Matter Friendlessness
"No Matter Waves for You!" — The Gluon Soup Nazi
(Never fear, MMT is near.👇🏼👇🏼) While looking for new ways to learn Clifford Algebra Standard Model tricks, I came across an old Internet two-week buddy from the early noughts, Carl Brannen. He’s an odd duck, which is why I like him.
He began writing a sort of mini magnum opus at one point, “Operator Guide to the Standard Model” , if opened you’ll note the little aesthetic touch of making the titlepage look like 1950’s RAND Corporation technical paper. Ah,… oh for the days before Dall-E slop.
It’s interesting reading, though I doubt I’ll ever get through it all. But maybe I can write about some highlights. One is that he seems to derive the Koide mass formula, which is of phenomenological importance, since it relates sums of lepton masses to sums of the square roots of the same masses. This suggests that some bilinear structure or another is involved in dynamical mass generation.
The Density Matrix
Since I am now adopting Jacob Barandes’ Indivisible QM framework as my foundational orthodox QM, I had a renewed appreciation for Brannen. He begins with the density matrix, an inherently stochastic concept (in line with Barandes).
He also starts from a POV where the geometry is at the forefront, not the abstract symmetry groups, which I would also concur with. It motivates using the Geometric Clifford Algebra as the “proper” language, and the symmetries follow from this geometry. CA/GA is just the convenient go-between language. It’s in the name!
But I think Brannen’s philosophy could use some tweaks.
Tweak One — Friendless Matter (No Matter Waves)
Matter is not so friendly to wave at us politely. Brannen (I think mistakenly) uses the language of “matter waves”. This is the view the solution to the equations of motion in QM (which are the spinors) are literally physical waves. This conflicts with Barandes, so we cannot have it! (It also is mysticism and defies all reasonable parsimony.)
If we pull back and avoid interpreting what a “spinor” is exactly, and just look at what the spinors are in the algebra, we see all the spinors are just generalized transformation (mainly rotation) instructions. But they are in such action, decoupled from bulky-bulk spacetime1, and so these rotations act only “internally”. Meaning, for any spacetime theory of QM, this is about local topological transforms. Gravity is still right there, since any spacetime topology is naturally coupled to gravity.
But the local transformations are not mixed with the spacetime transforms (Lorentz) of gravity (or of position and rotation gauge transforms in Clifford Gauge Gravity).
If you have this in mind, then you can get into reading Brannen’s book without worrying about which is more fundamental, the “state vector” (in Hilbert space category) or the “density matrix” (statistical processes category). Both are just fictions that account (in our models) for the indivisible stochastic dynamics.
The point about there being no matter waves, is just that the wavefunctions do not exist in physical spacetime, they are fictions, they are wave solutions only in the abstract Hilbert space of “states”. But here, a “state” is a transformation instruction. It is very misleading to call the spinors “states”. That is bad language but unfortunately baked-in historically, so we are sort of stuck with it.
Same is in MMT: we are stuck with people using physical metaphors for scorekeeping systems, like “tax drain” or “budget surplus” or “debt mountain”. Like you can have too many scorepoints left over from not entering enough points on the spreadsheet. 🤣 Or like it’s going to take a lot of oxygen and huffing and puffing to climb up a computer to reach the keyboard to enter “0.00” on a spreadsheet.
I mention this here at Ōhanga Pai today, because in a recent MMT forum I made the mistake of mentioning “the national debt of France is not a debt mountain”. I got jumped upon. I was right, but my mistake was speaking writing too simplistically. But that’s the fault of chat forums. For sure I’m not always good at reading the nuance of other’s messages that gets lost in the chat format. I’d always prefer people to write long sentences and construct them beautifully. Reading should be a pleasure.
What was I trying to say? In reality, the true “debt burden” of France is the private indebtedness of their households — to their banker, not to the ECB! — i.e., unemployment (people seeking more euro). The debt of their government is the opposite (excess scorepoints left in the non-government sector) and needs to be higher. The French government may have voluntarily forfeited their currency “sovereignty” but really they are still sovereign, they can quit the EMU any time, and remain in the EU (like several other nations). But their leaders are 𐝥ꗍꖡꗇ𐝥ꕒꗍꕒ.
Hence, two things:
The problem with the French government debt is for sure a big phreakin’ problem, because the debt is far too low (the evidence being unemployed French labour).
