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# I see your objection but I think you are missing the point,
because I think you are thinking about it in a very general sense. My point is simply that the question of why electrons aren't black holes simply doesn't come up unless you assume to begin with that electrons are point particles, and there is no reason to assume that, and every reason not to. It's merely the last vestiges of our intuitive grasp of how 'matter' behaves at human scales.

I think everything is emergent, fermions are 'twisting space' somehow, EM is just a special case of gravity. I can't prove nothin' but I'm absolutely convinced that our sense perceptions don't directly tell us what's really going on. There is a reason that the Universe appears to exist in four dimensional space-time, and I reckon the Gamma matrices have something to do with it.

(, Mon 24 May 2010, 16:57, archived)
# I probably am missing the point
I'm really tired for some reason. And I've just found that the reason my codes have been crashing for the last few days (causing me to work over the weekend and today, which is a bank holiday here) is that I didn't compile the libraries up with the Intel fortran compiler but used gfortran instead. Fuck's sake.... But it works now :)

I think my point ultimately might be that the question of why electrons aren't black holes doesn't come up unless you have a sound theory to work with in the first place -- which would be in some respects a theory of quantum gravity. Put that way, we seem to be arguing about exactly the same point, in totally different ways.

(Likewise that everything is emergent. But I'm not convinced about EM being a special case of gravity, attempts to do that pretty much always produce a dilaton and I don't like dilatons. But I believe the two of them are subsets of something else. There's a fair bit of focus on 3-forms at the minute, and a theory built on 3-forms automatically includes what are basically Maxwell tensors along with what are basically Ricci tensors, unless I've got totally the wrong end of the stick which I probably have. Something like that might be the way to unite the two without bogging ourselves down in string theory...)
(, Mon 24 May 2010, 17:04, archived)
# I think that just comes down to nomenclature,
I'd call the superset "gravity", still, gravity is rank-2 tensor so there's definitely scope for some quite complex behaviour, and going up to rank 3 intuitively would cause more problems than it solves.

There was some guy I read about a while ago who was working on a gauge theory based on the exceptional group G2, don't know if anything ever came of that.
(, Mon 24 May 2010, 17:11, archived)
# beats me
unless that was the surfer dude who used straight e8 to get everything out. last i heard no-one was actually convinced in the end.

i keep meaning to read through mcelrath's papers, he's currently convinced he's got out the standard model + neutrino masses + gravitons + a small cosmological constant + the correct dynamics from a cloud of interacting neutrinoes and anti-neutrinoes. but i don't even understand the setup since he preassumes the existence of neutrinoes and then finds what i can only assume are neutrino-like quasiparticles. but he's absolutely convinced and he knows a lot more particle theory than i do.
(, Mon 24 May 2010, 17:15, archived)
# Yeah that guy,
Garrett Lisi, I think he still has a small minority following. I don't like superstring theory much though so I hope someone comes up with something better that works.
(, Mon 24 May 2010, 17:32, archived)
# i'm hoping bob mcelrath's right
or at least along the right lines. but then i did do my masters in analogue gravity so i'm not quite unbiased on this... :)

i don't like string theory much either. it probably shows. but i'm not really sold on loop quantum either. i prefer their *intentions* -- they just want to quantise gravity, they're not shooting for the top right from the start -- but the theory itself is somehow unpersuasive.
(, Mon 24 May 2010, 17:37, archived)