3-strand braids that are supposed to correspond to particles in the Standard Model.

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   John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 06-Jan-2025 16:22:59 JST John Carlos Baez

   in reply to

   @yala @mcc @futurebird - I think the weirdest thing in the universe is life: for example the way water, ammonia, methane and the like, under the right conditions, slowly turns into butterflies, sequoias, philosophers, con artists and music. It may be common, it may be rare, we don't know.

   I would love loop quantum gravity to explain matter but nobody has gotten it to work yet. People have tried:

   Sundance O. Bilson-Thompson, Fotini Markopoulou, and Lee Smolin, Quantum gravity and the Standard Model, https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0603022.

   But it doesn't work so far.