Only Connect - Greg Egan

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Number of words : 750
Percent of complex words : 18.1
Average syllables per word : 1.7
Average words per sentence : 28.9


READABILITY INDICES

Fog : 18.8
Flesch : 31.3
Flesch-Kincaid : 16.1


PEOPLE

E.M. Forster

A writer.

Kusnanto Sarumpaet

Javanese mathematician. Author of six papers on general relativity and QGT. Found a simple dynamical law related to tetravelt graphs which always leads to the average valence stabilising at four.

Michael Faraday

A physicist who had a notion of lines of force running between electric charges.

Roger Penrose

A physicist and his spin networks are trivalent graphs with each edge labelled by a half integer, corresponding to a possible value of the spin of a quantum particle.

William Thomson

Had a theory of atoms as knotted vortex tubes.

Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli

1990s Physicists. discovered an analogous result in quantum gravity, where spin network states have a simple geometric interpretation.

John Baez and Fotini Markopoulou and José-Antonio Zapata

Did ground-breaking work on the possible dynamical laws for spin networks in the early 21st century.


CONCEPTS

Graph

A set of nodes and edges.

QGT

In Quantum Graph Theory, a quantum state describing both the geometry of space and all the matter fields present is built up from combinations of graphs.

Quantum Field Theory

A spin network embedded in a region of space can be used to assign an amplitude to every possible configuration of a field. The quantum states defined in this way consist of lines of flux running along the edges of the network.

Tetravalent graphs

With the four edges emerging from each node giving area to the faces of a “quantum tetrahedron”.

Polymer states

Possibility of open chains of dopant nodes.


TECHNOLOGY

Orbital Accelerator Facility

Currently being used to test for polymer states.


PLOT

The history of the physics and mathematics underpinning the developments of Quantum Graph Theory and Quantum Field Theory.


3.5 out of 5