Physicists Uncover Strange Numbers in Particle Collisions

a reply to: Tranceopticalinclined

just a little bummed the single number wasn't " 42

No, but close. Apparently, according to other members here, it was actually 420

a reply to: Riffrafter

Interesting.

I have a question though: why is particular physics seen as "the most important science"? A more accurate philosophical take would be systems theory - as many properties, such as consciousness, are thoroughly relational - ecological - and cannot be reduced to anything like a 'god particle', although we might find interesting relations between such fundamental particles and larger macroscopic processes.

For example, the Human being requires:

an existing biodynamical platform. This platform is emergent, with quantum events 'stabilizing' as atomic events which stabilize as molecular events, which stabilizes as cellular events, which stabilize as one larger macroscopic organism

All these processes are directed towards survival of the macroscopic structure in terms of the macroscopic realities of the external world. Thus, the structure of the organism cannot be abstracted from the external events which impinge on its structure. An organism, in fact, is a puzzle-piece that fits with other processes.

The Hominid brain "entrains" to the positive affectivity of other Hominid brains. Creatures with large brains are in effect, "relational structures". This means that the Human brain is not sufficient on its own, but requires another human face to observe and experience, a voice to hear, so that feelings can be communicated, and so energetically (metabolically) enliven the structure of the brain-mind.

Great post!

You have no idea how close to home this hits for me.

I have undergrad degrees in Comp Sci (BS) and Philosophy (BA) - so I was strangely "divergent" even then.

Additionally, I have a grad degree in QT, hence my intense interest in this article. So that's my long way of saying that the relationships you're talking about are of keen interest to me. One thing I love philosophically is the further you delve into studying things at a quantum level, the faster the physics crashes headlong into metaphysics.

And there is *no way* to escape it. So most quantum physicists have given up trying. A few are even embracing it.

There's hope for us yet.

What did you think of the pattern and underlying structure that arises from the maths that is talked about in the article?

a reply to: Riffrafter

One thing I love philosophically is the further you delve into studying things at a quantum level, the faster the physics crashes headlong into metaphysics.

It's also surreal. We (humankind) are clearly coming closer to an understanding of how we work - and yes, it goes all the way not merely into metaphysics (which is just a term for "what is real"), but can legitimately lead one to believe that mind - consciousness - can work differently if our social-context afforded a more natural expression of Human affectivity.

My theory is (influenced by the views of the biophysicist Mae Wan Ho) is that Human behavior - mind - is regulated by how the individual understands and regulates the flow of energy/information through their system. In other words - in an incoherent context - the "mechanics" of the natural external world, as well as the mechanics of the flow of our phenomenology, may present a "dualistic" reality. Entropy is great. On the other hand, seeking a more correlated awareness of external contingencies - knowing what is good for you and consciously supporting - may reduce entropy, and so, perhaps even lead to a state of zero-entropy (as Ho believed).

There's like a clockwise/counter-clockwise logic - with one direction yielding a separation of self from world, a sense of being an "individual ego" - however much of an unreal abstraction that is - and this derives from the "stress" that is acting upon the processing of information through the Human brain-mind.

Now imagine a different context - one where nurturing is primary - and what do you get? A totally different flow of phenomenology - more relaxed, less stressed, more spontaneous, simply because the organism is not being primed by past experiences to have negative expectancies towards the environment.

In my mind, there probably was a "garden of eden", and the departure from that state has everything to do with capitalism, commerce, private property, cities, etc.

People always think of this as if it weren't a phenomenon of nature. A self-organizing structure - creating cities, etc. This is pretty incredible. Yet, it can be difficult - as it has been for most anthropologists - to recognize that using-the-other to regulate your affectivity is how the brain-mind evolved. Each structure (organism) literally inter-included itself within the structure of others - which is what socializing is.

Fast-forward to around (atleast) 12,000 years ago, and you have the start of the agricultural era - something, in my mind, mistakenly considered as an incredible achievement - as opposed to a structural drift from the ecological background that supports human interinclusivity.

