There is a lot of talk right now about  Xiao-Gang Wen’s recent Science paper (found at…

Originally shared by Brent Neal

There is a lot of talk right now about  Xiao-Gang Wen’s recent Science paper (found at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6114/1604.full ) about phases of matter and their classification by symmetry.

Somewhat less technical but no less thought provoking is his recent blog post about emergence as a common character between condensed-matter physics and high-energy/particle physics. In this paper, he tries (though somewhat unconvincingly) to connect the two by positing that long-range entanglement of states is a common physical phenomenon that relates the fields.

From my point of view as a condensed-matter physicist, this is interesting because the only connection between the somewhat stolid and everyday physics that I know and love and the high-flying super-sexy world of particle physics is the second quantization and many-body theory. It’s a little hard to say whether Dr. Wen’s viewpoint is valid, but like with so much in theoretical physics, the math seems to hold up, so now its up to the experimentalists to take a whack at things.

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_aed08fb70101axz9.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js