Definition and motivation for Twistors

Question

What are Twistors? Why are they important?

This particular statement in Wikipedia is intriguing

According to Andrew Hodges, twistor space is useful for conceptualizing the way photons travel through space, using four complex numbers.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2015-03-23 11:09 (UTC), posted by SE-user Prathyush

Comments

Possibly relevant: physics.stackexchange.com/q/36359

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2015-03-23 11:09 (UTC), posted by SE-user twistor59

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See here: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/twistor%20space#TwistorsFor4dMinkowskiSpacetime

Answer 1

Your question can be answered at many levels. I'll keep it simple; I'm not very well versed with the grand picture.

Twistors provide an efficient (and possibly natural) means to encode the kinematics of massless particles and the resulting conformal symmetry. For a nice and clear introduction, check Witten's lecture notes from PiTP 2004: http://www.sns.ias.edu/pitp2/2004/schedule.html

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2015-03-23 11:09 (UTC), posted by SE-user Siva