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Quantum Field Theory (edit)

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|timestamp=5:14 AM ¡ Jul 23, 2023
|timestamp=5:14 AM ¡ Jul 23, 2023
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=== 2024 ===
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|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1767763283270935027
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=Ya know, I disagree with @elonmusk here because I don’t know how he got to such a strong conclusion. I wish he would say more. Seems unwarranted.
But @martinmbauer is clearly also not right here either! Examples:
1915: Einstein’s first explicit equation for [[General Relativity]] was mathematically wrong; it set a divergence free 2-tensor equal to a non-divergence free 2-tensor.  But it wasn’t fundamentally wrong. It needed a small fix reversing the trace component.
In the 1920s E. Schrödinger’s theory  didn’t agree with experiment. Why? Because the spin wasn’t properly incorporated. It wasn’t fundamentally wrong, and was patched. Same theory.
In 1928, P. Dirac’s [[Quantum Field Theory]] gave nonsense answers? Why? A small goof conflating bare and dressed masses. Harder to fix…but in no way a fundamental error. The theory of Quantum Electrodynamics or QED still stands.
Etc. Etc.
Not a big deal…but this point is just so wrong as to be unsalvageable. Very curious error to make.
Martin (with whom I usually deeply disagree) is normally pretty great. But sometimes I think pretending that all outsiders talking about the current physics disaster are cranks, causes insiders to say very simplistic unnuanced and wrong things. This feels like that. And I’m not even a physicist.
It’s like the insiders don’t realize that the outsiders have any validity. All outsiders don’t immediately become cranks by virtue of disagreeing at a profound level with the abjectly failing communities from which they came.
[Note: this is *NOT* a gotcha. I fully expect Martin to realize the error and just admit it. No big deal. We all say incautious things. And this is just obviously wrong. Not an indictment.]
|timestamp=4:03 AM ¡ Mar 13, 2024
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|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1778141545260331295
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=In the passing of Peter Higgs, we lost one of our last living connections to the Lagrangian of the Standard Model.
Peter Higgs was involved with both lines 3 & 4 of this “Recipe for the Universe.”
The level of the Higgs field φ becomes the as-if mass for the matter ψ in the mysterious ψy ψ φ term on line 3. This goes under the name “Yukawa coupling” if you wish to look it up.
How do you get that level (“vacuum expectation value” or VEV) to generate a positive mass m and not to be φ =0? That’s the job of the V(φ) term on line 4 which goes under the name “Mexican Hat potential” to induce “spontaneous symmetry breaking” for those googling.
Lastly, once you give life to this field φ which bears Higgs’ name, you have to animate it so that its excitations know how to move as waves. This is the job of the <nowiki>| D φ | ²</nowiki> “Kinetic Term” at the beginning of line 4. You can Google “Klein-Gordon Lagrangian” here.
I have recently heard commentators like  @michiokaku and @seanmcarroll opine that our Standard Model is “Ugly as Sin” or “It looks ugly. It’s both ugly and beautiful…It’s ungainly.” respectively.
I think that such physicists are *quite* wrong in that, but that is not the point here as I can guess how they see this. And in large measure they aren’t talking about lines 1 and 2 as “ugly”, which pretty much everyone agrees are beautiful as they come directly from Dirac, Maxwell and Einstein, and are present in the original [[Quantum Field Theory|Relativistic Quantum Field Theory (RQFT)]] called Quantum Electro-dynamics (or QED).
So to simplify matters, lines 1 and 2 are sort of canonically beautiful and appear so to essentially everyone. Lines 3 and 4 governing the Higgs field (with their expansion to 3 forces across 3 generations of matter) are what divide us. The only thing that forces them on us is the weak force and it’s bizarre decision to act only on “Left handed matter and right handed anti-matter.”
And so the legacy of Peter Higgs is tied up in the sui generis nature of the weak nuclear force and what makes the Standard Model “new” beyond QED.
I’m sad that I never met the man. But I believe what comes next is not [[String Theory]], but instead a recognition that the last two lines of this Lagrangian point the way to seeing the [[Standard Model]] as the classic “Elegant Swan” confused by many for an “Ugly Duckling” due to the misappraisal of its Higgs sector as if it were just an ad hoc mass mechanism. RIP.
|quote=
{{Tweet
|image=Fermilab-profile-sZ1TMaxM.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/Fermilab/status/1777786518393835759
|name=Fermilab
|usernameurl=https://x.com/Fermilab
|username=Fermilab
|content=Peter Higgs, after whom the Higgs boson was named, has left a remarkable impact on particle physics. The field changed forever on July 4, 2012 when the Higgs boson was discovered, cementing the final piece in the Standard Model of particle physics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/science/peter-higgs-dead.html
|timestamp=7:51 PM ¡ Apr 9, 2024
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|timestamp=7:22 PM ¡ Apr 10, 2024
|media1=ERW-X-post-1778141545260331295-GK05prgaIAAe-2V.jpg
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{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1797526814039887988
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=I’m not interested in a back and forth with anyone this confused about how to introduce yourself to a fellow human being. You didn’t just insult me Alex, but everyone who found that post valuable.
