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Rare Tachyons: A Tale of Two (Scientific) CitiesPosted by OsherDoctorow on May 11, 2003 at 23:04:03: All of us who know about George Lukas' Star Wars have heard of the Good Force and the Dark Force, which presumably Lukas meant to name the Good Force and the Bad Force. The idea in the physics literature about Tachyon Condensation "excorcising" Taychyons more or less is a sort of Bad Force view of physics with a twist - the Bad is avoided and thereby results in the Good. I would use quotation marks here except that I am not an ethical relativist and I don't like to give the impression of interchanging the concepts in these cases. Believe it or not, the history of mathematics and physics and to some extent other sciences is full of both Good and Bad theories in the respective senses of 1. directly seeking the Good or the beneficial core concepts, or 2. seeking the Good indirectly by avoiding the Bad or non-beneficial concepts. Newtonian Physics was a Good Theory in this sense, while the Tachyon Condensation theories of Sen's type are Bad Theories in this sense. Here are some examples from mathematics. 1. The Jacobson Radical and similar Radicals of Module, Ring, Group Theories in Algebra and of Topology are examples of Bad Theories in this sense - and very useful ones too. 2. Until recently, probability and statistics avoided probability zero events/processes like the plague, and now Rare Event/Probability + Logic + Physics as well as Large Deviations Probability-Statistics are quite interested in probability zero or (very small) positive epsilon events/processes. 3. Gauss-Null and other -Null sets and measures in geometric nonlinear functional analysis are quite useful Bad Theories largely developed by Benyamini and Lindenstrauss fairly recently in Israel. 4. Black holes as developed by Hawking and Sir Roger Penrose were originally Good Theories, and now there is a serious attempt to excorcise them and all singularities from physics as Bad Theories by "rounding them off" by the super-past-oriented physicists among others. In pursuing Tachyons and/or Tachyon Condensation via Rare Event or Probability + Logic + Physics, I am using a Good Theory in the above sense, and I suspect that the worst that can happen from my viewpoint is that there will forever be two different ways of approaching Tachyons and/or Tachyon Condensation. Ties are actually good for Rare Event people when they advance Knowledge. The Law of the Jungle spiral physics or spiral science advocates will undoubtedly disagree and wait for their theory to excorcise all others. Like the French Revolutionaries of the late 1700s, I suspect that they will have a long wait. Osher Doctorow
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