I recently did another podcast with Curt Jaimungal, on the topic of unification, which is now available here. As part of this I prepared some slides, which are available here.
The main goal of the slides is to explain the failure of the general paradigm of unification that we have now lived with for 50 years, which involves adding a large number of extra degrees of freedom to the Standard Model. All examples of this paradigm fail due to two factors:
- The lack of any experimental evidence for these new degrees of freedom.
- Whatever you get from new symmetries carried by the extra degrees of freedom is lost by the fact that you have to introduce new ad hoc structure to explain why you don’t see them.
There’s also a bit about the new ideas I’ve been working on, but that’s a separate topic. Over the summer I’ve been making some progress on this, still in the middle of trying to understand exactly what is going on and write it up in a readable way. I’ll try and write one or more blog entries giving some more details of this in the near future.
I just watched the interview, and from my layman pov I thought it was great. Definitely the clearest explanation I’ve seen of your new ideas! My question is: in the presentation you talk about some of the questions unified theories have tried and failed to answer, so how does this approach of explaining wick rotation with imaginary time in Euclidean geometry help to answer these outstanding questions? Is it mainly about the ability to do certain lattice calculations that you alluded to? Or is it that formalizing the wick rotation like this might lead to other unknown future insights and predictions?
Bryan,
I’m afraid I didn’t really explain this here, to explain the ideas carefully is another whole talk. Working out details still in progress, but the basic claim is that when you Wick rotate spinors from Euclidean spacetime to Minkowski, one of the two SU(2)s that makes up rotations in 4d Euclidean space-time becomes the internal SU(2) symmetry of the standard model (NOT the usually expected Minkowski space-time transformations). This gives an explanation of the SU(2) in the SM, and a new avenue for unifying things.