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Comment by thewoodenwand on February 18, 2013 at 7:45am

"What if electrons were not elementary, but were the ends of long strings in a string-net liquid which becomes our space?"

A state or a phase corresponds to an organization of particles. A deformation in the organization represents a wave in the state. A new state of matter will usually support new kinds of waves. Wen and Levin found that, in a state of string-net liquid, the motion of string-nets correspond to a wave that behaved according to a very famous set of equations -- Maxwell's equations! The equations describe the behavior of light -- a wave of electric and magnetic field. "A hundred and fifty years after Maxwell wrote them down, ether -- a medium that produces those equations -- was finally found." says Wen.

That wasn't all. They found that the ends of strings are the sources of the electric field in the Maxwell's equations. In other words, the ends of strings behave like charged electrons. The string-end picture can even reproduce the Fermi statistics and the Dirac equation that describes the motion of the electrons. They also found that string-net theory naturally gave rise to other elementary particles, such as quarks, which make up protons and neutrons, and the particles responsible for some of the fundamental forces, such as gluons and the W and Z bosons.

From this, the researchers made another leap. Could the entire universe be modeled in a similar way? "Suddenly we realized, maybe the vacuum of our whole universe is a string-net liquid," says Wen. "It would provide a unified explanation of how both light and matter arise." So in their theory elementary particles are not the fundamental building blocks of matter. Instead, they emerge as defects or "whirlpools" in the deeper organized structure of space-time.

I am trying to represent this in terms of a set of Mathematical equations, a little help.

Comment by James Yount on November 7, 2012 at 12:50am

I figured it out, never mind.

Comment by James Yount on November 6, 2012 at 8:56pm

Does anyone know how to represent 7/(1+81x^2) as a power series and find the first 5 coefficients in the series?     
I got 7*sum(from 0 to infinity) (-1)^n * 81^n * x^(2n)
The first coefficient I got was 7 which is correct, but after that I'm getting wrong answers ie 2nd coefficient -567 is wrong.... 

Comment by Steph S. on March 28, 2012 at 1:06pm

I love math!

Comment by Apeman Jim on July 2, 2010 at 1:19pm

Hello all!
I lack any meaningful skills in math, so I hope that I can learn something from the rest of you good people.

Comment by James Tyrrell on May 17, 2010 at 8:46pm

Hey everyone, I have to say my abilities in mathematics are not as strong as I'd like, but I understand how crucial it is in the endeavour of science and I'm determined to improve. Maybe someone (better versed in the subject than me) could start a discussion on websites that progressively teach mathematics? Or a discussion to collate a list of sites that cover specific fields at certain levels.

Great to be here, thanks in advance :)

Comment by Athianarchist on May 11, 2010 at 1:45pm

Hey, has anyone heard of Project Euler? It's pretty cool: http://projecteuler.net/

Comment by Keith Brian Johnson on April 27, 2010 at 10:13am

Yannick: I'm sorry, I must be being dense--what does this mean: "if N = 2^p , p non-negative integer, then a_k != a_j for every j,k = 1,...,N ( j!= k)"? The only sense I've been able to make of it would be that (a_j!)!=a_j for j=1,...,N.

Comment by Gecko, Seth...brother of Richie! on April 27, 2010 at 8:26am

im here because I suck at Math! Have math anxiety! So maybe I can learn something!

Comment by Jared Lardo on April 26, 2010 at 6:32pm

I think that it was because it was far away from his interests. He was interested in solving it--the reward was irrelevant and he thus rejected it. If you were on the toilet and I offered you a prize for taking the millionth dump in that bathroom, you'd refuse the prize, too, I think.

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