“It provides a organic structurelabor, or a bookprotecting mechanism, to accumulate very big numbers of Feynman diagrams,” shelp Marcus Spradlin, a physicist at Brown University who has been picking up the novel tools of surfaceology. “There’s an exponential compactification in alertation.”
Unenjoy the amplituhedron, which needd exotic particles to provide a stability comprehendn as supersymmetry, surfaceology applies to more down-to-earth, nonsupersymmetric particles. “It’s finishly agnostic. It couldn’t nurture less about supersymmetry,” Spradlin shelp. “For some people, me included, I slfinisherk that’s reassociate been quite a surpelevate.”
The ask now is whether this novel, more primitive geometric approach to particle physics will permit theoretical physicists to slip the restricts of space and time altogether.
“We needed to discover some magic, and maybe this is it,” shelp Jacob Bourjaily, a physicist at Pennsylvania State University. “Whether it’s going to get rid of space-time, I don’t comprehend. But it’s the first time I’ve seen a door.”
The Trouble with Feynman
Figueiredo sensed the need for some novel magic firsthand during the waning months of the pandemic. She was struggling with a task that has contestd physicists for more than 50 years: foreseeing what will happen when quantum particles collide. In the postponeed 1940s, it took a yearintimacytfinished effort by three of the radiantest minds of the postwar era—Julian Schtriumphger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, and Ricchallenging Feynman—to mend the problem for electricassociate indictd particles. Their eventual success would triumph them a Nobel Prize. Feynman’s scheme was the most visual, so it came to regulate the way physicists slfinisherk about the quantum world.
When two quantum particles come together, anyslfinisherg can happen. They might combine into one, split into many, disecombine, or any sequence of the above. And what will actuassociate happen is, in some sense, a combination of all these and many other possibilities. Feynman diagrams protect track of what might happen by stringing together lines reconshort-terming particles’ trajectories thcimpolite space-time. Each diagram seizes one possible sequence of subatomic events and gives an equation for a number, called an “amplitude,” that reconshort-terms the odds of that sequence taking place. Add up enough amplitudes, physicists suppose, and you get stones, createings, trees, and people. “Almost everyslfinisherg in the world is a concatenation of that stuff happening over and over aget,” Arkani-Hamed shelp. “Just excellent ancigo in-createed slfinishergs bouncing off each other.”
There’s a puzzling tension inherent in these amplitudes—one that has vexed generations of quantum physicists going back to Feynman and Schtriumphger themselves. One might spfinish hours at a chalkboard sketching byzantine particle trajectories and evaluating troublesome createulas only to discover that terms abort out and complicated conveyions melt away to exit behind inanxiously basic answers—in a classic example, literassociate the number 1.
“The degree of effort needd is tremfinishous,” Bourjaily shelp. “And every individual time, the foreseeion you create mocks you with its srecommendedy.”
