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The Fabric of the Cosmos
Now, when I say "easy," this is, like so much of Greene's book, relative. It's taken me three weeks to wade through the concepts and often humorous prose that goes along with them. Being something of a physics geek, I have a basic concept of relativity and quantum mechanics. Greene takes his time laying out classical physics, from Newton to Einstein, exploring the version of the universe presented by the laws of the very large. He then dedicates just as much room enumerating the precepts of the standard model as well as those of quantum mechanics. With these two pillars of modern physics established, we are next whisked on a journey through cosmology, delving further and further back into the history of the universe until both quantum mechanics and relativity break down and we are introduced to strings.
Greene's attention to strings does not overwhelm the book, as in The Elegant Universe, and he doesn't delve deeply into the concepts and math behind any of the theories of physics as in the latter half of his earlier text. What he does present is a very good conceptual overview of modern physics, all the while using the frameworks provided to drive at the central question: What are space and time? (Or "spacetime" as relativity puts it).
This sophomore effort is actually better, I believe, than The Elegant Universe. Greene has a way of explaining things in terms that non-physicists can grasp. His use of pop-culture icons to drive his points home are as masterful as they are funny. It would be my bet that should this book be made into its own television special (and it should) it will have to be a joint work by PBS and Fox. After seeing Greene present his Elegant Universe on PBS, and reading this book, I'm beginning to see him as a new Carl Sagan, or perhaps the illegitimate love child of Sagan and Matt Groening, if such a thing were possible.
In the end, though, the book has left me with more questions than answers. To be sure, Greene and the theories that he covers provide answers, but to conceptualize and understand them is my current difficulty. I'm sure that some of my own problems arise from learning through allegory. Not having the mathematical background to understand these concepts on a more fundamental level is, I'm sure, leading to my own habit of taking an allegory too far. Would the book benefit from a deeper analysis of physics? I don't think so. To take things much deeper would lose those of us without a deep rooting in mathematics. If anything, Greene's work should inspire us to learn more, to grasp the concepts at a deeper level, to understand them in a more fundamental way, if this is indeed possible with the strange world of quantum mechanics.
Greene does delve into what the future of physics could hold. This is, in my opinion, the weakest part of the book. While it is interesting to be exposed to what the 'next big thing' could be, without the grounding that Greene enjoyed in the previous four sections of the book the final chapters prove less fulfilling than the ones that worked towards them. It's not that Greene doesn't explain the concepts expertly, but knowing that we're reading about a theory that hasn't even been fully formed, that is only a step away from speculation, means they don't stand as tall as the previous chapters. People may say this about string theory as well, because it is still very much an evolving theory.
Still, this accounts for no more than the denouement of an otherwise thrilling, work. Having traveled once again with Greene on a journey through physics I can say that I understand what Feynman meant when he spoke of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out; thankfully Greene is a good bit easier to follow than Feynman.
You can purchase The Fabric of the Cosmos from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
If you haven't seen the series of PBS specials, "The Elegant Universe", I recommend that you do. They're free for download from the PBS website IIRC. It's an excellent and very informative discussion of some very interesting concepts.
It's kind of an ugly plaid corduroy, with elbow patches.
Recently I joined the local astronomy club in Santa Cruz, CA. The night I joined the feature was a lecture, "The Mystery of the Ultimate Fate of Small Black Holes" presented by Donald Coyne. The scope of matter, energy and time necessary for various things to take place is baffling, at least to me. Black Holes take a lot of time to be created. The Universe is estimated to be 13 billion years old. The theories put forth were such that black holes have formed and are dissipating (something about reaching a critical mass then collapsing in upon themselves, and kicking out staggering amounts of energy in radiation.) It seemed to me that for some of these things to have taken place the Universe would have to be older (as some of the processes would take longer than the universe has been in existence for.)
It's fascinating stuff, but a little goes a long way.
