[math-fun] Japanese supercomputer says: String theory says: universe is 3D expanding
Japanese supercomputer says: String theory says: universe is 3D expanding Normally I view string theory with great skepticism and lack of understanding. And now to up the ante on that, here is an amazing claim which I suppose one could consider to be an "experimental confirmation" of string theory. Press release: http://www.kek.jp/intra-e/press/2011/122209/ Paper: Sang-Woo Kim, Jun Nishimura, Asato Tsuchiya: Expanding (3+1)-dimensional universe from a Lorentzian matrix model for superstring theory in (9+1)-dimensions, http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.1540 (4 pages) This gist seems to be as follows. String theory says that particles are tiny 1-dimensional "strings" not points, and the universe is 9+1 dimensional not 3+1 dimensional, with the 6 extra dimensions curled up in some microscopic fashion for some reason so we do not perceive them -- which leaves it somewhat of a mystery why the universe is 3D and expanding. The "IKKT matrix model" is a way supposedly to simulate nonperturbative string theory using monte carlo on a supercomputer. So they put some strings in some kind of 9D box with periodic boundary conditions, simulated, and voila, the box automagically wanted to have 6 dimensions shrink small, and the other 3 dimensions expand. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)
I guess this would be more convincing if there were several teams, building several *independent* hokey and totally inadequately described/tested computer models of "nonperturbative string theory" which all ran the same kind of simulation and all got the same result. If so, then frankly this would have to be regarded as impressive. I mean, there are 10 possible subsets (for our purposes) of {0,1,2,..,9} and therefore the fact the computer says "3 is the answer" has to be regarded as making string theory "10X more likely to be true." It only takes about nine 10X confidence leaps before you're pretty strongly believing in fairies... On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 11:25 AM, Warren Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com> wrote:
Japanese supercomputer says: String theory says: universe is 3D expanding
Normally I view string theory with great skepticism and lack of understanding. And now to up the ante on that, here is an amazing claim which I suppose one could consider to be an "experimental confirmation" of string theory.
Press release: http://www.kek.jp/intra-e/press/2011/122209/ Paper: Sang-Woo Kim, Jun Nishimura, Asato Tsuchiya: Expanding (3+1)-dimensional universe from a Lorentzian matrix model for superstring theory in (9+1)-dimensions, http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.1540 (4 pages)
This gist seems to be as follows. String theory says that particles are tiny 1-dimensional "strings" not points, and the universe is 9+1 dimensional not 3+1 dimensional, with the 6 extra dimensions curled up in some microscopic fashion for some reason so we do not perceive them -- which leaves it somewhat of a mystery why the universe is 3D and expanding. The "IKKT matrix model" is a way supposedly to simulate nonperturbative string theory using monte carlo on a supercomputer.
So they put some strings in some kind of 9D box with periodic boundary conditions, simulated, and voila, the box automagically wanted to have 6 dimensions shrink small, and the other 3 dimensions expand.
-- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)
-- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step) and math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html
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Warren Smith