Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
At 12:20 AM -0800 2/15/03, Bill Stewart wrote: At 07:55 AM 02/14/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote: As one approaches the plank length, I'm getting kind of board with this. (Alternatively, Bob Hettinga can make some kind of pirate comment here...) It's non M, I'll tell ye that, matey... Cheers, RAH Hint: What's the 18th letter of pirate alphabet? Hyuk! -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
At 12:20 AM -0800 2/15/03, Bill Stewart wrote: At 07:55 AM 02/14/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote: As one approaches the plank length, I'm getting kind of board with this. (Alternatively, Bob Hettinga can make some kind of pirate comment here...) It's non M, I'll tell ye that, matey... Cheers, RAH Hint: What's the 18th letter of pirate alphabet? Hyuk! -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: CDR: Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
On Sat, 15 Feb 2003, Bill Stewart wrote: There's a theory that the standard pictures of space aliens have a strong resemblence to what a half-awake human sees when there's a six-month-old kitten staring you in the face from a few inches closer than your eyes' normal focal lengths... Oh. That's a good theory. It ties in well with a (completely insane, but otherwise very good) friend we have. He insists the cat has sampled his flesh, perhaps in order to capture DNA, and has appeared to him hundreds of miles away. I keep insisting some combination of dreaming after visiting and perhaps the stress of his job are responsible. He keeps insisting cats are alien. I see a nice middle-ground developing, if only I can bring him around. -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED] God created the integers, all else is the work of man. - Kronecker
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 12:20:12AM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: There's a theory that the standard pictures of space aliens have a strong resemblence to what a half-awake human sees when there's a six-month-old kitten staring you in the face from a few inches closer than your eyes' normal focal lengths... You know, that's a rather amazing concept -- one of our cats looks amazingly like Yoda even when I'm wide awake. And she has this habit of coming and whispering weird shit in my ear when I'm asleep. -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
On Fri, 14 Feb 2003, James A. Donald wrote: As one approaches the plank length, the structure of space time will become more like fractal quantum foam, It isn't 'fractal' at all, it does cease being continous. Not the same thing. -- We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
At 07:55 AM 02/14/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote: As one approaches the plank length, I'm getting kind of board with this. (Alternatively, Bob Hettinga can make some kind of pirate comment here...) TD Hell, Witten himself said something like The development of General TD Relativity probably occurs in nonhuman civilizations as a corrollary to TD Superstrings. The discovery of General Relativity on Earth prior to TD Superstrings will probably be regarded as an historical accident. ECI generally discount greatly any math or physics argument which has to ECappeal to nonhuman civilizations in search of profundity. I checked with the local non-humans, and they said that strings really are kind of fun, remind them of mouse tails, but that the historical accident was Not Their Fault... JD Suppose we had the ultimate theory of everything handed to us JD on a platter by supercilious aliens. .. and they objected to being called supercilious, as well. There's a theory that the standard pictures of space aliens have a strong resemblence to what a half-awake human sees when there's a six-month-old kitten staring you in the face from a few inches closer than your eyes' normal focal lengths...
