Its hard to describe the frustration and anger I feel to see all these papers talk about “tensor networks” and geometry as if they are discovering something new which wasn’t already discovered 31 years ago under the framework known as Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG). Take this recent paper for example: http://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05910 “First, how might we… Continue reading The “Rediscovery” of Spin Networks and Loop Quantum Gravity
Prologue Depression is a terrible disease. What amplifies its debilitating effect is its invisibility. There are no physical symptoms apparent to the external observer. In the absence of any concrete diagnostic criteria via either brain imaging or biochemical analysis, its presence must be inferred only indirectly and based primarily upon the testimony of the afflicted… Continue reading Battling Depression: A Personal Account (Part 1)
In an upcoming blog post I will outline a proposal theory of quantum gravity based upon the positive Grassmannian based upon my work with my student Devadarshini Suresh. It is always wise to be skeptical whenever anybody claims to have “a theory of quantum gravity” and I certainly do not want anybody to accept the… Continue reading Criteria for a Theory of Quantum Gravity
Earlier this summer I had the good fortune to be able to attend an (online) workshop on information and complexity. One of the most fascinating talks was by Scott Aaronson on the question of the emergence of the classical world from an underlying quantum substrate and the relation to complexity and computation. Background This –… Continue reading Complexity and Classicality
… is a phrase that many high energy theorists, especially those of the stringy persuasion, long to hear. Fortunately, to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, reports of the death of loop quantum gravity (LQG) are greatly exaggerated. Premature declarations of the imminent demise of LQG have a long history. The most recent one comes… Continue reading “Loop Quantum Gravity is Dead … ”
The previous episode of “this week-ish” was posted on June 5. Its been six months since then. I guess its time to post another volume but to be fair the title of this post has been changed to reflect the longer time span its contents refer to. Gravity as Quantum Computation (contd from Vol. 1)… Continue reading This Year-ish in Theoretical Physics
Schottky Peaks and AdS Black Holes In [1], Clifford Johnson makes yet another contribution to the study of black holes in anti-deSitter spacetimes or AdS black holes, for short. In this work he studies those black holes for which the specific heat at constant volume $ C_V $ (with “volume” here referring to the volume… Continue reading Specific Heats of AdS Black Holes and Quantum Geometry
Surely it is hubris on my part to presume to co-opt the title of the venerable online column “This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics” written for nearly seventeen years by the great doyen of mathematical communication – John Baez. However, not finding any other takers for this task I figured … why not? So here… Continue reading This Week-ish in Theoretical Physics
Julia is making waves in the scientific programming community as the language to learn if you truly want to be a computational code ninja. I won’t list out all the features which make Julia such an incredilicious language to learn. You can’t go clicks on the internet without stumbling into a paean to Julia, so… Continue reading Implementing Quaternions in Julia
In my last post, on the IAGRG30 Conference held at BITS Hyderabad, I had mentioned how during my talk I was corrected by Amitabh Virmani on a seemingly technical point. My talk was on connecting String Theory with Loop Quantum Gravity and as is inevitable in any such talk I opened with a brief description… Continue reading On the Compactness of Anti-deSitter Space