The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe

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I got the book on Saturday, it should be in every physicist’s library. It reminds me of Klein’s various “Vorlesungen”– lectures, literally “readings”. One thing Peter may not have mentioned is the clever prologue, which I assume takes place in Atlantis 🙂 This book appeals on many levels, including the very “tominess” of it! Finally, there’s a remarkable chapter on supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and string theory. Penrose is very skeptical of the whole idea of introducing more that 4 space-time dimensions. One reason is that the beautiful spinor and twistor geometry that fascinates him is special to 4 dimensions. Another reason he gives is the classical instability of higher-dimensional space-times. Under a small perturbation, such space-times should collapse and form singularities. The difficulties in stabilizing extra dimensions are at the heart of the problems of string theory, with the only known way of doing it leading to the “Landscape” picture and ruining any ability to get predictions out of the theory. The following might have been missed by the readers due to it having been posted a couple of days ago, but here it is (to humble ST people) Finally, I’ll draw these threads together more tightly by citing the following paper by Dowker, Henson, and Sorkin:

The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the

I find that the book explains the geometric concepts of fibre bundles and spinors perfectly well (certainly better than I would have thought they could be explained). The Portal Book Club - We have a weekly group that meets to talk about this book. Come join us in Discord! Penrose’s comments about higher dimensional theories were made in the context of a criticism of string theory, so I don’t think it is unreasonable for me to discuss them in that context. If you have another context in which you want to discuss these issues, you’ll have to make it explicit. Note that Matti Pitkanen was in 1994 allowed to post papers on the e-print archives now known as arXiv(obviously including the paper General points of philosophy and arguments of authority are just a matter of taste. The facts are that the question of linearized stability of KK spacetime, to the extent that it is a mathematically precise question, was settled long ago by precise calcualtions. I suggest that if Penrose had something concrete to say about it, he would publish a paper on the subject, which would then be subjected to the usual scrutiny. In the absence of that there is really nothing to agree or disagree with. Just relying on his authority is unfair to many talented and devoted people who actually worked on the subject. Similar words can be said about Hawking and the fiasco of the information paradox resolution.One weird thing is that he *completely* skips over basic calculus – I guess that’s ok though – it leaves more time for fun stuff. I was just reporting what Penrose says, and I’m not interested enough in this issue to spend my time on the details of this. In any case I don’t think Penrose has an air-tight argument against extra dimensions, because you can always claim that quantization solves the problem. Pitkanen, M. (1994). p-Adic description of Higgs mechanism I: p-Adic square root and p-adic light cone. [hep-th/9410058] …”.

The Road to Reality Study Notes - The Portal Wiki The Road to Reality Study Notes - The Portal Wiki

I’m not convinced that his exposition of fourier analysis would be easily graspible for the beginner, but I sure as hell enjoyed it! Why not entertain a similar possibility for the issues about the “observed” gauge groups, etc.? Do you really think such a point of view would render a theory based on the latter totally unpredictive? Many of us have been fascinated with the complex numbers. But is this really a state-of-the-art fascination? I don’t think so. The complex numbers are very important in advanced contexts – such as SUSY. Penrose’s ideas about the relations between the interpretations of QM, quantum gravity, and collapses inside the brain would … well, let me not say anything because whatever I would say would be viewed as impolite. Penrose essentially claims that his and Hawking’s singularity theorems also apply in this higher dimensional case. If you want the details, you have to take a look at the book, although Tony Smith just posted a relevant abstract.Penrose also carefully lays out areas in which his point of view differs from the general consensus of most theoretical physicists. An example is his emphasis on the importance for cosmology of understanding why the universe had such low entropy at the Big Bang. For more about this, see a posting by Sean Carroll. The full conception of Plato's theory of forms was not limited to only mathematical notions. Mathematics was linked to the concept of Truth but Plato was also interested in the absolute idealized forms of Beauty and Good. Beauty plays an important role in many mathematical discoveries and is often used as a guide to the truth. Questions of morality are of less relevance in this context but are critical with respect to the mental world. Moral debates are outside of the scope of this book but must be considered as science and technology progress. Penrose notes that figure 1.3 has purposely been constructed to be paradoxical in the sense that each world is entirely encompassed by the next. He writes "There may be a sense in which the three worlds are not separate at all, but merely reflect, individually, aspects of a deeper truth about the world as a whole of which we have little conception at the present time." Besides, please, have and show (!) some respect for Penrose: He did more in a lifetime than most of us combined and/or put together will ever do! Or are you telling me that if Newton were alive you’d walk all over his ass because he ‘was wrong’?!!! (Sorry, Peter, for the language; it’s just too soon in the morning to read gigantic loads of crap… add that to a bit of Napolitan blood and you have a recipe for a (flame-)war! >;-)

The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of (PDF) The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of

I dont know what Wilczek thinks or what he has said about extra dimensions. But here is something that could help round out the picture. Wilczek is evidently interested in quantum gravity and has just posted this paper with Sean RobinsonPenrose is a great and highly original guy, because of his contributions to GR, twistors, his triangle, his tiling, and so forth, but this kind of prayer is really bizarre. I have not seen the book. The literature contains several derivations of Hawking radiation, each with strengths and weaknesses. …