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 12:20:12AM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: There's a theory that the standard pictures of space aliens have a strong resemblence to what a half-awake human sees when there's a six-month-old kitten staring you in the face from a few inches closer than your eyes' normal focal lengths... You know, that's a rather amazing concept -- one of our cats looks amazingly like Yoda even when I'm wide awake. And she has this habit of coming and whispering weird shit in my ear when I'm asleep. -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com
Re: CDR: Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
On Sat, 15 Feb 2003, Bill Stewart wrote: There's a theory that the standard pictures of space aliens have a strong resemblence to what a half-awake human sees when there's a six-month-old kitten staring you in the face from a few inches closer than your eyes' normal focal lengths... Oh. That's a good theory. It ties in well with a (completely insane, but otherwise very good) friend we have. He insists the cat has sampled his flesh, perhaps in order to capture DNA, and has appeared to him hundreds of miles away. I keep insisting some combination of dreaming after visiting and perhaps the stress of his job are responsible. He keeps insisting cats are alien. I see a nice middle-ground developing, if only I can bring him around. -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED] God created the integers, all else is the work of man. - Kronecker
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
-- On 13 Feb 2003 at 16:51, Eric Cordian wrote: 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. As one approaches the plank length, the structure of space time will become more like fractal quantum foam, with an increasingly complex topology. Therefore, at distances comparable with the plank length, spacetime will not have a definite dimensionality. It might be that in the limit of very small distances, it becomes eleven dimensional, or it might be that the description of spacetime at distances smaller than the plank length cannot be given any definite dimensionality. 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. The shape of standard particle physics suggests that all of what we think of as physical law is the result of spontaneous symmetry breaking, merely a particular solution to a set of highly non linear equations, that have an infinite number of possible solutions, most of which correspond to universes nothing like our own -- that at sufficiently small scales and sufficiently high energies we encounter a metaphysics, capable of generating an infinite variety of systems of physical law. Suppose we had the ultimate theory of everything handed to us on a platter by supercilious aliens. In order to test it we first would have to find the solution, out of an infinite number of solutions, that corresponds to the normal physics of the universe. It seems likely that just finding the solution that corresponds to our vacuum would be very difficult indeed. Suppose we had the theory of everything, and suppose we could solve it, and suppose we could manipulte energies trillions of trillions of times larger than those we can now manipulate, with precision trillions of trillions of times larger than we can now control. Then we could remake a small region of space time to have physical laws that we might find more convenient for some purposes. All of this, however, seems hard. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG ok+QpWKWbKVF8q5f7HW4Ghw4PpqAPEr2FG3ocN2v 4Bd0OSE0YuN4HkOpXceSnWYuUaZou9XXgseFFRkXv
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
Eric Cordian wrote... Perhaps it is so friggin' hard because you are trying to do the equivalent of modular exponentiation with Roman numerals. Well, you're kind of missing my point. You said that 'M' was for Moron, and I was pointing out that the Morons working on this theory are in some ways some of the most mathematically proficient people on the planet (and some are just plain old great physicsts). I'd point out the geat lessons to be taken from Kuhn's structure of Scientific Revolutions (with which I largely disagree, however). Basically, that those of us who sit on this side of a revolution not only often disagree with the new approach, we often don't even believe its actually science. That could be the case here. (Feynman didn't think Superstrings was physics as he knew it, but he was also fully aware that some of his most respected colleagues were working on it). (In fact, I would have thought a member of the OTO, no strangers to alternative thinking, would be a little slower to declare that Superstrings was for morons.) 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. I don't fully get your argument here, but I never claimed to be a mathematical physicist. If you are familiar with Kaluza and Klein (aparently useless pud-pulling when it was developed), you'll understand that string theory arises directly from the notion that the small scale topological structure of space time is entirely different from the large scale one. Those extra 7/8 dimensions (depnding on how you count) never unfolded and are only visible at Planck scales. 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. Uh, but the fact that it was wrong doesn't make Einstein a moron. (And also, saying that a physical theory is wrong might arguably be like saying that a Picasso painting is wrong, if you are a Kuhn true believer!) I didn't say it was dead. I said it was a dead end. Are you sure that's what you typed? 