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duality between large and small
Jul. 2nd, 2005 05:59 pmI have to say, that after viewing this Zoom Quilt for a while (click on "Flash"), T-duality seems a lot less strange to me.
In string theories, there is a duality between large and small distances (T duality)... if you interchange them then you haven't really changed anything physical, but the interpretation of various quantities changes. So if you were to zoom in far enough, just before you got near the Planck scale, you would end up inadvertently zooming out. And you could just as easily see the zooming in as zooming out if you change your interpretation of what's going on. Whenever you're zooming in in one universe, you're zooming out in a dual universe where "drink me" means "eat me" (to put it in Alice in Wonderland terms) and there's no real difference other than the switched meanings. This is a much weirder picture than what's provided by the loop quantum gravity folks who just take the "naive" approach that the Planck length is a discrete unit for space. I still don't really understand it, but the zoomquilt helps me at least feel like it could be consistant.
The zoomquilt is similar in that if you zoom in far enough you end up back where you started... but it's different from string theory in that you're always cyclicly zooming in rather than getting turned around so that you find yourself zooming back out.
I've been itching to make a post about what I'm working on this summer (Matrix Theory), but I feel like I should wait until I get a bit further to try to explain it. I'm just getting to the point where I understand it well enough to write some stuff down. But I'm not ready yet to start doing the main part of it, just some "warm up" calculations to get more comfy.
In string theories, there is a duality between large and small distances (T duality)... if you interchange them then you haven't really changed anything physical, but the interpretation of various quantities changes. So if you were to zoom in far enough, just before you got near the Planck scale, you would end up inadvertently zooming out. And you could just as easily see the zooming in as zooming out if you change your interpretation of what's going on. Whenever you're zooming in in one universe, you're zooming out in a dual universe where "drink me" means "eat me" (to put it in Alice in Wonderland terms) and there's no real difference other than the switched meanings. This is a much weirder picture than what's provided by the loop quantum gravity folks who just take the "naive" approach that the Planck length is a discrete unit for space. I still don't really understand it, but the zoomquilt helps me at least feel like it could be consistant.
The zoomquilt is similar in that if you zoom in far enough you end up back where you started... but it's different from string theory in that you're always cyclicly zooming in rather than getting turned around so that you find yourself zooming back out.
I've been itching to make a post about what I'm working on this summer (Matrix Theory), but I feel like I should wait until I get a bit further to try to explain it. I'm just getting to the point where I understand it well enough to write some stuff down. But I'm not ready yet to start doing the main part of it, just some "warm up" calculations to get more comfy.
