Recent Developments in _At_ch^oo! Theory

9:00 AM

Introduction

This entry is a report from the conference on The Future of String Theory, January 2006, Some Island. Certainly the most exciting development to appear at this conference¹ was the introduction of _At_ch^oo! theory by Written [1]. Since that comment already 17 papers have appeared at arGive.arg [2-18] giving further developments², and this new result in string theory has been heralded as the greatest breakthrough in science since the discovery of calculus by Newton or Leibniz³.

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• ¹ The conference began with a review of 2005, "The Year That Nobody Did Anything In Physics Nearly As Important As Anything Einstein Did In 1905".
• ² Written could not be reached for comment, as he has been home in bed.
• ³ Actually, calculus may have been developed originally by Archimedes, but he did not publish since Pauli told him it was a waste of time.

Just in time?

This development has already become the center of debate on the Web (see below), since it may be the only thing that can save string theory from doom once the LHC (Last Hope Collider) starts up in 2007⁴, probing distances orders of magnitude smaller than a fm⁵.

Of course, unless some new particle is found there within a few years, it will also be the doom of high-energy physics in general (at least until the Axis of Evil builds its GNAPBW⁶ accelerator). However, there is also the possibility of continued low-funding accelerator projects: RHIC is planning to downsize by replacing gold nuclei with chickens⁷, to see what eggs look like far off shell.

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• ⁴ Coincidentally, this is also the expected date of the "string theory event horizon", beyond which all of string theory will collapse into a singularity due to its reaching critical mass. (It has been claimed that this would result in a loss of string theory information, but this is a vacuous statement.)
• ⁵ The subatomic distance of length, named after the famous, Nobel prize winning, Italian physicist Enrico Femtometer.
• ⁶ "GNAPBW" stands for "Gnapbw's Not A Particle Beam Weapon". It will be open-source design, based on information readily found on the web.
• ⁷ They will keep the acronym, for sentimental reasons (and because they can't afford replacing the monogrammed towels), but they will change the meaning to "Really Hard Inelastic Chickens".

Notation

So far, most of the discussion has been about just what "_At_ch^oo!" means. Part of the subtlety is that the notation is related to Chinese, in that the pitch of each letter is important, as indicated by the altitude of the letters. (The altitude notation was introduced in [4]. It also helps avoid some trademark restrictions.) The font may also be important. (Several mathematicians suggested using "blackboard bold", until it was explained to them that physicists don't use blackboards anymore.)

Results

Now that we have defined our notation, we can summarize the results. Unlike the usual formulation of string theory, which has 10 dimensions⁸, _At_ch^oo! has only 6 letters (or maybe 7, if you count the "!"), and thus has much more predictive power. The missing dimensions are contained in the pitch of each letter, which is already fixed by the theory. (Otherwise, it might be something like "^At^ch_oo!", and how ridiculous would that be?¹³) This already includes the Anthropic Principle, which precludes the existence of _Ch^oo_at! theory, e.g.¹⁴ The Standard Model then follows simply from the 2+3+1 (=SU(2)⊗SU(3)⊗U(1)) monotonically increasing decomposition _At _{⊕ c}h^o ⊕ o! (where the "!" represents the Abelian nature of the last factor).

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• ⁸ No, it has 11 dimensions⁹: Remember D-branes [4]?
• ⁹ Sorry, we forgot F-theory. That would make it 12 dimensions¹⁰.
• ¹⁰ But we're pretty sure we could make that 13¹¹ if we tried hard enough.
• ¹¹ On the other hand, 13 is an unlucky dimension, so let's make it 14¹², which is the number of dimensions for a manifestly conformal formulation ("conformulation") of F-theory.
• ¹² But just to be safe, we'll say it's 3 more than the number of the footnote you happen to be reading at the time.
• ¹³ If you don't believe us, just try to pronounce it!
• ¹⁴ This is related to the fact that humanity determines the direction of the arrow of time. (There was no arrow of time before the Big Bang, because the Big Bang was the bow of time. Of course, in the multiverse scenario usually associated with the Landscape, the multi-Big Bang was then the quiver of time.)

Conclusions

Clearly this is a hot topic. In fact, if you have not already written a paper on it, you will be lost in the shuffle. (Maybe you should have come to this conference.) Fortunately, you're reading this blog, so at least you'll be informed as we update the news. Also, if you read anything about this at other web sites, make sure to come here to find out why they're wrong.

References

• [1] E. Written, "_At_ch^oo!", comment during the talk by 1 Maldusiècle at this conference.
• [2] U. Tomeito, I. Tomahto, U. Poteito, and I. Potahto, "Gesundheit", hep-rh/0601001.
• [3] The Princeton Theory Group, "Handkerchief", hep-rh/0601002.
• [4] Some guy whose name we forget, "_At_ch^oo_o!, the extension of _At_ch^oo! to 11 dimensions", hep-rh/0601003.
• [5-18] What, are you still reading this? You aren't really going to look up 17 references, are you? Well, we're not going to bother to look them up. (Try STEEPLES: Search for the title "_At_ch^oo!", if you can figure out what syntax to use.)

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Comments

Wrought says:

9:10 AM

More ridiculous string nonsense. When are you guys going to start working on something more realistic, like loopy cumquat gravity?

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Bottle says:

9:20 AM

String theory is just as well proven as evolution. In fact, DNA is an open twistor superstring.

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Fordprefect says:

9:30 AM

That reminds me of the time I went bicycling in the Himalayas...

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Pshaw says:

9:31 AM

What kind of wine do they have there?

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Bottle says:

9:32 AM

Hey, can we stay on topic? Which is, "Global warming is caused by the cosmological constant."

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Gall says:

9:33 AM

So, what about _At_ch^oo! theory?

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Bottle says:

9:34 AM

It is Written's greatest new result -- very beautiful, very concise. It is very deep, so far I have understood only up to the "h".

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Gall says:

9:35 AM

Shouldn't that be an "ħ"?

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Bottle says:

9:36 AM

A what?

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Gall says:

9:37 AM

I said, an "ħ"? And why are there 2 "o"'s?

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Fordprefect says:

9:38 AM

Duality! The "^o" is for S⁵ (a little sphere) and the "_o!" is for AdS₅.

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Bottle says:

9:39 AM

I thought the "_A" was for AdS₅.

Actually, the font size on this blog is much too large. You should use a much smaller one, so I can read the screen and use it to scratch my nose at the same time.

Then you can make footnotes that are even smaller, so nobody will read them.

Also, you are using the wrong font family. If you use a Microsophist font like Verdigris, then all the Mac and Linux machines will substitute something even smaller.

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Distiller says:

9:40 AM

No, no. Use the MathML fonts! They're much prettier, and you need to install a plug-in to even see them!

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Gall says:

9:41 AM

This is a string blog. If I wanted to hear about politics and HTML, I would go to the column on the right, which is written by an idiot.

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