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. Well, you seem to have some odd ideas about the goals of Superstrings. Being able to re-extract the standard model as a low energy simplification was and is a main goal for superstrings, as far as physics is concerned. Some headway is being made, too. As for predicting the outcome of experiment, give it time. A few measurable predictions are now being made, but remember the main domain of superstrings are energies that correspond to 10^(-43) sec after the universe began. A brute-force accelerator approach would require a ring larger than the galaxy, so some cleverness will be in order. 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. Child universes are actually kind of predicted by inflation theory, which does not require superstrings per se. I generally discount greatly any math or physics argument which has to appeal to nonhuman civilizations in search of profundity. You seemed to have missed the point. You seemed to be claiming that the goals of superstrings included proving that General relativity is wrong, and my point here was to show that one of the main and most brilliant proponents of Superstrings (Witten) considers precisely the opposite as being true. 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. Yes, and Saint Peter's dome is a straightforward application of a paintbrush. Just as non-linear physics is like non-elephant biology, If I understand you correctly, this is a great phrase (I'll have to steal it). But we're good at solving linear equations. Many nonlinear equations may not have solutions that we can write down with pen or paper, (or even simulate on a computer for that matter)...ah well. M-Theory is a distraction, like injecting opiates, or arguing on Usenet. Yikes. I understand the concept of having an opinion, but somehow I think your arguments on this issue would not be very quick to discourage
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
Tyler Durden Wrote: Well, you're kind of missing my point. You said that 'M' was for Moron, and I was pointing out that the Morons working on this theory are in some ways some of the most mathematically proficient people on the planet (and some are just plain old great physicsts). Well, of course I meant that the theory is the wrong approach, not that the people working on it were unskilled craftsmen. Skilled craftsmen can, of course, build both outhouses and palaces. I'd point out the geat lessons to be taken from Kuhn's structure of Scientific Revolutions (with which I largely disagree, however). Basically, that those of us who sit on this side of a revolution not only often disagree with the new approach, we often don't even believe its actually science. That could be the case here. (Feynman didn't think Superstrings was physics as he knew it, but he was also fully aware that some of his most respected colleagues were working on it). I'd agree with Feynman on this one. 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. I don't fully get your argument here, but I never claimed to be a mathematical physicist. One of the fundamental notions of a manifold, is that any two points possess disjoint neighborhoods, no matter how close together the two points are, said neighborhoods containing an infinity of other points. Spacetime does not possess this property, because its only points are the intersections of the world lines of real and virtual elementary particles. Space and time are a statistical aggregate of this interaction of particles, and the notion that there is something between its discrete points is an illusion we only percieve at large scales. If you are familiar with Kaluza and Klein (aparently useless pud-pulling when it was developed), Kaluza and Klein forshadowed the modern idea that the internal symmetries of gauge fields were in reality full-fledged dimensions, as three dimensions of space and one of time were for the gravitational field. They did this by showing that general relativity in five dimensions correctly explained both gravity and electromagnetism. They missed the important point that if the extra dimension were closed and microscopic in size, that observers would still see a 3+1 dimensional universe. you'll understand that string theory arises directly from the notion that the small scale topological structure of space time is entirely different from the large scale one. Those extra 7/8 dimensions (depnding on how you count) never unfolded and are only visible at Planck scales. Yes, if one allows the SU(3) symmetry of the strong force, the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism, and the SU(2) of the weak force, to be real dimensions, in addition to three dimensions of space and one of time, one gets a 10 dimensional theory. Throwing in one more dimension so that all variations on the theory can be abstracted into a single all-encompassing theory gives 11 dimensions. We assume all but 4 of them are compactified. But this is more of an internal symmetries are real dimensions too issue, than a string issue. There's really nothing that stops you from having these microscopic dimensions, and still working with particles instead of strings. This does nothing about the issue I discussed earlier, about the universe being non-manifold-like at Planck scale, and manifold properties being statistical aggregates of particles interacting in a frothy manner. 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. Uh, but the fact that it was wrong doesn't make Einstein a moron. (And also, saying that a physical theory is wrong might arguably be like saying that a Picasso painting is wrong, if you are a Kuhn true believer!) Again, bad things happen to good people, and moronic theories happen to smart scientists. The theories scientists invent after the thing that makes them world-renowned are frequently worthless. Science, after all, generally tries lots of things that don't work before tripping over the thing that does. 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. Well, you seem to have some odd ideas about the goals of
