Friday, September 20, 2013

Shtetl-Optimized Smack Down of the Pop Sci Write Ups of the

At first glance, the amplituhedron appears to be a way to calculate scattering amplitudes, in the planar limit of a certain mathematically-interesting (but, so far, physically-unrealistic) supersymmetric quantum field theory, more efficiently than by summing thousands of Feynman diagrams. In which case, you might say: “wow, this sounds like a genuinely-important advance for certain parts of mathematical physics! I’d love to understand it better. But, given the restricted class of theories it currently applies to, it does seem a bit premature to declare this a ‘jewel’ that unlocks all of physics, or a death-knell for spacetime, locality, and unitarity, etc. etc.”

Yet you’d be wrong: it isn’t premature at all. If anything, the popular articles have understated the revolutionary importance of the amplituhedron. And the reason I can tell you that with such certainty is that, for several years, my colleagues and I have been investigating a mathematical structure that contains the amplituhedron, yet is even richer and more remarkable. I call this structure the “unitarihedron.”

Go read.  OMG.  Go read.

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