This piece of text was written as an attempt to provide a popular summary
about TGD. This is of course mission impossible since TGD is something at
the top of centuries of evolution which has led from Newton to standard model.
This means that there is a background of highly refined conceptual thinking
about Universe so that even the best computer graphics and animations fail
to help. One can still try to create some inspiring impressions at least. This
chapter approaches the challenge by answering the most frequently asked questions.
Why TGD? How TGD could help to solve the problems of recent day
theoretical physics? What are the basic princples of TGD? What are the basic
guidelines in the construction of TGD?
These are examples of this kind of questions which I try to answer in using
the only language that I can talk. This language is a dialect of the language
used by elementary particle physicists, quantum field theorists, and other people
applying modern physics. At the level of practice involves technically heavy
mathematics but since it relies on very beautiful and simple basic concepts, one
can do with a minimum of formulas, and reader can always to to Wikipedia if
it seems that more details are needed. I hope that reader could catch the basic
principles and concepts: technical details are not important. And I almost
forgot: problems! TGD itself and almost every new idea in the development
of TGD has been inspired by a problem.
Keywords: Second law, arrow of thermodynamical time, biological evolution,
Poincare invariance, classical conservation laws, quantum measurement theory, state function reduction, non-determinism, standard
model, super string models, space-time geometry, surface,
imbedding space, geometrization of physics, infinite-dimensional
geometry, physics and number theory, number theoretical universality,
p-adic number fields, quaternions, octonions, associativity,
primes, arithmetic quantum field theory, general coordinate invariance,
zero energy ontology, quantum criticality, finite measurement
resolution, electric magnetic duality, generalized Feynman diagram,
twistor, twistor Grassmannian.
