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The Elegant Universe, Now Available Online
Photon Ghoul writes "PBS has made available online all three hours of the NOVA program on unified theory. Formats are QuickTime and RealVideo with each hour broken up into eight chapters each." I watched the whole thing, and while it's clearly for a lay audience (no math required), it was fun and informative. I was pleased to note that dissenting views on whether string theory was science were presented, and even brief discussion of what constitutes science.
Still, I'd rather buy the $32 DVD set. Hey its good television. Support PBS!
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
One thing that even the people at NOVA have misinterpreted, and I wish they hadn't, is that there is a difference between applied science and pure science. They are not the same.
I am a pure mathematician and my passion and work is in pure science. What I do is explore pure mathematics. None of my work will most likely ever be directly appliable to experiment. But, some day the work that I do, along with many other mathematicians will provide the foundation, the pure science, which physics will be able to use for experimental understanding. Without pure scientific understanding, experimentation can never be anything more than observation.
What 'string theory' should be more properly stated as is 'string hypothesis'. It is certainly not yet a true theory and it is certainly not yet a law. Currently, it is purely a hypothetical explanation and possible prediction model. That does not make it any less powerful or less important. Some day it may prove to be the 'bridge' that is needed to complete one more piece or pieces of the grand puzzle. Although, alone it does not need to be experimentally verifiable. And it is certainly not philosophy.
I think that the fact that they had to pack so many effects into the show to keep today's audience interested is mainly a reflection of the sad state of the MTV generation's attention span.
Actually, I was fine with the visual effects that demonstrated the physics priniciples. Computer graphics are available; why not use them. What stood out to me was the need to keep something, anything moving on the screen at all times. Thus, all the strange sliding panels contantly shuffling back and forth in the background behind the various extra-smart scientists as they talked.
The producers must have reasoned that the target audience was so used to being fed spinning logos, scrolling textbars, subsecond edit cuts and webpage-like clutter, that if they saw nothing but someone sitting still talking, then they'd assume the TV must somehow be broken.
Mathematics is not science. It is mathematics. Math is its own thing, and unless you take an extreme Platonic foundation of mathematics... math is not explored, it is created. That is, math is simply about pure mental constructions, and doesn't necessarily have any connection to the "outside world" or "reality".
:)
As a fan of math myself (I am currently playing with non-well-founded axiomatic set theory), it irks me when people claim that math is a science, or has applications as its purpose. Similarly, it is bothersome when people bring religious concepts such as the Platonic Realm into math.
The very intent of math is to have certainty, not faith in the external existence of mathematical objects - somehow independent and trancendental apart from our minds.
Who knows, maybe these theories do exist independently from our thought, but we can't confirm this. However, we can confirm our own thought's existence, and therefore math should be founded on such a thing.
String Theory is either a religion or philosophy in that it makes a claim about reality based on nothing other than faith. It is just as valid a science as creationism. I do find String Theory to be more interesting though as it makes use of interesting math