Oo! My widdo bwain, it bwoo my widdo bwain! Oo! Oo!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
According to this daring young thinker, our whole silly idea of time being a continuum from past thru present onto the future may be bunk. With the abolition of the time interval and precise measurements of place at a certain time, it solves some of the great mathematical paradoxes. You can read a better layman's summary and explanation here.
The concept of time is so passe...
Karma Police, come arrest this man...
I like The Illustrated Brief History of Time more than the none illustrated version. I saw Elegant Universe on PBS and really liked the visuals. Mr. Greene - give us non-geniuses more visuals to help understand this stuff.
I have found the concept of special relativity particularly fascinating. The way that Einstein described spacetime I still find to be quite neat, even though it's a (relatively) old theory at this point. It seems like we're on a speed-of-light course through this universe, and when you're relative velocity is 0, then you are traveling through time at the speed of light (if such a concept can be grasped), and conversely, when you travel at the speed of light, then time is stopped for you (so that the vector sums of velocity through space and time always add up to the speed of light). The simplistic genious of that blows me away, and I love reading any material that has any more insight or explanation into relativity. I even find quantum mechanics to be interesting to study (though the math sucks).
I bought The Elegant Universe a few years ago, and I loved it. I think this is definitely going to be worth checking out at the library.
Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.
Atomic batteries to power! Turbines to speed!
I finished Elegant Universe a few weeks ago, after having put it down for most of a year because I couldn't stand to read another rehashing of QM, relativitiy, isn't this weird. After skipping those chapters, the second half was quite engrossing.
Is it worth reading this if you already read and enjoyed Elegant Universe, or is it just a watered down version without explaining the math?
I would hope a reviewer would give a little more insight into whether to read it or not.
Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist, and don't even know that much about physics, but I'm very interested in the philosophical implications of Greene's view of time, or what little I read of it.
I briefly read one of this book's chapters on time, and it doesn't seem to explain much. Greene argues that time doesn't flow by pointing out how, due to special relativity, events in my future may be in someone else's past.
Therefore, Greene concludes, all events, past, present, and future, must already exist and must always exist. And our sense that time flows is an illusion.
Interestingly, Greene explicitly REJECTS the notion of a "projector" illuminating one cross-section of this frozen river of time one piece at a time. He rightly sees the problem with this analogy: when does the projector operate? It would have to operate at no time at all, so the concept is incoherent.
How does Greene account for flow? He says that the feelings, thoughts, and perceptions one has at any particular point in time contain sufficient context that one senses their relationship to the past and to the future. This we call flow.
My problem with this explanation is that I don't think you can have thought without change. I don't think there is reason to believe that there is a fundamental unit of time, within which some kind of fundamental unit of thought would exist.
Thought is inherently based on movement or change in our mental landscape, and this movement must happen in time. There is no possibility for thinking without flow. Thinking cannot account for flow, but rather assumes it.
Also, if we take the frozen river hypothesis, how do we find ourselves at one point in time and then at another point in time... how does this movement ever occur? And to whom? Wouldn't we be locked helplessly at our one "point" in time?
Finally, even if special relativity does show that events in one person's future may subjectively be perceived in another person's past, the very fact that we can correlate these two pieces of information: does that not show that there is some master set of times that relates everything to everything else?
On this subject, I always liked Max Tegmark's speculations on the topic, which includes some assessment of why we have only one, and not zero or two or more temporal dimensions.
There's lots of other cool stuff on Max Tegmark's site too if you want to procrastinate on whatever else you're doing. (He's a physics (astrophysics?) professor at U.Penn.)
--LP
Time is what you lost when you started reading /.'s stories.
Space is what you lost when you started downloading things.
Just common knowledge...no need fo a book to grasp that.
Wait ! I got it !
Money is what you lost when you bought the book when you could have just read my post.
=P
... not to mention other important questions, such as "When is the universe?", "Who is matter?", and "Where the hell is the remote?"