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
-- On 13 Feb 2003 at 16:51, Eric Cordian wrote: 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. As one approaches the plank length, the structure of space time will become more like fractal quantum foam, with an increasingly complex topology. Therefore, at distances comparable with the plank length, spacetime will not have a definite dimensionality. It might be that in the limit of very small distances, it becomes eleven dimensional, or it might be that the description of spacetime at distances smaller than the plank length cannot be given any definite dimensionality. 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. The shape of standard particle physics suggests that all of what we think of as physical law is the result of spontaneous symmetry breaking, merely a particular solution to a set of highly non linear equations, that have an infinite number of possible solutions, most of which correspond to universes nothing like our own -- that at sufficiently small scales and sufficiently high energies we encounter a metaphysics, capable of generating an infinite variety of systems of physical law. Suppose we had the ultimate theory of everything handed to us on a platter by supercilious aliens. In order to test it we first would have to find the solution, out of an infinite number of solutions, that corresponds to the normal physics of the universe. It seems likely that just finding the solution that corresponds to our vacuum would be very difficult indeed. Suppose we had the theory of everything, and suppose we could solve it, and suppose we could manipulte energies trillions of trillions of times larger than those we can now manipulate, with precision trillions of trillions of times larger than we can now control. Then we could remake a small region of space time to have physical laws that we might find more convenient for some purposes. All of this, however, seems hard. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG ok+QpWKWbKVF8q5f7HW4Ghw4PpqAPEr2FG3ocN2v 4Bd0OSE0YuN4HkOpXceSnWYuUaZou9XXgseFFRkXv
M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
Eric Cordian wrote... Continuous math is a dead end. So are strings. 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. The M in M-Theory stands for Moron. 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.) -TD _ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Tyler Durden wrote: The M in M-Theory stands for Moron. I always thought it stood for Mescaline. ]:
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
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
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
Eric Cordian wrote... Perhaps it is so friggin' hard because you are trying to do the equivalent of modular exponentiation with Roman numerals. Well, you're kind of missing my point. You said that 'M' was for Moron, and I was pointing out that the Morons working on this theory are in some ways some of the most mathematically proficient people on the planet (and some are just plain old great physicsts). I'd point out the geat lessons to be taken from Kuhn's structure of Scientific Revolutions (with which I largely disagree, however). Basically, that those of us who sit on this side of a revolution not only often disagree with the new approach, we often don't even believe its actually science. That could be the case here. (Feynman didn't think Superstrings was physics as he knew it, but he was also fully aware that some of his most respected colleagues were working on it). (In fact, I would have thought a member of the OTO, no strangers to alternative thinking, would be a little slower to declare that Superstrings was for morons.) 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. I don't fully get your argument here, but I never claimed to be a mathematical physicist. If you are familiar with Kaluza and Klein (aparently useless pud-pulling when it was developed), you'll understand that string theory arises directly from the notion that the small scale topological structure of space time is entirely different from the large scale one. Those extra 7/8 dimensions (depnding on how you count) never unfolded and are only visible at Planck scales. 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. Uh, but the fact that it was wrong doesn't make Einstein a moron. (And also, saying that a physical theory is wrong might arguably be like saying that a Picasso painting is wrong, if you are a Kuhn true believer!) I didn't say it was dead. I said it was a dead end. Are you sure that's what you typed? 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. Well, you seem to have some odd ideas about the goals of Superstrings. Being able to re-extract the standard model as a low energy simplification was and is a main goal for superstrings, as far as physics is concerned. Some headway is being made, too. As for predicting the outcome of experiment, give it time. A few measurable predictions are now being made, but remember the main domain of superstrings are energies that correspond to 10^(-43) sec after the universe began. A brute-force accelerator approach would require a ring larger than the galaxy, so some cleverness will be in order. 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. Child universes are actually kind of predicted by inflation theory, which does not require superstrings per se. I generally discount greatly any math or physics argument which has to appeal to nonhuman civilizations in search of profundity. You seemed to have missed the point. You seemed to be claiming that the goals of superstrings included proving that General relativity is wrong, and my point here was to show that one of the main and most brilliant proponents of Superstrings (Witten) considers precisely the opposite as being true. 