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Elegant Universe Airs Tonight on PBS
fatarfy writes "USA Today among others has an article discussing tonight's presentation of Brian Greene's Elegant Universe, which discusses String Theory. It airs on PBS. From the article: 'The two segments of the show turn their spotlights on a crisis in physics, one invisible to the general public but increasingly embarrassing to the discipline. Simply put, Einstein's unbelievably accurate explanation of gravity, known as general relativity, is completely out of whack with the equally accurate explanation of electromagnetism, radioactivity and atomic forces known as quantum mechanics. The theories are mankind's most fundamental views of verifiable reality, and the disagreement means that something important about the universe eludes our understanding.' Sounds like it's worth watching."
"... something important about the universe eludes our understanding..."
Exactly correct, but also unintentionally funny. I'm guessing something is more accurately 100,000,000 things.
We're talking about PBS here. It's really easy to skip the commercials already, since they're not embedded in the program.
Of course, if they offered it for download on the internet, they wouldn't sell as many DVDs for $20.
Whatever, my tax money is already paying for the program. Please, someone record this and put it on Kazaa for me.
In order to balance, one of the two opposing socks is pushed away from the other in the unseen plane, balancing the washing machine but, regretfully, making that sock unobtainable. Many scientists believe that at the opposing side of the washing machines is a large black hole, into which the socks go, which in turn is unbalanced as a result causing each sock to remove a small amount of mass from the hole on entry.
This is why you get holes in your socks. It's symmetry.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I'm stupid. I meant to say also the following. What if we specify an ample line bundle L on the C-Y 3-fold X; this is a polarization of X? Ample in algebraic geometry is the same as positive in several complex variables.
Among other things, this gives a *volume* of X, a positive real number, which is the same kind of volume that we're used to thinking of---like a cube with sides all equal to 1 has volume 1, etc. The Griffiths and Harris book would explain this better than I can.
The volume is something like $L^3/sqrt{2\pi}$, or something like that. Since it's physics, there are some kind of units. If this volume is small enough (i.e. measured in small enough units), it might suggest a reason why we can't move "along" the six dimensions corresponding to the C-Y 3-fold bundle: something small like an electron already fills up the tiny volume.
Ah, whatever. I'm just talking out my butt.