Civil War in Stanford's Physics Department?

I stand in the cross fire between Susskind and Laughlin. Do they have adjoining offices like Gell-Mann and Feynman? :-)

Laughlin hauls out his heavy artillery against Susskind in his final chapter

"Exploding things, such as dynamite or the big bang are unstable. Theories of explosions, including the first picoseconds of the big bang ... are inherently unfalsifiable, notwithstanding widely cited supportive 'evidence' such as ... the cosmic microwave anisotropy ... Beyond the big bang we have really unfalsifiable concepts of budding little baby universes with different properties that must have been created before the inflationary epoch, but which are now fundamentally undetectable due to being beyond the light horizon."

Not so fast Professor Laughlin. Antony Valentini has shown how quantum theory may be slightly extended so as to permit "signal nonlocality" violating the "no cloning theorem." Indeed your very idea of emergence will force signal nonlocality in open non-equilibrium living matter I suspect. If so, then the pocket universes of eternal inflation beyond the Hubble horizon may not be fundamentally unobservable at all. This would mean that entanglement could be used as a stand alone C^3 channel. There is no reason to require macro-quantum ground states to be linear and unitary subject to the Born probability interpretation simply because their elementary excitations are. Contrary to popular opinion Steven Weinberg did not hammer the last nail into the coffin of signal nonlocality. He only chose experiments in which one would not expect signal nonlocality in the first place.

So that is my first shot across Laughlin's bow, although I do agree with a lot of his ideas about emergence.


On Jan 28, 2006, at 12:40 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

I am significantly revising my book Super Cosmos in a 2nd revised edition to include the creative tension between Robert Laughlin and Lenny Susskind, both physics professors at Stanford, seen at the endings of their respective books "A Different Universe" and "Cosmic Landscape". I will also include Richard Gott's book "Time Travel" on the self-creating megaverse of pocket universes.

I also will be improving the accuracy of the current edition regarding the nature of the zero point energy cores of the charge clusters of Ken Shoulders and the microgeon hidden variable model of the spatially extended J.P. Vigier electron/quark that shrinks to a point from space-warping when hit hard. I will clean up the Cartan form equations for emergent tetrad gravity using two Goldstone phases for the vacuum coherent manifold instead of one. This seems to fit the facts in a much more natural way. The cosmological constant "Mother of all physics problems" is solved by realizing that it is the emergent coherent non-random Higgs vacuum fields Goldstone phase variations that provide the "marble" of Einstein's smooth c-number geometrodynamics Guv, with only a little bit of locally random, but nonlocally EPR correlated, zero point vacuum fluctuation in the "wood" source /\guv.

Lambda = (Quantum of Area Flux Density)^-1(1 - |Higgs Field|^2)

The curved locally invariant gravity tetrad field is the intrinsic Cartan 1-form

B ~ (dtheta)(phi) - (theta)(dphi)

dB ~ 2(dtheta)/\(dphi)

/\ = antisymmetric Cartan exterior multiplication

Einstein's Curved Spacetime local invariant is by the Equivalence Principle

ds^2 = (1 + B)(Flat Spacetime)(1 + B)

No /\ there of course. The metric field is a "bosonic" tetrad pair, the "tetrad" field is a "fermion".

The renormalizable Higgs ODLRO field potential is

V(Higgs) = a|Psi|^2 + b|Psi|^4

Spontaneous symmetry breakdown of the false vacuum to a local minimum in the landscape means

a < 0, b > 0

In my new model

|Psi|^2 = |Psi1|^2 + |Psi2|^2 + |Psi3|^2

The degenerate vacuum manifold is

G/H = S2

i.e.

1 = (|Psi1|^2 + |Psi2|^2 + |Psi3|^2)/|Psi|^2

= cos^2(Theta) + cos^2(Phi) + cos^2(Chi)

Theta & Phi are the two independent Goldstone phases of the Vacuum Manifold.

Note that this is like a simple spherical Fermi surface. The Calabi-Yau parameters would be additional structure on the Vacuum Manifold "surface" - things like wormhole handles et-al to get the 10^500 worlds in the FRW de Sitter limit where Lambda is constant.