote:Messing around further with this:

The Dirac equation has 4 complex dimensions. We can think of that as 3+1straight dimensions and 4 curved.
Note that the Dirac equation describes a spinor field, so to every point (t,x,y,z) in space-time, there is a 4-dimensional element of the spinor space assigned.
So a complete solution of the Dirac-equation is, with this specific meaning, happening in 4 real and 4 complex dimensions.
Furthermore, the space in which the spinors lie, there is a priori no curvature present. Saying these complex dimensions have curvature would be as if you would say the values an electric field could take has curvature: It is difficult to understand the meaning of such a statement, i.e. it does not make sense to say it without thorough explanation on what you mean.
String theory has 3+1 straight dimensions and 6 possibly curved.

However this does not necessarily mean that the dimensions themselves are curved. What if electrons and so forth are knots in the 6 dimensions?
That seems to make some sense.
In 6 dimensions knots are 4D. So the dimensions are only curved locally due to being knotted.

The 4 curved dimensions of the knot then correspond to the 4 curved dimensions of the Dirac equation, while the 6 dimensions are those of string theory.

Not that I take any of this seriously....
Sounds interesting! You might be interested in the works of Rañada, do look it up!
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Re: My Naive View of Particles and String Theory

Postby PatrickPowers » Thu Apr 18, 2019 11:59 pm

You might be interested in the works of Rañada, do look it up!


In the course of human events I found this paper: Is The Electron a Photon with Toroidal Topology? by Williams and van der Mark. The answer surely is "no," but their results are quite impressive nonetheless. http://www.cybsoc.org/electron.pdf

The authors assume that the electron is a photon in some sort of unknown self-confining state. This not the case, but what's impressive is that they can then come up with a simple topology that has many of the properties of the electron, some of which I had never even heard of. So while it isn't a final answer it is quite a few steps in the right direction.

Here is a later book on the same sort of topic. From Photons to Atoms - The Electromagnetic Nature of Matter https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.3110 I have yet to read it any further other than to be impressed by the size of the author's ego.

By the way, let me be clear about what I'm up to. The whole "wave" and "particle" ideas of QM do more harm than good. It is a futile attempt to make an analogy with the familiar. Better to forget all about that and come up with something entirely new. I have the sense that there is some simple topology that explains the electron but evades discovery because it occurs in a realm very different from what we are used to. Williams and van der Mark seem to have made a giant leap in that direction, but they are trying to do it in the context of the 3+1 universe. I think there is no chance that such things exist in 3+1 spacetime. Nowadays when I see "torus" I always think of an even-dimensional space. So maybe that is the way to go. I also believe that a knot is going to be a lot more stable than a torus.

I think that today that there is not enough data to find the true answer, but it is realistic to achieve the much more modest goal of a better concept than the wave/particle thing.

Will I ever have the time to take a crack at this? Put this together with Hestenes and the AdS/CFT correspondence? Maybe not, but it's fun to putter around with.
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