Love and Math

The Heart of Hidden Reality

2013 Edward Frenkel

Edward Frenkel is a 46yo Russian expatriate mathematician, currently teaching at Berkeley, working on the "Langlands Program", the unification of Number Theory, Curves over Finite Fields, and Reimann Surfaces. Wile's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is discussed as an example of the combination of the first two.

This book is a combination of autobiography and descriptions of some complex mathematical thinking - it is more about the intellectual journey from young physics enthusiast to mathematical researcher, not a lucid explanation of the math. I suppose if you read it slowly, twice, you will have a basic understanding of some extremely challenging math. I did not do the hard work, but some of you might.

I enjoyed the book. I expect many but not all mathematicians will. Some might be frustrated by not fully understanding the subject matter. Others might find the autobiographical content too personal.

My lazy tendency is to throw stuff against the wall of my brain and see what sticks - a surprising amount does, even if I don't think I understand it at the time. Enough remains to combine with ideas from other areas, or to research in depth if needed. If you are more methodical than I am, you may not like the book. It will show you the promised land in the distance, but not take you there.

===Tachyons ===

One casual remark on page 213, about low-dimensional string theories - Unfortunately, the resulting theor is plagued by some serious problems (in particular, it allows for the existence of tachyons, elementary particles moving faster than light, whose existence is prohibited by Einstein's relativity theory). This bothers me on many levels. Einstein's relativity theory may "contradict" some form of tachyons, but theories do not prohibit, any more than Newton's laws prohibit relativity. Einstein "prohibited" non-locality, but it is true of quantum phenomena. Perhaps non-causality is permitted under some extreme circumstances, too.

The typical argument against tachyons is their potential use in causality-violating signalling systems, such as the one illustrated in http://hendrix2.uoregon.edu/~imamura/FPS/images/PhysRevD.2.263.pdf. If tachyons cannot be used for practical signalling (for instance, because their typical interaction lengths are on the scale of galaxies) that means that causality violation would be practically indetectable. If tachyons had effects like slowing down photons over gigaLY distances, or gravitationally interacting, slowing down, and concentrating near galaxies, then their effects on our universe might appear to be what we label cosmological constant, or dark matter. Modern physics is full of mathematical epicycles, stuff thrown into the theories not to explain phenomena, but to make the math "beautiful". When that math suggests cosmological constants 120 orders of magnitude larger than what seems to be the case, or invents supersymmetric particles which experimental evidence seems to rule out, perhaps it is time to reform our mathematical aesthetics, or ditch assumptions that have no practical or experimental consequences.

But then, I am not a physicist. I appreciate what the condensed matter folk do. The particle theoreticians get the publicity, but they seem like "secular theologians" haunting modern science.