Back to Plato

I noticed that Lumo posted on a talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed at some group of philosophs.  A-H was talking about the need to replace space time by something - and his idea of the amplituhedron. 

So he outlined the amplituhedron program, the picture that the amplitudes have so many complicated terms because the amplitudes are really volumes of a polytope in an auxiliary space and the polytope is cut to many complicated pieces in some ad hoc ways. This program interprets a scattering process as a generalization of the process where just numerical labels scatter – and their scattering means a permutation.
Polytopes cut into many complicated pieces?  Shades of Plato's Timaeus, where he constructs a cosmology of the regular polytopes he knew - the so-called Platonic solids, and their pieces, taking special note of the fact that all except the dodecahedron can be decomposed into 30-60-90 triangles.

I was going to mention this on his blog, but he has me banned.  My theory is that he's afraid some of his audience of mostly crazies might be converted.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

Uneasy Lies The Head

Book Review: Anaximander By Carlo Rovelli