Waiter, There's a Black Hole in My Condensed Matter...

Perimeter Institute ^ | Monday, March 24, 2014 | unattributed

[SunkenCiv]

Physicists are using surprising ideas and mathematical tools originating in string theory to guide research into strange materials that are cropping up in condensed matter laboratories...

“Let’s start here,” Sachdev says. “Condensed matter physicists study the behaviour of electrons in many materials – semiconductors, metals, and exotic materials like superconductors.”

Normally, these physicists can model the behaviour of a material as if electrons were moving freely around inside it. Even if that’s not what’s actually happening, because of complex interactions, it makes the model easy to understand and the calculations easier to do. Electrons (and occasionally other particles) used in this kind of short-hand model are called quasi-particles...

“Without quasi-particles, it’s a mess,” says William Witczak-Krempa. Witczak-Krempa, a Perimeter postdoctoral fellow, is also a condensed matter theorist who collaborated with Sachdev on the paper. “It’s this quantum fuzzball of stuff.,, Erik’s work was a huge computational achievement. It took months of processing time. And, in the end, the results still needed to be converted into a form that can be compared with experiments. This is where we tried something new.”

To perform this conversion, Sachdev and Witczak-Krempa tackled the same system from a different angle: string theory.

[onedoug]

Nature? No. God? Yes. I believe all the evidence supports a Creator, of which nature is but a part.

Interestingly, aspects of M-Theory hearken back to Hugh Everett’s “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics of the mid-1950s in which “all” outcomes of events are realized, and are not simply chosen when the quantum wave function collapses and a specific outcome is realized.

If true, scaling energy downward to General Relativity - which would still be unified at a time lim=0 - should in consequence yield sets of circumstances in the macro as well. This could mean that when we die, however we die, our lives could continue in some other plane on which they have been playing out almost literally, eternally, with no break at all in the continuity of our lives, completely unaware of what had just transpired in that other plane of “this” existence.

...Except as a conjurer of ideas, such as I hope I can count myself. I don’t think God would mind. Hey, it’s just a hypothesis.

Though it does sort of gives a fresh perspective on the religious sense, here at least, of “eternal life”.

Best....