

James Gates: Symbols of power – Adinkras and the nature of reality [pdf] - espeed
http://www.onbeing.org/sites/onbeing.org/files/gates-symbolsofpower.pdf

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duaneb
This is very cool, but I was under the impression supersymmetry has been
mostly abandoned due to negative results from the LHC.

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Steuard
There has been rather a lot of press along those lines, certainly. A
substantial fraction of the "parameter space" for supersymmetry does seem to
have been ruled out. But for better or worse, SUSY has a _very_ large
potential parameter space, so the theory as a whole is nowhere near being
disproven. I don't have the impression that many actual particle physicists
have changed their minds yet.

To some degree, how one views the current data depends on one's expectations
going in. For the Higgs search, the LHC (and other experiments) had already
ruled out the vast majority of the possible masses for the particle, long
before it was discovered. But we didn't take that as evidence against its
existence; instead, we expected that those results were "boxing in" the true
value (as indeed they were).

So someone who considers the theoretical argument for supersymmetry to be very
strong could interpret the current data in a similar way: the LHC is homing in
on its actual form by ruling out alternative possibilities. On the other hand,
someone who considers the theoretical argument unconvincing could legitimately
see the current data as strong evidence against supersymmetry (at least at the
weak scale).

For what it's worth, I recall seeing some predictions in 2008 by Abraham
Seiden for the dates when the LHC would have enough data to see various
potential new physics.[1] (This was before the disaster when they first
switched it on, so all of his dates are at least a couple of years early in
practice.) He said that some versions of supersymmetry might be seen as early
as 2009: those are (I think) the same versions that we're seeing data against
these days. But he lists a date of 2017 for a "higher energy form of
supersymmetry". So even before the data began to come in, everyone knew it
would be quite a while before anything definitive could be said on the
subject.

[1] There's an error for the original site, but here's a Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1iyysX3...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1iyysX3_GKoJ:www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm%3Fid%3Dtimeline-
for-the-large-hadron-colli+)

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mmastrac
While the title is tantalizingly interesting, can someone describe exactly
what is happening here? I see a mention of Hamming codes, but the rest is
pretty complicated.

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fusiongyro
I'm so far from the right person to leave a remark on this it's not even
funny, but it looks to me like someone noticed that category theoretic "arrow-
chasing" diagrams for supersymmetry happen to look reminiscent of this West
African artform. I brought a book on category theory ("Conceptual
Mathematics") to a coffee group last week and someone there expressed a lack
of interest in it because it seemed to him like "some kind of advanced
geometry," which isn't it at all, but category theory relies quite heavily on
this particular visual structure and I can see why someone glancing at the
book would come away with that impression.

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archgoon
Adinkras are not Category Diagrams (among other things, if you have A->B and
B->C you don't necessarily have A->C). Here's the original paper:

<http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0408004v1.pdf>

Urs Schreiber speculated a while ago that there may be a connection between
adinkra diagrams and categories

<http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2007/08/adinkras.html>

But to my knowledge, the connection has not been made explicit.

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fusiongyro
Thanks! I'm definitely out of my league here; I found the second blog article
and went based on my glancing at that. IIRC the transitivity of the category
diagram is of paramount importance, so I wouldn't think the analogy holds if
transitivity doesn't.

Category theory is an interest of mine I hope to develop further but there's a
lot of preliminary learning I need to do first.

