If someone wants a completely different reason to help tide me over, I can tell them all about a newly discovered relationship in particle physics which is just waiting for someone to embed it in a model. Every day I check the arxiv and expect to see that someone has done it, but not yet. It’s an amazing generalization of another relationship which has been known for 30 years but which has been neglected (not completely), because it runs against a bit of particle-physics “common sense”.
There are a fair number of math and physics people here on LW. Simply describing such an idea to some of them either via email or through another post would be doable. And this isn’t the only place where there are physicists. I know professional physicists who might be willing to look at that sort of thing if I told them in advance that the person in question seemed to have an idea that wasn’t obviously wrong and that the person knows far more physics than almost any crank. This sort of thing if it actually works would by itself be far more interesting to many here than anything related to qualia. The attitude would probably be something like pleasant surprise if it helps in that regard in some way.
It’s discussed in this thread. The Koide formula is the prototype; Alejandro Rivero, who opened the thread, found its generalization. The barrier to the original formula’s credibility, as explained in the Wikipedia article (I added this section just yesterday), and also in Motl’s post, is that that sort of relation “shouldn’t” hold for that sort of quantity. The physicist Yukinari Sumino devised a mechanism to protect the original Koide relation from quantum corrections, but his paper has received very little attention, even from the people who work on generalizing the Koide relation. We don’t know that the Sumino mechanism is the only way to protect a Koide relation, but it’s natural to think about extending it to Rivero’s new relations. That’s actually a highly conservative response; one of the peculiarities of these formulas is the appearance of mass scales also found in QCD, which is suggestive of something really deep going on, like a supersymmetric QCD dual to the whole standard model. As far as Sumino’s paper goes, later in the thread “fzero”, who is evidently a working particle physicist, gives it some critical scrutiny, but we didn’t yet come to any conclusions.
So other people are paying serious attention to this already? Have you considered seeing if Rivero considers your ideas strong enough to help you put a paper on the arxiv?
So other people are paying serious attention to this already?
To explain the situation I have to describe the sociology of theoretical attention to Koide’s relation. Koide first discovered it in a model 30 years ago. Dozens of people have written papers about it. But as Lubos mentioned, the relation “shouldn’t” be as accurate as it is, because of RG flow (which is why Lubos dismisses it as a coincidence). A much smaller number of papers have been written about the behavior of Koide relations under RG flow. Sumino’s papers are the only ones describing a mechanism capable of making the Koide relation exact, and they haven’t received much attention.
Alejandro’s generalization of the Koide relation was found in a theoretical milieu where the RG issue hasn’t been discussed very much. The bare facts are a set of numbers, the fermion masses. The people looking for Koide-type relations have included mainstream physicists, “alternative” physicists, and ex-physicists. (Alejandro is in the last category; he has a physics PhD, but works in IT now, but participates vigorously in these online discussions.) The mainstream theorists who have in recent years proposed extended Koide relations do sometimes consider how they would be affected by RG flow, but it’s a rather peremptory discussion, and you don’t even get that much from the others.
So I’m the only one publicly talking about “Rivero + Sumino”, but who knows what’s going on in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. There are a few things which might inhibit consideration of Alejandro’s paper: it involves an unfamiliar parametrization of the Koide relation, and it may sound odd to have quarks from different weak doublets in such a relationship. However, the paper actually describes a chain of Koide relations encompassing all the quark masses… Anyway, without going into the details, the relationships he found are a little peculiar from the vantage of theoretical expectations, which is an extra issue on top of the RG issue for physicists not already involved in these investigations; but in my opinion these peculiarities are actually mighty clues to the cause of the relationship.
If I ever do manage to make a Rivero-Sumino model, getting on the arxiv won’t be a problem. The challenge is just to make the model.
There are a fair number of math and physics people here on LW. Simply describing such an idea to some of them either via email or through another post would be doable. And this isn’t the only place where there are physicists. I know professional physicists who might be willing to look at that sort of thing if I told them in advance that the person in question seemed to have an idea that wasn’t obviously wrong and that the person knows far more physics than almost any crank. This sort of thing if it actually works would by itself be far more interesting to many here than anything related to qualia. The attitude would probably be something like pleasant surprise if it helps in that regard in some way.
It’s discussed in this thread. The Koide formula is the prototype; Alejandro Rivero, who opened the thread, found its generalization. The barrier to the original formula’s credibility, as explained in the Wikipedia article (I added this section just yesterday), and also in Motl’s post, is that that sort of relation “shouldn’t” hold for that sort of quantity. The physicist Yukinari Sumino devised a mechanism to protect the original Koide relation from quantum corrections, but his paper has received very little attention, even from the people who work on generalizing the Koide relation. We don’t know that the Sumino mechanism is the only way to protect a Koide relation, but it’s natural to think about extending it to Rivero’s new relations. That’s actually a highly conservative response; one of the peculiarities of these formulas is the appearance of mass scales also found in QCD, which is suggestive of something really deep going on, like a supersymmetric QCD dual to the whole standard model. As far as Sumino’s paper goes, later in the thread “fzero”, who is evidently a working particle physicist, gives it some critical scrutiny, but we didn’t yet come to any conclusions.
So other people are paying serious attention to this already? Have you considered seeing if Rivero considers your ideas strong enough to help you put a paper on the arxiv?
To explain the situation I have to describe the sociology of theoretical attention to Koide’s relation. Koide first discovered it in a model 30 years ago. Dozens of people have written papers about it. But as Lubos mentioned, the relation “shouldn’t” be as accurate as it is, because of RG flow (which is why Lubos dismisses it as a coincidence). A much smaller number of papers have been written about the behavior of Koide relations under RG flow. Sumino’s papers are the only ones describing a mechanism capable of making the Koide relation exact, and they haven’t received much attention.
Alejandro’s generalization of the Koide relation was found in a theoretical milieu where the RG issue hasn’t been discussed very much. The bare facts are a set of numbers, the fermion masses. The people looking for Koide-type relations have included mainstream physicists, “alternative” physicists, and ex-physicists. (Alejandro is in the last category; he has a physics PhD, but works in IT now, but participates vigorously in these online discussions.) The mainstream theorists who have in recent years proposed extended Koide relations do sometimes consider how they would be affected by RG flow, but it’s a rather peremptory discussion, and you don’t even get that much from the others.
So I’m the only one publicly talking about “Rivero + Sumino”, but who knows what’s going on in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. There are a few things which might inhibit consideration of Alejandro’s paper: it involves an unfamiliar parametrization of the Koide relation, and it may sound odd to have quarks from different weak doublets in such a relationship. However, the paper actually describes a chain of Koide relations encompassing all the quark masses… Anyway, without going into the details, the relationships he found are a little peculiar from the vantage of theoretical expectations, which is an extra issue on top of the RG issue for physicists not already involved in these investigations; but in my opinion these peculiarities are actually mighty clues to the cause of the relationship.
If I ever do manage to make a Rivero-Sumino model, getting on the arxiv won’t be a problem. The challenge is just to make the model.