Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, so it’s time for this blog’s yearly tradition of posting a poem. Next week there may be a prose take on the same topic.
You’ve heard love stories like Oliver’s, I’m sure.
Meeting that childhood sweetheart
In the back room, with the garden view
And trust that, with a wink, the parents may regret.
Stories tungsten-milled
To fit our expectations.
And you’ve heard wilder stories
From genuinely riskier lives.
The rescue and the love linked under the Milky Way
Like an action movie.
The love’s reality, even so,
Defying summary.
You’ve heard stories of wide-eyed students
Realizing they can be adults.
Of those moments in study or celebration
Turning points in self-conception.
And maybe you don’t ask
About the other times.
Love happens,
And we love love to happen.
But we build love too.
May that which we build
Outgrow the story.
4 gravitons 
What do think about https://openai.com/index/new-result-theoretical-physics/ ?
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Would have been more on topic the week before 😉
I haven’t had time to dig deeper yet, so a few first impressions, starting with two misconceptions I’ve been seeing.
First, the description makes it sound like this is something gluons rarely but sometimes do, which isn’t the right way to think about it. This calculation only applies to an extremely precise situation, you can’t have this happening in nature precisely in this way. (If you know some math, the configuration is measure zero.)
Second, a few people are missing which part GPT did and which part the humans did. The humans knew that this gluon behavior should be possible from the literature, and calculated it by hand for the first few examples. They then reached out to OpenAI, and used various GPTs to get a simplified version of the formula that works for all cases, and a proof the formula is correct.
Now, you might think, ok, GPT just simplified a formula, not that exciting. The thing is, in this subfield, simplifications can be very important. The history of the amplitudes subfield is a series of surprising simplifications that led to powerful insights.
On the other hand, because of that history, we’re a lot better at finding those kinds of simplifications. It can be the kind of thing we assign to a Master’s student as a thesis topic.
I don’t know yet where this particular simplification falls, as mentioned I haven’t dug into it yet. It could be useful or useless, easy or very impressive. That depends on the details.
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“This calculation only applies to an extremely precise situation, you can’t have this happening in nature precisely in this way.”
It’s not even measure 0, I thought it was impossible in our universe. Tree level single minus amplitudes vanish in 3+1 signature, and their result is only non-zero in 2+2 signature, no? That said, I guess this result may have some utility in construction of Minkowski space loop amplitudes from unitarity.
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True! I’d caught that it was in a collinear regime but missed that it was also in (2,2) because I hadn’t seen that referred to as “Klein signature” before. And yeah, while I don’t know if anyone would be interested in using unitarity in this collinear regime, in general I think your “guess” is the right way to think about this: if it does turn out to be useful, it will be as the seed to some recursion relation or the like.
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