Is reality different when we don't experience one another as strangers? Quantum biology would suggest "yes". Thought may have more considerable powers than we currently experience - where our minds are often considered to be "virtual' and unreal relative to the physical. Even though, as we know, mind can regulate body.

a reply to: Riffrafter

It's interesting. I wonder if it's related to synthesis/thesis/antithesis.

If you want a good book on the origin and organization of life (the cell), I'd highly recommend you read Harold Morowitz and Eric Smith's book The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth.

I've extracted some important ideas from this book which I see as fundamental. The structure/pattern that you refer to seems almost to allude to this: that all things evolve and change through a "loop" that has perception at one end and action at the other end, with 'affect', or the flow of energy itself, as the synthesizing "third".

The newest idea in biology - the field likely to replace neodarwinism - is biosemiotics. And in biosemiotics, the organism may be most coherently thought of as an "energy" or "feeling" that constructs an external structure as the same time as an inside forms.

In other words, what behavioral science calls "affect", may be the phenomenological cognate of "metabolism". Metabolism is a bodily process - yet our phenomenology gives rise to feelings, which, as Antonio Damasio's work shows, is functionally tethered to the biodynamism of our bodies.

So I the organism as being constituted at all levels by a tripartite logic - Morowitz/Smith's "core metabolism"/"co-factors"/"oligomers", which corresponds quite amazingly to the higher level organismal structure of affect/action/perception.

I'm writing a book based upon this, which basically argues that life is a process inherent within matter. It does not arise everywhere, but requires a 'relaxed' - but not stagnant - environment that is able to maintain far-from equilibrium dynamics without destroying the whole structure - as would happen on Venus - or never getting started to begin with, as on mars.

That, in other words, is how amazing and remarkable life is. It is almost universal in its significance, as it requires the "exploration" of conditions that only yield fruit in certain highly specialized locales of the universe.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Great posts.

I'm going to need a little time to "metabolize" this as there is an awful lot to digest, and I want to process this carefully.

Thanks so much for sharing your views.

I'll be back with questions...probably more than a few.

Well... Particle physics to Philosophy... while there is often a relation, Id say the above chain is hugely off topic not only that but peoples 'take' on it seems to stem from not understanding what so called loop corrections are.

The real way the maths works is that every place there is a line, you have a certain mathematical representation, every vertex also, there is a set of rules and accounting as the article says that when a diagram is drawn you apply the rules, end up with a mathematical representation, and you bash the constants and numbers you know into a calculator and boom, out pops a number that represents a probability.

Now... that is what you call zero or 1st order correct. It basically says that this thing will happen x% of the time.

You do the experiment and you find the real value (or the best your stats and systematics can tell) is not quite x... it is correct to 1 or 2 decimal places only.

This is where the loop corrections come in.

The theory says that, hey when you have an electron scatter, the mediator can itself produce a closed loop during the interaction and to the outside observer, you still see the electron scatter only.

So you take that diagram (or set of diagrams) and you perform the same calculation and add it to the first set.

You now have a second order correction, which will be... slightly closer to the experiment. If you keep following this process, you will find that you get very very close in the case of a lot of observed particle physics, but it isnt perfect and it stops being useful after a certain point.


Now... as patterns and numbers goes, I can only comment that the structure of the loop corrections is methodical, and so yet there might appear to be some pattern in the mess, Iv done 1st and 2nd order corrections on paper for a electron-electron scatter... and let me tell you... its a lot of paperwork! On the underlying structure, I listened to an interview once that basically said the nature of it looks like it sort of an error correcting code. Which might sound like the whole "Holographic universe / we are in the matrix" statement but the way the theorist thought about it said that it is where the concept of super symmetry comes in. That there is a higher mass domain that links with what we see around us and is the source of this so called error correction.

It was quite interesting, not sure id 100% agree, but it was mathematically quite sound.

Still, nice article OP

a reply to: ErosA433

I was giving this some thought the other day. Then it hit me.

They are using the Riemann zeta function! Maybe the link is not all "motives" and "weights" and "periods" but may even be simpler: prime numbers. Primes are nature's building blocks as evidence in progressions like leaf distribution around the stock of a plant, sunflower seeds, etc. So if the zeta function is giving up a value and that is the resultant weight which they are immediately multiplying by two... that sounds an awful like primorial function of # = 2 x 3 x 5 x...

