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2026-07-28 16:31:21 UTC
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John Carlos Baez on Nostr: - the usual wisdom (which I agree with) is that in Yang-Mills theory the gauge groups ...

- the usual wisdom (which I agree with) is that in Yang-Mills theory the gauge groups need to be compact, since only they have a Killing form that's semidefinite, which allows you to define a nonnegative Hamiltonian. So, nobody I know has ever considered SU(2,3) or Spin(4,6) as a gauge group in Yang-Mills theory.

"There was one circulating on mastodon a few months back that amounted to nothing more than setting all the physical constants to 1 and calling it job done!"

It all depends on what the job is. 😆