Also, you just argued that some fields like [[Quantum Field Theory|quantum field theory]] are populated exclusively by idiots, as no one has ever explained it simply. And I’m not going to put up with that.
Just do what you do flexing, and let others alone. If you want to try again and be civil, lemme know. Otherwise, I’ll pass.
Thanks.
|thread=
{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1797525390942224779
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=May I make a recommendation? Look into both Crypto *and* Social media!
Those are 2 of the few places you can be a complete ass to people you don’t know &amp; still make a *fortune*.
Best to avoid homotopy theory, the marines, molecular biology &amp; music theory. It’ll be a short ride.
|timestamp=7:07 AM ¡ Jun 3, 2024
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|timestamp=7:12 AM ¡ Jun 3, 2024
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{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1836463647587201186
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=This is so funny.
1984: “[[String Theory|String theory]] *must* get *all* the resources because [[Quantum Field Theory]] *cannot* ever do what [[String Theory]] can. That’s just a cold fact.”
[40 years later….]
2024: “We aren’t a mass delusion in the form of an obviously failed scientific research project that spun out of control in full view of the world if we are equivalent to what we said would never work. That’s it! String Theory 4evah.”
This is getting ridiculous beyond the ridiculous ridiculousness of previous ridiculousnesses. After four decades of this, there just aren’t good words. I’m sorry.
|timestamp=5:53 PM ¡ Sep 18, 2024
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{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1849993149332193417
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=@edfrenkel [Cochain complex by London Tsai.] https://t.co/ukSFnkLpN5
|thread=
{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1849977335858254241
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=UC Berkeley Prof. Edward Frenkel @edfrenkel is one of the world's great mathematical minds.  He has just decided to launch a video-podcast called AfterMath.
This is just beginning today and should mature and be amazing.
https://t.co/IGZPJT7ju9
|timestamp=12:52 AM ¡ Oct 26, 2024
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{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1849978643189203212
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=In my opinion, knowing Ed as I do, It certainly has the potential to change everything in the space of high level science communication around both Mathematics and Physics (Particularly Quantum Field Theory).
Within mathematics Ed is unusually approachable, with collaborative work across film, art, literature, philosophy and psychology. He and I have known each other since Harvard snatched him from the Soviet Union at its bitter end to come to our math department. Years later we reconnected and started going on various adventures in the US and abroad. I believe I even had a breakthrough in my own work when we even spent an entire surreal week completely covered in alkaline dust arguing about cinema and particle theory in a tiny two man tent, with most details mercifully lost to history, vodka and the Burning Man playa.
In any event, it is very uncommon for research mathematicians to use words like 'Genius', but that is probably how Ed struck us American graduate students in the department at the time; an always smiling Russian immigrant of few English words, who seemed to understand everything across the hardest fields almost instantly.  My recollection was that it took him around one year to get a PhD. Something like that.
Ed has since matured into a fine author and public speaker with fantastic command of American English. While he is just getting started on his chanel, he already brings up a great point in his first video that I don't think I ever fully considered and just discussed with him last night: mathematics is not communicated or learned through sensory input. We can build visual models or use symbols, but the actual structures we discover are not sensory in nature. And that this leads to disorientation because in some sense they are built inside the mind without any experience of them having come in (via our senses) from the outside world.
Subscribe to @edfrenkel on @X and on his YouTube channel. This is likely to eventually wend its way up to the most beautiful but otherwise inaccessible science content that we almost never get in the public sphere, presented by a top researcher (rather than a popularizer) at the height of his powers.
|timestamp=12:57 AM ¡ Oct 26, 2024
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{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1849982838264988060
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=I want to end on a personal note despite the dangers of being 'real' on X.
When a mathematics or physics PhD leaves academic research departments behind to work on research on their own, it is very difficult to function. It is almost impossible.
For the last 10-15 years, Ed Frenkel has been like a one man research department for me to talk about [[Differential Geometry]], Representation Theory, Algebraic Topology/Homotopy Theory, Particle Theory of the [[Standard Model]], [[General Relativity]], Geometric and [[Quantum Field Theory]], Lie Theory, Differential Topology, Elliptic Operators, Category theory, Spinorial Algebra, etc.
Whatever I have needed to discuss across a very broad range of topics, Ed has been able to meet me. I speak from experience: other than another man named David Kazhdan (a coauthor of Ed's), I have not seen this easy ability to switch contexts at a personal level. Edward is not just a remarkable mind, but an extraodinary individual, and friend at multiple different levels.
Ed: Congratulations. I couldn't be more excited for you brother. Looking forward.
|timestamp=1:14 AM ¡ Oct 26, 2024
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|timestamp=1:55 AM ¡ Oct 26, 2024
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