Core Theory T-Shirts

Way back when, for purposes of giving a talk, I made a figure that displayed the world of everyday experience in one equation. The label reflects the fact that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood.

So now there are T-shirts. (See below to purchase your own.)

It’s a good equation, representing the Feynman path-integral formulation of an amplitude for going from one field configuration to another one, in the effective field theory consisting of Einstein’s general theory of relativity plus the Standard Model of particle physics. It even made it onto an extremely cool guitar.

I’m not quite up to doing a comprehensive post explaining every term in detail, but here’s the general idea. Our everyday world is well-described by an effective field theory. So the fundamental stuff of the world is a set of quantum fields that interact with each other. Feynman figured out that you could calculate the transition between two configurations of such fields by integrating over every possible trajectory between them — that’s what this equation represents. The thing being integrated is the exponential of the action for this theory — as mentioned, general relativity plus the Standard Model. The GR part integrates over the metric, which characterizes the geometry of spacetime; the matter fields are a bunch of fermions, the quarks and leptons; the non-gravitational forces are gauge fields (photon, gluons, W and Z bosons); and of course the Higgs field breaks symmetry and gives mass to those fermions that deserve it. If none of that makes sense — maybe I’ll do it more carefully some other time.

Gravity is usually thought to be the odd force out when it comes to quantum mechanics, but that’s only if you really want a description of gravity that is valid everywhere, even at (for example) the Big Bang. But if you only want a theory that makes sense when gravity is weak, like here on Earth, there’s no problem at all. The little notation k < Λ at the bottom of the integral indicates that we only integrate over low-frequency (long-wavelength, low-energy) vibrations in the relevant fields. (That's what gives away that this is an "effective" theory.) In that case there's no trouble including gravity. The fact that gravity is readily included in the EFT of everyday life has long been emphasized by Frank Wilczek. As discussed in his latest book, A Beautiful Question, he therefore advocates lumping GR together with the Standard Model and calling it The Core Theory.

I couldn’t agree more, so I adopted the same nomenclature for my own upcoming book, The Big Picture. There’s a whole chapter (more, really) in there about the Core Theory. After finishing those chapters, I rewarded myself by doing something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time — put the equation on a T-shirt, which you see above.

I’ve had T-shirts made before, with pretty grim results as far as quality is concerned. I knew this one would be especially tricky, what with all those tiny symbols. But I tried out Design-A-Shirt, and the result seems pretty impressively good.

So I’m happy to let anyone who might be interested go ahead and purchase shirts for themselves and their loved ones. Here are the links for light/dark and men’s/women’s versions. I don’t actually make any money off of this — you’re just buying a T-shirt from Design-A-Shirt. They’re a little pricey, but that’s what you get for the quality. I believe you can even edit colors and all that — feel free to give it a whirl and report back with your experiences.