For a third slogan I’ve chosen:<\/p>\n
Nature is fundamentally conformally invariant.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Note the weasel-word “fundamentally”. We know that nature is not conformally invariant, but the kind of thing I have in mind is pure QCD, where the underlying classical theory is conformally invariant, with quantization dynamically breaking conformal invariance in a specific way.<\/p>\n
The group of conformal symmetries, its representations, and what this has to do with physics are topics I haven’t written about in the notes I’ve been working on. This is because I suspect we still haven’t gotten to the bottom of these topics, and properly dealing with what is known would require a separate volume. Part of the story is the twistor geometry of four dimensions, which Roger Penrose pioneered the study of, and which recently has found important applications in the calculation of scattering amplitudes.<\/p>\n
As a more advanced topic, this slogan would normally have been put off until later, but I wanted to point to a new article by Natalie Wolchover in Quanta magazine<\/a> which deals with exactly this topic. It describes several different efforts by physicists to rethink the usual story about the hierarchy problem, taking a conformally invariant model as fundamental. For the latest example along these lines, see this arXiv preprint<\/a>. The whole article is well-worth reading, and it includes a quote from Michael Dine (whose work I’ve been critical of<\/a> in the past) that I found heart-warming:<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not in a position where we can afford to be particularly arrogant about our understanding of what the laws of nature must look like,\u201d said Michael Dine, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has been following the new work on scale symmetry. \u201cThings that I might have been skeptical about before, I\u2019m willing to entertain.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Perhaps particle theorists are beginning to realize that the landscape is just a dead-end, and what is needed is a re-examination of the conventional wisdom that led to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For a third slogan I’ve chosen: Nature is fundamentally conformally invariant. Note the weasel-word “fundamentally”. We know that nature is not conformally invariant, but the kind of thing I have in mind is pure QCD, where the underlying classical theory … Continue reading