The ECB can always extinguish the French Gov debt, without inflation bias, the “right amount” is whatever is needed for full employment of French workers (in non-ꕗꖹꝆꝆꕷꖾꕯꖡ jobs, one should expect). That the ECB does not do so is a reflection of how utterly evil they are, ignorant or innocently evil.
On the “evildom”: if the ECB had any jot of compassion, they’d employ the French workers, without batting an eyelid, and let inflation run hot. Who cares about inflation if productivity is gained and fairly distributed? No one should care. It is even a de facto wealth tax, which most people desire (until they get super rich), which you could not get a single vote for in the Parliament. OK, but the ECB would not vote for that either, which is the real problem, not the French Gov Debt. The Debt is not the problem, it is the non-government sector wealth in tax credits, so it’s a good thing if it goes higher without inflation.
(Let’s not get tendentious here about the “D” word, it is not a dirty word. Those of us preferring Gesell currency systems (still implies debt — obligation to redeem) can put our language and system preferences on hold, since there is no political realpolitik way the Europeans will ever adopt a Gesell currency any time soon. But the French could easily Frexit some time soon. Retire the first real-debt burdens, like Le Penn, Lecornu and Macron and the rest, I forget their names, all neoliberals look the same to me.) Democracy debt.
That other nominal Debt in euro will not cause inflation if it is held in worker check accounts, rather than in investor bonds (basic income but only for people who already have money, in proportion to how much euro they already have).
But of course, the ECB are 𖥐𖦪𖠢𖢧𖥣ꛘ𖥕ꚶ𖨚 ꕗꗇꕷꖡꗇ𐝥ꕒꕷ, so none of this idyllic cosmopolitan Europe is going to happen in our lifetimes. More neoliberal funerals are required.
But my point is still valid. It is only by acknowledging the French Government Debt is too low, that you can win the victories for workers. But also, the ECB should not be demanding the French Gov offer interest-earning securities to the private market, for this serves no useful purpose. The Debt of the French government in any case is on the books held by the ECB, and so can be extinguished whenever full employment is attained, with no tax payer or bond trader in sight. The discipline of the scorekeeping system is to prevent the French from running inflation hotter than necessary for full employment — because they are in a currency union, so it would be unfair to play favourite and allow the French to eat more Danish bakeries per head than the Danes eat croissants per head.
Such are the trade-offs for being in a Union. If the French Frexited, they’d have an FX rate to deal with if they decide willy nilly to eat too many Danish pastries, and that’s fine — more Danish pastries so less Merlo wine, or whatever is traded as offset — that’s where the discipline could be, no need for an undemocratic unelected bunch of utter 𖧥𖨚𖨚𖦙𖥕ꛚ𖠢ꕷ at the ECB imposing the discipline for you. Myself: as Emperor of France, I’d much prefer my own scorekeeping and suffer exchange rate pass-through adjustments any day to giving my scoreboard, hence the fate of my working families, to the ECB. I mean, I want to be a beloved Emperor, not a tyrant. All I need is some free time to write physics and drink espresso with my sandwiches. Maybe sometimes sleep. My wine-drunk citizens are hardly going to begrudge me I’d hope.
This is of course something the French government could do by themselves with their own currency. Why they do not is hard to say, it is not because they lack “sovereignty”, except to say they are very silly taunting Kniggits. As are we all. But MMT’ers are less silly in some respects that really phreakin’ matters for justice than others.
Here “French” is just the name of a country that arose in the forum. It could be “Greece”, “Italy”, “Spain” or whoever.
I had something else to write, but maybe that’s enough physics procrastination. Maybe I should say, I wish all the “debt mountain” fear mongering headlines would just go away. They could easily go away. But The People have to learn MMT to Invisibiliaramus! the finance press Dementor headlines.2
I do not have a short phrase for how “internal” (Yang-Mills gauge) symmetry transforms cannot mix with Lorentz transforms, people invoke the magic words “Coleman–Mandula Theorem” but although true, that never vibes with my jibes. In any case, there is some minimal coupling, otherwise gravity cannot work. It’s just the symmetry transforms cannot get mixed.
Has Harry Potter been “Cancelled” yet from popculture discourse? It’s just the pop reference that first came to mind, ok.