13 February 2011

Arkani-Hamed prefers spaghetti to supersymmetry

I am kidding - but only a bit. In his suit-wearing talk in Princeton of which I have written before, there is one moment where Arkani-Hamed seems to hesitate. He says that fundamental physicists need to throw space-time out of the window. Then he adds that usually, before doing that, they introduce many complications into space-time, such as higher dimensions and fermionic coordinates. But if you watch that moment again, you get the impression that he is hesitating.


Schiller's spaghetti model realizes what Arkani-Hamed was hesitating about in his talk: it changes directly from a situation with space-time to a situation without. If I understand it well, the spaghetti model describes continuity as thermal average, and this average is not possible at high energy. So space-time is thrown out of the window directly, without making it complicated beforehand.

In conclusion, Arkani-Hamed should prefer the spaghetti model to supersymmetry.

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