It is also strange to notice that Riemann Zeta (2) = Pi^2/6 and that Pi^power will be there. So even if there is no connection to primorial then Pi is still being encoded in the answer. If they want to weight their answer 2 x Pi^2/2x3 = Pi^2/3 which throws back into prime numbers being involved.

I'm just spitting chalk at this point and it may have nothing to do with it all. But what if while investigating Feynman diagrams they end up doing something like solving the Twin Prime conjecture! That would make Feynman the coolest physicist ever!

Seems I spend too much time thinking of prime numbers... thanks for letting me rant so I do not bore people at T-day festivities with odd ball notions of the nature of reality!

a reply to: Riffrafter

Thanks for expressing your appreciation

originally posted by: Astrocyte
a reply to: Riffrafter

Thanks for expressing your appreciation

I'm still thinking about it.

Damn you.

Damn you to hell....lol.

I *love* topics that make me think.

Soon....

a reply to: 3n19m470

That seems more accurate my good sir!

I say we allow them to keep on sciencing the hell outta it...

a reply to: Riffrafter

This popped up last week for Pi Day when nerds around the US celebrate date 03/14 in deference to PI = 3.1415926535...

So while trying to get students to understand quantum equations a professor went back to basics. Using a variation of Fermat (yes, that eponymous “last theory” guy) called “least principles” (it is a method used to arrive at a value by using an infinite sequence that result in a single value). They applied this well-known method to the ground state of hydrogen. The ground state has potential higher states so they started factoring them in like using Feynman diagrams. In doing, they started a infinite sequence which turned out to be the same method to arrive at a value for Pi!

Friedmann did not set out to look for pi nor for the Wallis formula. The discovery began in a quantum mechanics course taught by Carl Hagen, a professor of physics at the University of Rochester.

While the quantum calculations developed by Danish physicist Niels Bohr in the early twentieth century give accurate values for the energy states of hydrogen, Hagen wanted his students to use an alternate method—called the variational principle—to approximate the value for the ground state of the hydrogen atom.
…
They could then calculate the values for the different energy states and compare them with the values obtained by Bohr almost a century ago. This enabled them to determine how the ratio of the Bohr values to the values obtained with the “tweaked” variational principle changed as higher and higher energy levels were taken into account.

And they were surprised to see that the ratio yielded—effectively—the Wallis formula for pi.

Valuewalk.com, 3/14/17 - Formula For Pi Turns Up In Quantum Mechanics.

The sad thing is that was discovered in 2015! It is a good read nonetheless. Funny how PI popped up again. The Wallis equation is similar to the primordial function in that successive terms are multiplied together. In Wallis, it is (2J / 2J - 1) x (2J / 2J + 1).

The thing is, the denominator is nothing more that the odd numbers! At J = 1, 1 x 3; J = 2, 3 X 5, J = 3, 5 x 7 etc. After 2, all prime numbers are odd. So the multiplications are 2 x all odd numbers, which again is close to the regular primorial function of 2x3x5x7x... which loops back to Rienmann Zeta function!!

Pi Day indeed!

One of the most helpful clues for proving the Riemann hypothesis has come from function theory, which reveals that the values of the imaginary part, t, at which the function vanishes are discrete numbers. This suggests that the nontrivial zeros form a set of real and discrete numbers, which is just like the eigenvalues of another function called a differential operator, which is widely used in physics.

In the early 1900s, this similarity led some mathematicians to wonder whether there really exists a differential operator whose eigenvalues correspond exactly to the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function. Today this idea is called the Hilbert-Pólya conjecture, named after David Hilbert and George Pólya—despite the fact that neither of them published anything about it.
...

One of the interesting things about the newly discovered operator is that it has close ties with quantum physics.

In 1999, when mathematical physicists Michael Berry and Jonathan Keating were investigating the Hilbert-Pólya conjecture, they made another important conjecture. If such an operator exists, they said, then it should correspond to a theoretical quantum system with particular properties. This is now called the Berry-Keating conjecture. But no one has ever found such a system before now, and this is a second important aspect of the new work.

