WeirdScience - Graphs, a ball of string and Winos

>

That is the standard model of sub-atomic particles. Thanks to Wiki for the pics in this article. The thing that I like about science is how easily something as abstract as the above, possibly the most abstract thing known to man, can be represented on a simple two dimensional grid.

I have to wonder if the trick is not inherent in nature, that these are not so nice and organised but merely in our perceptions of it are able to organise it. The above data could be represented on a multidimensional shape, such as on a sphere, in a line, an irregular solid or a rotating model.

You could make a much less tidy graph by linking it up like this

A human can easily manage a three dimensional graph. A four or five dimensional graph, involving a colour and time variable, would be pretty easy to follow in certain circumstances.

Any multidimensional graph is merely a human representation of a tiny data set and of course is incredibly limited compared to the information that the universe holds.

The universe would seem to be a huge data set of multi dimensional information. A graph is a tiny representation of it. One would assume that there is an infinite amount of information in the universe as information is being copied all of the time and all previous information would be preserved.

However three things suggest that there is not an infinite amount of information in the universe. Firstly copied information is not new information but reorganised information. Secondly if we believe that there are about a google of electrons in the universe then there can only be a limited amount of information stored in them. Thirdly there is no reason to think that things that have occurred in the past are preserved as information. Brownian motion suggests that they are not and memory is really just a feature of biology rather than physics. Therefore without information about past events there can be no choices and the universe would be best modelled as a piece of string with information on it, rather like DNA. Unless it has an end the string would be a loop.
The apparent alternative to a string universe would look a lot like Wikipedia. Information linked to other information in a giant cloud, all interlinking. By definition a universe made up of interlinked information would be a cloud as the only links could be back into the cloud. If we could only follow one path of this interlinked information then we could never know if it was an interlinked web of information or a single string. Anything else, to a bio-aware organism, would simply be a theory.

A string model leaves us with a huge question. Is their only one piece of string, one set of possibilities that we can travel down or is it some bit of fluff with junctures everywhere? I like Stephen Hawking's model of the universe as something more like the inside surface of a balloon. I can't answer this of course but if memory is only a biological phenomena rather than a physical one then their is no reason for choices or memories to be physically real anyway; very Vanilla Sky.

For the one person or so who as read to the end, a Winos are the superpartners of the SU(2)_L gauge fields. The theoretical Anti-W particle and a prime candidate to be anti-matter.