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I was brought up on Imperial units: pounds, feet, etc. - I hated it, I found metric much, much easier to deal with.

12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 880 yards in half a mile

16 ounces in a pound, 14 pounds in a stone, 112 pounds in a hundredweight, 20 hundredweight in a ton
(if a new born baby is 6 lb 4 oz, and the mother is 10 stone 10 pounds, what fraction of the mother's weight is the baby?)

The metric system is much easier, and is consistent with the numbering system most of us are used too!

If you want truly fundamental units we could adopt those in use by physicists, such as string theorists, see:
http://superstringtheory.com/unitsa.html
where they describe things in terms of Planck length, Planck time, & Planck mass - but not very useful for everyday life!

Nothing or the Big Crunch depending on your favorite theory.

Just Rmeber that our 4dimenstions 3d+time, might only exist in our universe. Ever looked into String Theory?.
Most likely everything they are saying today is way different than what it actually is. But to be able to comprehend what might be out there, and to think of new ways it can be imagined, Is to me, a huge step in our advancement.
To me, this bubble is merely a little 'pop!' that happened as the big bang accured. Although it happened very quick, we were caught in this bubble, where inside brought on these 4 dimensions and this split second of time outside, happened for billions of years inside.
Somewhere on Slashdot there was a story about universes appearing in the corner of your office. I think this isn't far from the truth, since space-time is all relative. One might appear and disappear in our dimensions, but might exists for a long time in theirs.
One more thing. ... shit i forgot, Ill post it later

you actually can get the minutes back by reversing time.

There are real time eaters out there, they exist beyond three dimensions and exist in several dimensional space. If you saw how they really look, you'd go insane like I did when I first saw them.

First learn about super strings and then we can discuss how the universe and multiverse actually work. Hawking got a lot of things wrong, the Hawking paradox was but one of them and the information and matter and energy does not simply disappear, it ends up in a different dimension. One you Terrans have not discovered yet. But keep guessing, you'll find it eventually and then learn how to reverse time.

This is better than most people think : string theory is a generalisation of *both* general relativity and quantum mechanics. It is consistent with both, therefore all QM and GR results can be found in ST (now M-theory). Now for ST to predict something *new* and therefore interesting is difficult, because it must happen at the QM-GR interface, i.e in very extreme environments like near black hole.

In addition the theory is difficult to handle mathematically. It would be good to be able to find things like Hawkings black-hole radiation from ST, but I'm not sure anyone has been able to pull it off yet, although the entropy of black holes have been derived from ST in some cases.

At Sony they subscribe to String Theory and Brane theory. Space is not three dimensional.

Seriously. Here is it

Stick 1 - X, Y, Z(press the stick)
Stick 2 - X, Y, Z(again press the stick)
Motion sensor X, Y, Z (Assuming the sensor works in 3 dimensions.)

Theoreticly it could be Nineaxis instead of Sixaxis

There's a basic explanation of the known forces (Strong, Electronmagnetic, Weak and Gravity

There are quite a few ideas kicking about:

scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG)

Modified Newtonian Dynamics
General Relativity,
Quantum Gravity,
The http://www.halexandria.org/dward155.htm">Zero-poin t Field,
Superstring Theory,
M-theory,
Inflation/Cosmology,
Yilmaz gravitation, and
Membrane Gravity

Law of Universal Gravitation,

And there's also Intelligent Gravity

Unfortunately, there is no one simple experiment to prove any of these either true or false.

According to the string theory, there are 26 spacetime dimensions. I'm sorry that your 15 years old and ignorant.

http://www.superstringtheory.com/basics/basic4a.ht ml

Maybe so. Not that I know how that one works any better than quantum mechanics. ;)

This is known in Superstring Theory since about '96.
See http://www.superstringtheory.com/cosmo/cosmo5a.htm l

Everything is predictable scientifically. It's just that there's too many variables to do it practically.

What is this, 1792?

I think this isn't true anymore

Why?

If it were possible to travel backward in time and alter history, it already would have been. WWII (and others) would not have happened as certainly some future time traveler would go back and make sure that all the BAD dictators would never be born and all BAD things that happened, never happen. I use the wars as a point of reference because they are universally known/recorded events and everyone can agree that mankind would have done much better had they never happened. ANYONE can agree that it would be a GOOD thing to go back in time and prevent those terrible events from ever happening.

So either time travel is not possible, as future travelers would have already gone back and prevented certain things from ever happening OR time travel is possible and the past can not be altered at all. One possibility is that the M-Theory comes into play and any attempt to alter time ejects the traveler into another "brane"..
Also see, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory

see the superstring theory: http://superstringtheory.com/

Check this out. Anyway from my understanding string theory in its modern form implies supersymmetry. If supersymmetry is disproven than string theory in it's current form is inconsistent. So yeah string theory isn't exactly dead but needs some major rework. So much rework that it might be unfixable.

