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.


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