Schwarzschild superstrata

 @stringking42069 has put in a word in favor of superstrata, so I'm going to assume that that is the best-founded approach to black hole microstates in string theory. Hopefully it's compatible with the construction of Schwarzschild black holes from RN black holes connected by negative-energy struts. 

In other news, there has been a blitz of Geometric Unity content recently, which has clarified my understanding of the theory. Very briefly, it does boil down to obtaining the gauge groups and elementary fermions of the standard model, from geometric structures on the metric bundle of 4d spacetime. Eric Weinstein has a classical theory, more or less, but the question is whether a quantum theory actually exists. 

I'll probably say more, but no time for it today. 

Geometric Unity update

Eric Weinstein recently gave a talk extending his theory of everything to include a 4-dimensional cosmological constant. I tried to post about it on one of the subreddits about his work (/r/theportal), but they seem to have new moderation rules. Hopefully I can get through, but for now I post my remarks here:. 

Dark sector from duality invariance

I was just skimming a new paper on how to state "duality invariant" theories, like electromagnetism with both electric and magnetic charges. In talking about the 6d (2,0) family of theories, it says (equation 4.1) that an auxiliary vector field that breaks Lorentz covariance is often needed, in order to make the overall theory Lorentz-invariant. This immediately reminded me e.g. of the "impostor field" appearing in a form of modified gravity due to Sabine Hossenfelder, and which has been used to model MOND. Can the auxiliary vector field of the duality-invariant theories be used in this way?

Qutritzer fine structure

Last month I ran across an alleged quantum-gravitational bound on the fine structure constant (proposed by Shahar Hod) that is remarkably close to the actual value. I am somewhat surprised that it has received almost no public attention, but there are many examples of neglected ideas and observations, inside and outside physics. 

The actual "bound" is ln(3)/(48pi). As I describe in the linked post, this work is descended from an episode in black hole physics from over twenty years ago, in which the quantity ln(3) showed up in the "quasinormal" resonant modes of charged near-extremal black holes. (Carl Brannen says the quasinormal modes are associated with excited unbound states, which makes sense since they describe Hawking radiation, i.e. a quantum escaping from the black hole.) 

Today Scott Aaronson mentioned some results on how to efficiently distinguish three states of a qubit. I mused that maybe the current generation of "qubitzers" could take another look at the ln(3) mysteries, using tools from those results. (I spoke of "qutritzers", but I think technically this is not about qutrits, just about three states of a qubit.)