Nima Arkani-Hamed says, “Spacetime is doomed.”

From an October 2017 homepage:

Nima Arkani-Hamed1 of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, with a sweeping naturalness, proclaims “Spacetime is doomed2 (go to 5:45 minutes of 1.22.44). His really-real reality is within his ever-so-illusive amplituhedron3 with a string to a planar N.4 He declares that it’s equal to the perturbative topological B-model string theory in twistor space5 (an ever-so-positive Grassmannian6) (related ArXiv article).

To which I reply, “Yes, of course. We knew that.”


1 The first link goes to our correspondence (mostly emails) to Nima Arkani-Hamed. He has also received a few tweets as well.

2 Spacetime is doomed is a YouTube video. If you go to 5:45 minutes of his 1 hour 22 minute lecture, you will hear that indeed, spacetime is doomed. The entire lecture is his focus on this concept.

3 The amplituhedron has a special place within our work. It was one of many basic structures and by no means is the most basic. The transformations between circles and spheres to lines and tetrahedra and then octahedra are.

We knew that:

4 The N=4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory within Wikipedia is entirely readable, but not easily understood.

5 Twistor space for perturbative topological B-model string theory

6 Grassmannian the set of -dimensional subspaces in an -dimensional vector space.

 

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.