Talk:Calabi-Yau manifold

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[edit] too technical?

Can someone explain this in a manner that gives examples of how it relates to our world, or give analogies to so the general public can better understand it?

I highly doubt it.

You might refer to the research project of one, Neal Wadha, who's discovery of an exception to Yau's conjecture won him recognition as a 2005 Intel Science Talent Search Competition Finalist.

You may want to read one of Brian Greene's books. And howabout someone fire up Mathematica and do a projection of the manifold into 3-space so that we can get a nice pretty picture for the page?

I read Brian Greene's "Elegant Universe" and I have a fague understanding of the simplest and most general ideas of Calabi Yau shapes, but I do not understand why if (as he states) 11 dimensions (10 space and 1 time) seem to make the equations balance and we live in a 3 expaned dimensional world, that Calabi Yau shapes are persued. 3 dimensions experienced + 6 curled up Calabi Yau dimensions + 1 time dimension only makes 10 dimensions. Is there another type of manifold that has 7 dimensions? Is the remaining dimension expanded? Specifically, if there are tens of thousands of variations on Calabi Yau shapes, how many viable variations exist for 7 dimensional manifolds? -- Alex R April 23, 2006

The seven dimensional manifold you are looking for is a G2 manifold. That is, a manifold whose holonomy group is the exceptional Lie group G2. Just as string theory in 10 dimensions can be thought of as a limit of M-theory in 11 dimensions, there is a way to turn Calabi-Yau threefolds into G2 manifolds. -lethe ^{talk +} 22:40, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Please sign your posts people. A projection of a CY to 3-space would look like a fairly meaningless blob. Imagine trying to project a sphere or other surface onto a line. And that's only going down one dimension. -- Fropuff 16:24, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

i added the {{technical}} tag to this article because i have no idea what it's talking about. --Someones life 22:26, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

And I, in turn, removed it. -lethe ^{talk +} 00:29, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Could you please explain why? This article seems ridiculously inaccessible to a general audience. Perhaps you would like to give reasons why you think this article is unavoidably technical, or maybe add a list of prerequisites for understanding this article. If, on the other hand you think this article is already accessible to a general audience, as someone with more than a high school education and understands nothing about this article, i would have to dissagree. --Someones life 19:41, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

The link you post, Wikipedia:Make technical articles accessible states that "you should put an explanation on the talk page with comments or suggestions for improvement". You didn't do that, so the presence of a technical tag was completely useless. People putting technical tags on templates without any effort at all to improve the article is a pet peeve of mine. I happen to think that this article can't really be made much more accessible without embedding it in a one semester course. However, if you had specific problems, it might be possible to address them. Instead, all you said is you had no idea what the article is talking about. Well, doesn't help anything. -lethe ^{talk +} 01:14, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I can see where you're coming from, but how can i even try to improve this article when i barely even know what it's about?... something about multiple dimensions and string theory is all i can extract. I'll try to be more specific about what i think could be improved on by someone who knows what this is all about. There are many technical terms that are used bluntly as though one is expected to be familliar with them, whithout saying what they mean or how they apply to whatever a Calabi-Yau manifold is. Basically I think the article should try to have more of an explanation of what it is, rather than definition and examples. If, as you say, you think it would take far too long to sufficiently explain what this thing is about, why not take my suggestion of applying the prerequisites template so that people who want to learn at least know where to start? --Someones life 05:03, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, since I got no response, and i still think the article needs to be fixed, and i've fully explained why, i'm putting the technical tag back on.--Someones life 16:56, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

So a Calabi-Yau is a special kind of Kähler manifold. Would you be satisfied if we explained what a Kähler manifold is? In my opinion, a layman's description of a Kähler manifold cannot be done in a few words, and we already have the link there. I might be willing to write a paragraph attempting at a layman's description, but right now, the article is only 3 paragraphs long; the layman's description would account for a full 25% of the article, which I'm not comfortable with. Moreover, I'm fairly convinced that no one would find it useful. Not the layman, not the expert. It would look something like this:

A Calabi-Yau manifold is a particular type of Kähler manifold, which is a manifold which carries a complex structure and a Hermitian structure which are compatible in each other in a technical way. For a Kähler manifold to be Calabi-Yau manifold, its curvature form must be an exact differential, which also implies that the trace of its curvature form vanishes, according to a famous result by Calabi and Yau.

