Related papers: A moonshine dialogue in mathematical physics
The ability to discover abstract physical concepts and understand how they work in the world through observing lies at the core of human intelligence. The acquisition of this ability is based on compositionally perceiving the environment in…
In 1990, Dyson published a proof due to Feynman of the Maxwell equations assuming only the commutation relations between position and velocity. With this minimal assumption, Feynman never supposed the existence of Hamiltonian or Lagrangian…
In the chameleon mechanism, a field (typically scalar) has a mass that depends on the matter density of the environment: the larger is the matter density, the larger is the mass of the chameleon. We briefly review some aspects of…
Mathematics is changing. Computers are verifying proofs, checking calculations, and exploring complex structures that would overwhelm human effort. Yet curiosity-driven research is where tomorrow's breakthroughs are quietly prepared. In…
In this talk we discuss mathematical structures associated to Feynman graphs. Feynman graphs are the backbone of calculations in perturbative quantum field theory. The mathematical structures -- apart from being of interest in their own…
Modified Newtonian dynamics (Mond) has had considerable success in describing motions in galaxies. It uses a single force which falls off inversely with the distance at large distances and inversely with the square of the distance at…
The neat formulation that describes the gauge interactions associated with internal symmetries is extended to the case of a simple, yet non-trivial, symmetry group structure which mixes gravity and electromagnetism by associating a gauge…
A program was recently initiated to bridge the gap between the Planck scale physics described by loop quantum gravity and the familiar low energy world. We illustrate the conceptual problems and their solutions through a toy model: quantum…
The effect of boson bunching is frequently mentioned and discussed in the literature. This effect is the manifestation of bosons tendency to "travel" in clusters. One of the core arguments for boson bunching was formulated by Feynman in his…
Monsters lurk within mathematical as well as literary haunts. I propose to trace some pathways between these two monstrous habitats. I start from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's influential account of monster culture and explore how well…
In physics, Feynman diagrams are used to reason about quantum processes. In the 1980s, it became clear that underlying these diagrams is a powerful analogy between quantum physics and topology: namely, a linear operator behaves very much…
We review the present state of and future outlook for our understanding of neutrino masses and mixings. We discuss what we think are the most important perspectives on the plausible and natural scenarios for neutrinos and what may have the…
Einstein believed that Mach's principle should play a major role in finding a meaningful spacetime geometry, though it was discovered later that his field equations gave some solutions which were not Machian. It is shown, in this essay,…
Being mathematics a natural language to Mankind and to physics, it must be constantly adapted to our necessities and our natural perception. Then, mathematical concepts are not absolute to reality. Although mathematical theories are…
The quest for unification of particles and fields and for reconciliation of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity has led us to gauge theories, string theories, supersymmetry and higher-extended objects: membranes... Our spacetime is…
In Bohmian mechanics particles follow continuous trajectories, hence 2-time position correlations are well defined. Nevertheless, Bohmian mechanics predicts the violation of Bell inequalities. Motivated by this fact we investigate position…
In this paper, we will discuss a formal link between neural networks and quantum computing. For that purpose we will present a simple model for the description of the neural network by forming sub-graphs of the whole network with the same…
Global celebration greeted the 2012 discovery at CERN's Large Hadron Collider of a particle that matches the textbook description of the Higgs boson. That achievement validated a remarkable chain of theoretical reasoning that combined the…
Formalizing an old desire of Einstein, "psi-epistemic theories" try to reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics, while viewing quantum states as ordinary probability distributions over underlying objects called "ontic states."…
We construct a family of (p+3)-dimensional brane worlds in which the brane has one compact extra dimension, the bulk has two extra dimensions, and the bulk closes regularly at codimension two submanifolds known as bolts. The…