"We have identified a quantization condition for the Berry-Keating Hamiltonian, thus essentially verifying the validity of the Berry-Keating conjecture," Brody said.

Phys.org, April 7, 2017 - New insight into proving math's million-dollar problem: the Riemann hypothesis (Update).

First, there is a bit to follow.

Riemann hypothesis states "all non-trivial zero lie along single vertical line (½ + it)" (same source) where "i" is sqr(-1) and "t" varies the height of the non-trivial zeros. Riemann was studying something else but had the feeling this was a true statement but did not spend the time to prove it. He died without ever proving it and they name the conjecture after him. The problem has been unsolved for over a hundred years! There is a million dollar prize for anybody who can solve it. Because it involved "real numbers" (integers and imaginary) this falls under the topic of "real analysis" in math.

The Hilbert-Pólya conjecture concerns the "differential operator" just means a value will be returned when the derivative is taken. Which leads us to the Berry-Keating conjecture which states that Hilbert-polya should have a quantum state defined for it because you can take the derivative. So over in quantum physics, they have found and proven B-K conjecture! (A Hamiltonian is the set of possible outcomes when measuring the total energy of a quantum state)

Is that a trip or what?! We stand on the door step of Riemann being proven thanks to quantum physics!

The only thing is that Berry-Keating conjecture does not correspond to a physical entity. But this is still a crazy tie-in between physics and math!

Normally, physicists describe quantum systems using highly symmetric mathematical matrices whose solutions, or “eigenvalues,” correspond to the system’s energy levels. The symmetries of these matrices usually guarantee that imaginary numbers cancel out and the eigenvalues are real, so that these matrices make sense as descriptions of physical systems. But for 20 years, Bender and Brody have studied matrix descriptions of quantum systems that relax the usual symmetry requirements and respect a weaker property called parity-time (or PT) symmetry. Following a 2015 conversation with Müller, they discovered that they could write down a PT-symmetric matrix whose eigenvalues correspond to the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function. “This came as a real surprise to us,” Brody said. However, because the matrix was only PT-symmetric, instead of following the usual stricter symmetries, it isn’t guaranteed to have real eigenvalues — the property that would ensure that corresponding zeros have real parts equal to ½.

The researchers spelled out several arguments for why the eigenvalues of their matrix are probably real, and why, in that case, the Riemann hypothesis is probably correct, but they came short of proving it. “Whether it will be difficult or easy to fill in the missing steps, at this point we cannot speculate,” said Brody. “Further work is needed to get a better feeling as to the scale of difficulty involved.”

Quantamagazine.org, April 4, 2017 - Physicists Attack Math’s $1,000,000 Question.

OK. That makes more sense. The phys.org did not do a very good job of explaining what happened. Normal quantum physics uses symmetry to cancel out the sqr(-1). The physicists Bender, Brody, and Muller broke that symmetry and did a weaker version, parity-time, which allows for swapping around dimensions (elements of an equation) as long as corresponding signs are changed as well. In so doing they created a quantum state they could use to validate the Berry-Keating conjecture. They then argued that their case applies to B-K and therefore Riemann.

I think the Riemann hypothesis and that 1 million remain safe. But the fact that quantum physics ties into the Zeta function is still fascinating as all get out.

I think a lot of us here on ATS haven't much knowledge of the quantum world beyond the 1930's.
When I hear theories involving "particles" I pretty much tune out immediately.
The idea that there is some kind of particle kernel that "pops" might be an attractive theory but..

What we do know is that something happens when energy waves resonate in the quantum world where the "mass" phenomena occurs. In the 1940's they finally got around to actually converting mass to energy in large uncontrolled reactions in the desert. Some of the results from that research is still classified, and it occurs to me that an intuitive understanding of energy resonance in those tiny dimensions might not be offered to the public due to the needs of nonproliferation?

Prior to the nuclear test in the 40's there were a lot of estimates made by people that could do the math, some were wrong some were right, nobody's talking.