Black holes do not exist, but some weird objects that behave exactly like black holes do. :))

OTOH, I haven't found that article too reasonable. It relies on contradictions between Quantum physics and General Relativity that are currently being solved by Superstring theory.

http://superstringtheory.com/

String theory may or may "be the solution". But let's not kid ourselves; there have been *no* experiments done that support string theory. The site linked is just playing "let's pretend".

There is an enormous amount of work that makes Quantum Mechanics play well with relativity.

The problem with quantum mechanics and relativity is that the theory of quantum mechanics only works well when gravity is so weak that it can be neglected. Particle theory only works when we pretend gravity doesn't exist. On the other hand, general relativity only works when we pretend that the Universe is purely classical and that quantum mechanics is not needed in our description of nature.

The solution is string theory. This website has a nice list of expirements that have been done in favor of string theory.

classical physics = 3 space dimensions relativistic physics = 4 dimensions (space+time) braneworld physics = 5 dimension (space+time+mass) http://superstringtheory.com/experm/exper51.html The holy grail of modern theoretical physics is the unification of quantum and relativistic theory. A key idea here is the possibility that there might be extra, hard-to-perceive dimensions. The braneworld theory say that the extra dimension is mass, so the mass of elementary particles might actually be fluctuating, if ever so slightly. Mass dynamics! Who knows, these ultra fine mass experiments may give us a way to test some of these crazy theories.

Decades of work has indicated more than three ways to make QM compatible with GR, including: string theory (AKA M-theory), twistors, and loop quantum gravity (LQG). However, it is suspected by some that, just like St. Patrick would tell us, these three are actually different facets of the same underlying reality. (Just like different interpretations of QM don't actually produce different predictions.)

Decades of work has indicated more than three ways to make QM compatible with GR, including: string theory (AKA M-theory), twistors, and loop quantum gravity (LQG). However, it is suspected by some that, just like St. Patrick would tell us, these three are actually different facets of the same underlying reality. (Just like different interpretations of QM don't actually produce different predictions.)

This misunderstanding stems from our science education in grade school, during which we're taught that a "theory" is just a guess that has yet to be proven.

Let me tell you about how theoretical physics really works. Quantum THEORY is just that, a theory. But it has been tested to unbelievable precision. Using the theory of quantum electrodynamics, one can calculate constants of nature from first principles to better than 12 decimal places. These theories are "right," even though there might be some improvement or refinement that comes along later.

That's the end of my general rant. Now to address specific things you said that were, quite ironically, complete baloney. You say general relativity (GR) hasn't been tested. Einstein's first prediction using GR concerned the deflection of light around the sun during an eclipse. His prediction was different from what others were saying, and when the eclipse of 1919 finally came, Einstein was vindicated. GR passes major experimental test #1.

Do you have GPS in your car? If you do, you may be surprised to know that those things rely on the mathematics of GR. Without taking into account some of the terms that pop out of the equations of GR, your GPS would never be able to locate you. But it can, and hence GR passes experimental test #2 with flying colors.

Finally, I point you to the Nobel Prize's page on Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor. They found experimental proof that two stars orbiting each other were decaying at a rate exactly in accordance to what had been predicted years before. This is a very stringent test of the validity of GR -- the stars were orbiting each other near the "strong field" where gravitational effects are really strong, and hence where any deviation from the behavior predicted by the theory should be obvious -- and, once again, GR passed the test like an Asian kid taking math.

A certain amount of skepticism is always healthy, of course. Do I think there will be eventual refinements to GR? Of course, probably in the form of superstring theory. But before you go around proclaiming that it's all baloney, you better figure out what you're talking about.

I thought the string theory was the hardest and most useful theory to prove or solve.

Dr Michio Kaku has set out to prove or disprove it and says if solved would allow time travel, teleportation, and agelessness.

In case you are not aware, Claude Shannon adressed the issue of 3-D crossword puzzles in "The Mathematical Theory of Communication". I quote:

The redundancy of a language is related to the existence of crossword puzzles. If the redundancy is zero any sequence of letters is a reasonable text in the language and any two-dimensional array of letters forms a crossword puzzle. If the redundancy is too high the language imposes too many constraints for large crossword puzzles to be possible. A more detailed analysis shows that if we assume the constraints imposed by the language are of a rather chaotic and random nature, large crossword puzzles are just possible when the redundancy is 50%. If the redundancy is 33%, three-dimensional crossword puzzles should be possible, etc.

Since he also claims that the redundancy of English is 50% (in other places, he claims it is even higher), it appears that the father of information theory has decided that you will not be able to pull off a 3-D crossword puzzle. To me, that sounds like a great reason to try and do it. Not many people sucessfully prove Claude Shannon wrong, even indirectly.

