“It provides a natural framework, or accounting mechanism, for assembling large numbers of Feynman diagrams,” he said. Marcos Spradlinphysicist at Brown University who has been learning the new tools of surfacelogy. “There is an exponential compaction of information.”
Unlike amplituhedron, which required exotic particles to provide an equilibrium known as supersymmetry, superficialology applies to more realistic, non-supersymmetric particles. “He is completely agnostic. “You couldn’t care less about supersymmetry,” Spradlin said. “For some people, including me, I think this has been a really big surprise.”
The question now is whether this new, more primitive geometric approach to particle physics will allow theoretical physicists to completely escape the confines of space and time.
“We needed to find some magic, and maybe this is it,” he said Jacob Bourjailyphysicist from Pennsylvania State University. “I don’t know if space-time will be eliminated. But it’s the first time I’ve seen a door.”
The problem with Feynman
Figueiredo felt firsthand the need for some new magic during the final months of the pandemic. He was wrestling with a task that has challenged physicists for more than 50 years: predicting what will happen when quantum particles collide. In the late 1940s, it took three of the greatest postwar minds (Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, and Richard Feynman) a years-long effort to solve the problem of electrically charged particles. Their eventual success would earn them the Nobel Prize. Feynman’s scheme was the most visual, so it came to dominate the way physicists think about the quantum world.
When two quantum particles come together, anything can happen. They could merge into one, split into many, disappear, or any sequence of the above. And what will actually happen is, in a sense, a combination of all of these and many other possibilities. Feynman diagrams keep track of what could happen by joining lines that represent the trajectories of particles through spacetime. Each diagram captures a possible sequence of subatomic events and provides an equation for a number, called “amplitude,” that represents the probabilities of that sequence taking place. Add enough amplitudes, physicists believe, and you get stones, buildings, trees and people. “Almost everything in the world is a concatenation of things that happen over and over again,” Arkani-Hamed said. “Just good old-fashioned things bouncing off each other.”
There is a disconcerting tension inherent in these amplitudes, a tension that has bothered generations of quantum physicists dating back to Feynman and Schwinger themselves. One could spend hours in front of a blackboard drawing Byzantine particle trajectories and evaluating scary formulas only to discover that terms cancel out and complicated expressions fade away to leave extremely simple answers (in a classic example, literally the number 1).
“The degree of effort required is tremendous,” Bourjaily said. “And every time, the prediction you make mocks you for its simplicity.”
