Tyler Durden opines: > Yo! Superstring theory is only "continuous math" because the proper > mathematical theory describing strings didn't exist. In the past, physics > has sometimes lagged (ca 1900) sometimes led (Newton) the development of the > needed mathematics. If Superstrings ends up describing "everything", it will > be apparent that Ed Witten was right: "Superstrings is really 21st century > physics that we accidentally stumbled upon in the 20th century". In other > words, progress is slow precisely because the math is so friggin' hard.
Perhaps it is so "friggin' hard" because you are trying to do the equivalent of modular exponentiation with Roman numerals. Manifolds are second countable Hausdorf spaces in which every point has a neighborhood homeomorphic to the open ball in R^N. I see no evidence that the Universe may be infinitely magnified and still remain manifold-like. If the small scale structure of the universe isn't manifold-like, then a theory which says it is an 11-dimensional manifold is not a great leap over a theory which says it is a 4-dimensional manifold. Remember that Einstein, in the days when gravitation and electromagnetism were the only known forces, spent a lot of time trying to incorporate electromagnetism into general relativity by making it the skew-symmetric part of a non-symmetric metric tensor. Einstein found inventing the math to do this "friggin' hard." It was also "friggin' wrong." > As for Superstrings being dead, I'd suggest that quite the opposite is true, > though a lot of the research in strings over the last decade has been done > by mathematicians. Read Hawkings' recent "Universe in a Nutshell"...as some > Superstring proponents have long suggested, it seems we are now coming very > close to experimental verification of one tiny part of this massive theory. I didn't say it was dead. I said it was a "dead end." Whether something will ever produce something of value is orthogonal to whether lots of people will work on it, and peer-review boxloads of eachother's papers. > "The manifold folks are never going to produce anything which obsoletes the > big general relativity book by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, which will > live forever as the apex of predictive power of the manifold approach to > spacetime dynamics." > I don't think any Superstring researcher believes that (at least the ones > I've spoken to don't, and I have spoken to some of the older big figures). Make me a machine that does something of practical value, for which string theory predicts the machine will work, and general relativity and the standard model predict the opposite. Make me something that levitates, or transmutes, or forks off child universes, or generates traversable wormholes, or takes pictures of particles that can only exist if the universe is made up of strings. That will impress me. Protestations as to what the Priesthood of Tenured String Magicians and Popular Coffee Table Book Authors believes or doesn't believe will merely prompt derisive laughing. > Hell, the whole point of Superstrings was to find a way to reconcile General > Relativity with a QM view, and Superstrings is still a very nice candidate. Strings are little more than a trick to evade particle interactions being dimensionless points in space time. It's like saying that gravity can be combined with quantum mechanics if all particles are tiny wiggling plastic bags full of Jello, so small that they only appear pointlike to an ordinary observer. Fuzz out the charge and mass of a particle, and some infinities go away. The measure of the usefulness of a new theory is the increment in predictive power over the prior way of thinking about it. Not how many pages you can cover with indecipherable equations that are "Friggin' Hard." > Hell, Witten himself said something like "The development of General > Relativity probably occurs in nonhuman civilizations as a corrollary to > Superstrings. The discovery of General Relativity on Earth prior to > Superstrings will probably be regarded as an historical accident". I generally discount greatly any math or physics argument which has to appeal to "nonhuman civilizations" in search of profundity. Special relativity follows from the Lorentz Transformations, which follow from almost any clueful research into electromagnetism. General relativity is a simple extension in which Lorentz invariance is a local instead of a global property, and gravity and accelerated frames are locally indistinguishable. The notion that it is even remotely likely that a civilization, at the point where it knows about only two forces and has not yet discovered quantum mechanics, would invent superstring theory and then derive general relativity from it, is wishful thinking of the highest order. > Uh, no. Even if M-theory has nothing to do with reality, it will yield > interesting mathematics for decades. Remember, these branches of physics are > ferociously mathematical. Morons never get anywhere near these fields. Even > I, a genius among mere mortals am a near-Moron in the presence of people > working in these fields. (Want an example? I thought that generating the > confluent hypergeometric functions using contours in the complex plane meant > you were hot shit mathematically. Math-physicists refer to something like > this as "arithmetic".) All of continuous mathematics is merely the study of the behavior of large discrete systems in the limit of low magnification. It's like measuring mathematical proficiency on the single axis of Pi digit computation. Just as non-linear physics is like non-elephant biology, it is the study of the large discrete systems themselves, and not their limiting cases, which will yield new insights into the structure of the universe. The Universe is much better modeled by bits and logic, than it is by manifolds and fields. You will get more insight into the universe by studying something like integer factorization for a year, than you will get by studying M-Theory for a hundred years. M-Theory is a distraction, like injecting opiates, or arguing on Usenet. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
