“It provides a natural structure, or accounting mechanism, for creating a very large number of Feynman diagrams,” he said Marcus Spradlina physicist from Brown University who studies recent tools in surface science. “There is an exponential density of information.”
Unlike amplituhedron, which required exotic particles to provide an equilibrium called supersymmetry, surface science refers to more realistic, non-supersymmetric particles. “It’s completely agnostic. He couldn’t care less about supersymmetry,” Spradlin said. “I think it was a really big surprise for some people, including me.”
The question now is whether this new, more primitive, geometric approach to particle physics will enable theoretical physicists to completely transcend the boundaries of space and time.
“We had to find some magic and maybe this is it,” he said Jacob Bourjailyphysicist from Pennsylvania State University. “I don’t know if it will get rid of space-time. But for the first time I see a door.
Trouble with Feynman
Figueiredo sensed the need to apply some new magic in the final months of the pandemic. She was grappling with a task that had challenged physicists for more than 50 years: predicting what would happen when quantum particles collided. In the late 1940s, it took three of the greatest minds of the post-war era – Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, and Richard Feynman – many years to solve the problem of electrically charged particles. Their ultimate success would win them the Nobel Prize. Feynman’s diagram was the most visual, which is why it dominates the way physicists think about the quantum world.
When two quantum particles come together, anything can happen. They can merge into one, split into many, disappear, or any sequence of the above. And what will actually happen will be, in some sense, a combination of all these possibilities and many more. Feynman diagrams trace what can happen by connecting lines that represent the trajectories of particles through space-time. Each diagram shows one possible sequence of subatomic events and gives an equation for a number called “amplitude” that represents the probability of that sequence occurring. Physicists believe that if we add enough amplitudes, we get stones, buildings, trees and people. “Almost everything in the world is a combination of these things happening over and over again,” Arkani-Hamed said. “Just good old-fashioned stuff bouncing off each other.”
These amplitudes conceal a puzzling tension that has vexed generations of quantum physicists, beginning with Feynman and Schwinger themselves. You can spend hours at the blackboard sketching Byzantine particle trajectories and evaluating terrifying formulas, only to find that the terms cancel out and complex expressions dissolve, leaving behind incredibly simple answers – in the classic example, literally the number 1.
“The degree of effort required is enormous,” Bourjaily said. “And every time the predictions you make mock you with their simplicity.”