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. Yes, and Saint Peter's dome is a straightforward application of a paintbrush. Just as non-linear physics is like non-elephant biology, If I understand you correctly, this is a great phrase (I'll have to steal it). But we're good at solving linear equations. Many nonlinear equations may not have solutions that we can write down with pen or paper, (or even simulate on a computer for that matter)...ah well. M-Theory is a distraction, like injecting opiates, or arguing on Usenet. Yikes. I understand the concept of having an opinion, but somehow I think your arguments on this issue would not be very quick to discourage
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
Tyler Durden Wrote: Well, you're kind of missing my point. You said that 'M' was for Moron, and I was pointing out that the Morons working on this theory are in some ways some of the most mathematically proficient people on the planet (and some are just plain old great physicsts). Well, of course I meant that the theory is the wrong approach, not that the people working on it were unskilled craftsmen. Skilled craftsmen can, of course, build both outhouses and palaces. I'd point out the geat lessons to be taken from Kuhn's structure of Scientific Revolutions (with which I largely disagree, however). Basically, that those of us who sit on this side of a revolution not only often disagree with the new approach, we often don't even believe its actually science. That could be the case here. (Feynman didn't think Superstrings was physics as he knew it, but he was also fully aware that some of his most respected colleagues were working on it). I'd agree with Feynman on this one. 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. I don't fully get your argument here, but I never claimed to be a mathematical physicist. One of the fundamental notions of a manifold, is that any two points possess disjoint neighborhoods, no matter how close together the two points are, said neighborhoods containing an infinity of other points. Spacetime does not possess this property, because its only points are the intersections of the world lines of real and virtual elementary particles. Space and time are a statistical aggregate of this interaction of particles, and the notion that there is something between its discrete points is an illusion we only percieve at large scales. If you are familiar with Kaluza and Klein (aparently useless pud-pulling when it was developed), Kaluza and Klein forshadowed the modern idea that the internal symmetries of gauge fields were in reality full-fledged dimensions, as three dimensions of space and one of time were for the gravitational field. They did this by showing that general relativity in five dimensions correctly explained both gravity and electromagnetism. They missed the important point that if the extra dimension were closed and microscopic in size, that observers would still see a 3+1 dimensional universe. you'll understand that string theory arises directly from the notion that the small scale topological structure of space time is entirely different from the large scale one. Those extra 7/8 dimensions (depnding on how you count) never unfolded and are only visible at Planck scales. Yes, if one allows the SU(3) symmetry of the strong force, the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism, and the SU(2) of the weak force, to be real dimensions, in addition to three dimensions of space and one of time, one gets a 10 dimensional theory. Throwing in one more dimension so that all variations on the theory can be abstracted into a single all-encompassing theory gives 11 dimensions. We assume all but 4 of them are compactified. But this is more of an internal symmetries are real dimensions too issue, than a string issue. There's really nothing that stops you from having these microscopic dimensions, and still working with particles instead of strings. This does nothing about the issue I discussed earlier, about the universe being non-manifold-like at Planck scale, and manifold properties being statistical aggregates of particles interacting in a frothy manner. 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. Uh, but the fact that it was wrong doesn't make Einstein a moron. (And also, saying that a physical theory is wrong might arguably be like saying that a Picasso painting is wrong, if you are a Kuhn true believer!) Again, bad things happen to good people, and moronic theories happen to smart scientists. The theories scientists invent after the thing that makes them world-renowned are frequently worthless. Science, after all, generally tries lots of things that don't work before tripping over the thing that does. 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. Well, you seem to have some odd ideas about the goals of
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
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
M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
Eric Cordian wrote... Continuous math is a dead end. So are strings. 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. The M in M-Theory stands for Moron. 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.) -TD _ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963
Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...
On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Tyler Durden wrote: The M in M-Theory stands for Moron. I always thought it stood for Mescaline. ]:
