LHC and fictions

[Ignacio Añón]

Vaughan Pratt <pratt at cs.stanford.edu>:

While I'm sympathetic to the point of view of mathematical fictionalism,
I'd be interested in hearing from any FOM participants about physics
fictionalism.

Whereas Bohmian mechanics maintains that particles such as electrons move
continuously, the Copenhagen Interpretation maintains that electrons in
orbitals only exist as distributions and not as actual continuously moving
particles.

These being contradictory points of view, must we infer that at least one
of them is fictional?

Vaughan Pratt


If the LHC(large hadron collider) ends up confirming that the Higgs boson,
has such a low mass, because some aspect of the field structure surrounding
it, can be described by a lagrangian, this might give us some sense about
how "fictional", certain formulations are in quantum field theory.

We already know, that either Quantum chromodynamics(QCD), as formulated in
the Bardeem style interpretation("technicolor"), or M-theory, will be shown
to be correct. This will give us some way of grasping how "fictional",
certain ideas are in physics...

It looks like the invariant topology engulfing the elements of QCD, will be
shown to be less fictional than M-theory, and include within their
invariant spaces, certain string membranes, whose subtle logic is governed
by the asymptotically free and complex, lagrangian dynamics of the QCD,
generated, as a puppet by a puppetier, by an invariant topological
structure, within which QCD and M-theory are just layers.

Forming the topology, locking the invariant subtleties of its structure,
precision electroweak measurments have shown an asymptotically free logic,
which is enriching the invariance of the topology: almost nothing is
understood today of it, and the formalism to tackle it, is not yet there,
although the physical ideas are all in the air.

The fascinating thing, is that this asymptotically free logic, seems to be
less fictional, than any topological, geometric, Langlands style theory:
this will revolutionize math and FOM, since they will be shown to be a tiny
fraction of a larger field, fusing our notion of number, space, and
physics, into a subtler, non-asymptotic, logic...
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: </pipermail/fom/attachments/20210329/9ff29506/attachment-0001.html>