Monthly Archives: January 2013

Group representation theory lies at the heart of modern physics as the mathematical expression of symmetry, remaining perhaps the most promising vehicle for initial progress beyond relativity and the standard model.  Covariance in relativity is expressed locally in terms of … Continue reading →

If spacetime degenerates into a nonmanifold structure near the Planck-scale, the number of fundamental elements involved in even the smallest-scale interactions currently observable might be very large: possibly on the order of Avogadro’s number.   This statement applies not only to … Continue reading →

George Ellis and a few other physicists have recently introduced the idea of top-down causation in fundamental physics.  In the context of classical spacetime, the hypothesis of top-down causation is that causal relationships among subsets of spacetime are not completely … Continue reading →

 Shape dynamics, invented by Julian Barbour, is a theory of spacetime that applies an action principle, called Jacobi’s principle, and a procedure called best matching, to a configuration space of conformal 3-manifolds, called shape space, to recover the Hamiltonian formulation … Continue reading →

The following are some new ideas about physics.    I have most of these ideas partially written up, but I am so busy with other work at present that it may be some time before I can put them into a … Continue reading →