Of course, if you do create a 3-D crossword puzzle, you should call it a 11-D puzzle, and claim that all the other dimensions are curled up very small. If some of the smartest people in the world can get away with that, you should be able to also.

As for the description of gravity being incorrect, I hate to tell you this, but general relativity solves *so* many problems that cannot be solved otherwise that it's preposterous at this point to consider anything else. Gravitational lensing, bending of light by masses, binary pulsar decay, Mercury's perihelion precession... etc. etc... NO other theory of gravity explains any of this, unless it starts with General Relativity and expands on it.

The theory of relativity works very well in large scale, but it doesn't work in small scale, i.e. the subatomic particle scale. It and the quantum field theory simply refuse to work together. That's why a general theory of everything is needed.

One very promising theory is called the string theory. I recommend exploring the website, it's very interesting reading.

Check The Official String Theory site if you're confused about all these concepts. When you've done that, you will have gained some answers, but will of course get even more questions. :-)

Lol, too fast to capture.. I suppose the Cisco uses magic packet-fu to route the data without needing to actually know it's there / where it's going. Or maybe it's a Spooky action at a distance kinda thing

Second: I can't see how you can possibly test any of this.

Perhaps because you're not a string theorist? :)

There is some interesting information about what kind of experiements could give us evidence for string theory here.
In fact, some researchers at my school have been involved in tests of the force law of gravity at very small scales in an attempt to find evidence for the extra dimensions that string theory claims exist. Nothing has turned up yet of course, but the likelyhood was fairly small at the scales observed; IIRC, the number of dimensions that gravity propagates through would determine the scale at which changes in the force law would be observed, with higher numbers of dimensions (I think they need to be "compact" dimensions) requiring smaller scales. (Or something like that).

As described in the site linked to above (though I didn't study the material on the site that closely) supersymmetry also offers some good opportunities for gathering evidence for string theory as well using particle accelerators. I'm not sure whether the tests could actually falsify the theory, but then, I'm not a string theorist either, and some more research would no doubt prove enlightening.

Why not consult Official String Theory Web site :)

As well, quantum tunneling becomes a major issue, but this isn't as important as the sheer limit of the architecture. How so? I thought that since they were operating above the quantum level, that its efefct on them would be so minimal it wouldnt matter much at all? Or would absolute zero even change they way the strings (see Herefor more information on String Theory) behave?

Go here

It's a much more interesting collection of information on string theory. A slide show/audio collection and a video. There's even a section of the main site that explains the branches of mathematics you need to know to actually understand superstrings.



p

I agree with the series being fairly lame. Brian Greene is annoying. The entire time, he talked as if he was speaking to a little, bitty baby.. Widening his eyes and flapping his arms around a lot.

The production values were ridiculous, extremely over the top. And everyone seems to agree that it is totally devoid of mathematics and it still denies you any sort of strong understanding of the concepts. Just ask anyone who watched it if they can explain how or why the five different versions turned out to be the same (M-Theory). They can't! And that is a joke.. All you know from the Nova show is that oh.. "there were five versions.. but it was really just one"

Go here and listen the audio collection; then give the video a viewing. You may have a hard time soaking up the slides and the audio explaining how M-Theory came to encompass all five.. but it does a lot better job of clarifying the concept.

All Nova did with this show was encourage people to remain ignorant by convincing them that they'd learned something. I don't see what is so wrong with challenging the viewer just a weee little bit. They spent an inordinate amount of time just trying to convince us all that there could be more than three dimensions.

oh well.. I just got real excited and was let down by the whole series..



p

Superstring theory has been superceeded by M-theory, which addresses many of the inconsistencies that made superstring theory seem a bit dubious.

Essentially, the quantum gravity theorists were right and the superstring theorists were wrong, especially regarding numbers of dimensions. M-theory replaces both theories, solidifying what we now know and have experimentally observed. I'm sure it receives a bit of resistance from people in positions to profit from superstring theory as it is now, but it's negligable.

I know "M" doesn't sound as catchy as "superstring", but do try to keep up. These articles on a geek site like slashdot are like a chemist's journal still discussing classical alchemy.

Brian Greene wrote an excellent book, The Elegant Universe on superstring theory. It's an engaging book, and well worth the read.

You can buy it here from Amazon.

In the Einsteinian physics world, energy can only be created by the destruction of matter. Which certainly was going on at the Big Bang.

However, I believe there also suggestions from string theory that the events leading up to the Big Bang event may have also transferred mass/energy to the dimensions we're capable of sensing from those we normally can't.

See this page for some well presented info.

Be careful what you wish for. Thanks to fun things such as String Theory, Time Dilation, and Quantum Time Travel you just might get that warp drive... yesterday!