I see problems with this attempt. For the layman: if I don't know what a manifold, complex structure, Hermitian structure, exact differential, trace or curvature are, then this is still completely inaccessible. For person who has the prerequisites, and is now trying to learn about Calabi-Yaus, these descriptions are far too short to be of use, they're too imprecise. In short, I can't imagine saying anything that would make this article more approachable without simply copying and pasting definitions of all the hyperlinked words. Last week I think I really helped make the intro for Hilbert space more accessible, because a Hilbert space is really just an infinite dimensional version of the inner product vector space that we all learned in high school. But Calabi-Yaus don't (as far as I know) admit such a description. I'm going to leave the technical notice though. While I personally don't think much can be done, and therefore don't think it's appropriate, maybe someone else will disagree. -lethe ^{talk +} 18:31, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Lethe that this article is unavoidable technical; there just isn't a good way to explain the concept to someone unfamiliar with manifolds, let alone Kähler manifolds. The problem is that layman do hear about the concept because of its connection to string theory. No one complains that the article on Kähler manifolds is too technical because no layman ever looks at it. We could try an intro along the lines of

A Calabi-Yau manifold is a special type of manifold that shows up in certain branches of mathematics such as algebraic geometry, as well as in theoretical physics. Particularly in superstring theory, the extra dimensions of spacetime are sometimes conjectured to take the form a 6-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold. The precise definition of a Calabi-Yau manifold, given below, is somewhat technical.

Not that that really explains anything, but it might ward off complaints. -- Fropuff 20:57, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you, Lethe, that your attempt would still not help the layman, i didn't understand it. You're right about the fact that all the hyperlinked words would need to be defined for the reader in order for them to understand this article, and I have no problem with that in itself, thats how wikipedia works. The problem i have is that all those links go to articles which are equally unintelligeable to the average user. I think Fropuff's suggestion is exactly the kind of thing that would help, especially because the article currently links only to Kähler manifold, which, in turn, links to Complex manifold, which still doesn't make much sense to me, but links to manifold, as Fropuff did, which finally gave me some inkling of what a Calabi-Yau manifold is. I just dont think its fair for people to have to navigate a maze of links just to figure out what an article is about. --Someones life 17:58, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Actually I think Fropuff's version is pretty good for an intro. Although I really dislike the vacuous "The precise definition of a Calabi-Yau manifold, given below, is somewhat technical." Of course it is given below. Technicality is relative/POV. A prerequisite for this is that manifold itself remains general and non-technical enough and doesn't effectively become topological manifold. --MarSch 11:31, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

since the article was first tagged, edits have added an introductory paragraph, a diagram, more details in the definition, additional examples, and more links. is it time to remove the "too technical" tag? Lunch 03:50, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] the compactness requirement

A Calabi-Yau (C-Y) manifold isn't required to be compact (it's probably better to say that compactness is an optional part of the definition). Otherwise, it makes little sense to discuss compactification of C-Y manifolds as is done in the "Applications in String Theory" section. If the manifold is compact, then it is its compactification. -- KarlHallowell 20:04, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Look at this preprint, Topological Strings and Their Physical Applications [1], by Andrew Neitzke and Cumrun Vafa (see pp. 3-4). They replace the conditions of compactness and the vanishing of the first Chern class with the condition that the manifold admits a global, nonvanishing, holomorphic n-form. It coincides with with our definition when the manifold is compact. -- KarlHallowell 20:21, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Historical Motivation

It think this entry would be enriched if the reason that led Calabi to define Calabi-Yau manifolds from his study of Kahler structures is added.

I know little of the historical motivation for these manifolds. Do you have any sources you can recommend? -- KarlHallowell 19:29, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't know any reference for this; I actualy visited this entry with hopes to find it out.