Key Points
Zoom in far enough on a patch of space, the theory says, and you wont see a menagerie of particles or jittery quantum fields..
In recent months, two teams of physicists and computer scientists have used neural networks to calculate precisely for the first time what sort of macroscopic world would emerge from a specific microscopic world of strings..
Using insight gathered from an assortment of computational techniques in 2019 and 2020, the group identified a handful of formulas that spit out classes of Calabi-Yau manifolds producing what they call broad brush versions of the standard model containing the right number of matter particles..
String theorists including Anderson started trying to calculate specific metrics in these ways, but the procedures took a long time and produced overly bumpy doughnuts, which would mess up attempts to make precise particle predictions...
Importantly, they worked in a context where the geometry of the fields and that of the manifold are tightly linked, a setup in which the Yukawa couplings could be calculated inan alternative way, although this had never been done before.When the group calculated the couplings in both manners,the resultsmatched.Moreover, the couplings they found hinted at a separation between particle massesa mysterious featureof the standard model...