I'm not smart enough to be able to verify this info, but have a look here :


http://superstringtheory.com/forum/eluboard/mess ag es4/59.html

Chers,

I didn't say i know.. that's why i said "probably".. It's possible, but it's unlikely. You can find more info on t these forums, there are quite some physics freaks posting interesting things. They are answering to other questions too, like "what is the speed of gravity?".

I saw a report on the global warming flash points within earth. Basically the idea traced the carbon output of rainforests. Geologically global warming was gradual but intensived at certain time periods. These time periods were centered around forest fires in the rain forest areas. The general map is this. Rain forests can only act as a carbon sink for so much carbon before the dead material created by the forest begins to add to carbon output instead of the plants breath cycle decreasing it. In natural historic global warming (without man made intervention) the increase of life on earth slowly moved carbon distribtion until the atmosphere warmed this slow warm hyper excelerated in the last phases. This caused quick changes in temperature followed by a dramatic cold period. The key was the current rain forest model. It appears rain forests hold more carbon than predicted. In tracing this carbon it was found that dead organic material was carried by the rivers and decayed producing methane. But instead of the gas being released in the atmosphere this material was pushed into the sea depths and froze. Methan ice packs have been hit by oil drilling before and than come up a boil. The theory is that this extra carbon sink accounts for the rapid period of global warming in the geological evidence. Slow global warming slowly raises the rates of forest fires releasing more carbon from the forests when temperatures hit a point of affectin sea temperatures the methane in the ocean becomes gas. These large storages are dumped almost instantly creating a dramatic and quick rise in temperature which melts the ice caps and glaciers. This changes the saline levels of the ocean changing the heat distribution of the currents and flipping into a cold period. So it is best to not bring up these carbon sinks but to leave them untouched. Again the drive should be to move away from carbon based fuel. Related links
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/12/12 18_earthbelch.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/early-earth-01k.htm l
http://www.hydrogen.co.uk/h2_now/journal/articles/ 3_Methane.htm
http://superstringtheory.com/forum/warmboard/messa ges2/116.html

There's a discussion of this here on Superstringtheory.com I would put this as an update to the original story, but I don't know how to update.. Original poster, Jim

Define "particle".

There's a lot of theories about alternatives to the big bang besides the one mentioned in the Yahoo article. The main one that is getting a lot of interest in scientific circles isn't this new one in the Yahoo article. Instead, it's the so called Ekpyrotic theory, with the name coming for the Greek word for fire. It is so intresting because it brings together two disparate areas of physics: inflation and M branes. Inflation is a weird concept that says the universe expanded from the diameter or an atom to the size of a grapefruit almost instantly - required to explain the way galaxies are clumped and clustered in the sky we see today and first postulated by a guy named Alan Guth. M branes are an offshoot of string theory postulated by Ed Whitten. There's tons of stuff on these topics on the web; all of it is facinating, enter any of these terms in a search engine and keep reading. Next stop, Google...

Arguing with theory (especially Relativity) is not uncommon. The only way theories become so well supported is trial by fire.

I'm all for arguing with the theory, but more interested in the result.

Since we are talking Unified theory, please allow a shameless plug to my fav String Theory site.

Everytime I hear theoretical physics discussions my mind starts to wonder...

When you look at matters of scale in theoretical physics and how we're now able to see inside the basic components of atoms; you have to wonder if God created His universe by a freak physicial breakthrough in a corporate lab, had time to observe us, then change our destiny and get a carptenter's wife pregant then mysteriously stop directly influencing our lives not soon afterward?

Maybe our universe is sitting in a dustbin as a spent experiment in some superuniverse. What happens to His creation when they take the trash out?

Just a thought.

--Theology + Physics = KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

I completely agree to this. I did enjoy reading this book very much, and I think it has opened new horizons to me. Here's a URL about the topic: http://www.superstringtheory.com/

...can be found here at the Official String Theory Website. This site gives an overview of the need for string theory, what it is, and how it works with previous theories. Definately worth a read if you have read or are thinking of reading this book.

Religion established for humanity that there was nothing that it could not explain. It's all just a matter of 'listening to God'. It's just a matter of serving God the right way.

Then science came along and proved that there is more to this universe than religion can explain.

Then science said that there is nothing in the universe that science cannot ultimately explain. It's all just a matter of getting the numbers and theories down right.

Then God got sick and tired of this bickering and invented String Theory.


Jon Katz might be wise to realize that the best wisdom is to talk to God while mastering the microscope. If we master science without talking to God, we'll obliterate ourselves. If we ignore science, we're ignoring God and we will be obliterated by a disease, or by a comet. If we listen to God, however, we will master the gravitons, skip across galaxies on tachyons, and we will ultimately discover that science is God's law, not the proof of a godless universe.

Of course we can also use science and misinterpret God and blow ourselves to extinction in a nuclear holy war, too.

I can recomend this book "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene. It's very enyojable reading - though not easy.

Check out this web site (String Theory) to find out more.