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
there was an interesting NPR interview with greene about his new book last week:
y &t odayDate=03/16/2004
http://freshair.npr.org/day_fa.jhtml?display=da
It's one line, but the backslashes should take care of it, if your browser doesn't insert needless spaces:
a 1a1afb6ae049ae214fc034aad839a9198\f 362d841a61948bf2688f01f87fb\b /nova_eu_30[12-14]c[01-\
curl -f "http://a768.g.akamai.net/5/768/142/3f9e\
9589/1
5ea187bea5786
6fdf0e7ceb61c22186f
08]_mp4_300.mov" -O
... and it wrinkles easily.
First off, this stuff is hard. No, really hard. You need to focus down and study this stuff for years before you can really get up to speed and read the preprint server with any understanding. Oh, and did I mention those years need to be spent hanging around people who already understand it?
Secondly, overviews are hard -- and hard to write well. The value of a good overview is respected by everyone in the field. You need maps with different grades of detail.
Thirdly, first hand experience: at least one of the string theory people I know read the first Greene book when she was starting out and loved it. Plenty of other physicists and astronomers I work with have read it just to get a sense for what is going on in this rather abstracted part of physics they don't have the time to catch up on.
Oh, and fourthly, this kind of book does wonders for scientific literacy and interest in the general public. Selfishly, it helps build the case for continued public funding of this kind of thing. Better put, it is a sort of 'return' to the public that repays them for their support by working hard to generate a story both intellectually respectable and comprehensible to the educated and motivated layman.
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I'm afraid that you are somewhat confused. String theory is not the observed behaviour mentioned in step 1. It is the hypothesis/theory mentioned in steps 3 - 5.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
This is all very intriguing but I have a lot to do. I'll look at it yesterday when I have more time.
...is "The Gifts of the Jews," by Thomas Cahill. In it, he postulates that the Jewish people were the first to introduce the concept of linear time into a world of circular time. It's a very humanitarian treatment of time, as opposed to something Hawking might put out. It's definitely an interesting read, regardless of how twitchy your Godometer is.
Just kind of wondering, do you consider thought to be fundamental to the point of working on all scales?
The way I would resolve that kind of issue would be to think of thought as basically a chemical process which doesn't arise until time scales so large that the difference between time being a flip-book and time being continuos are irrelevent. (I.e. for thoughts that take significant fractions of a second, time being cut into sub-femto-second slices or being truly continuos doesn't make much of a difference.)
Say for example it is possible to make a true AI out of a Turing machine. This is a bit of a leap, but would you accept this? If that were possible, then somewhere deep in the guts of those thoughts, operations would be happening in discrete chunks. So, for that thinking entity there is no meaningful possibility of time less than the period of the clock running its hardware. Of course, stuff is still happening, the hardware is moving from state to state, but the way that is happening could be discontinuos and it wouldn't make any difference to the AI.
Perhaps this raises the question, would it be possible for a thinking entity to operate at such high speed that it would percieve time differently? Or would you consider that the experience of time is so fundamental that it must operate the same no matter how fast one thinks?
What's 1+1? Have you ever seen a 1? Then how do you know two 1s make a 2?
What's a zero? What's the very concept of nothing? Have you ever seen nothing? Then how do you know it exists?
I'm sure the scientists both in favor of and against String theory would have a few choice bits of evidence to offer up in support of their theory.
Instead of reciting the scientific method like a third-grade science teacher to a class, why not offer something more substantial, and, dare I say, SCIENTIFIC to support your hypothesis?
When someone really is trying to understand science and asking hard questions (but without an axe to grind either way), the first question is what makes scientific "fact" better than something just made up. This is the question you answered. Theories must be falsifiable.
The second question though is much harder. Basically, how can you be sure your theory really "explains" things sufficiently (whatever that means). Even though Kepler's Laws are observationally sound, still somehow they dont really explain what is happening with planetary motion the way universal gravitation does.
So, the second question is the hard one. Just because QM makes testable, correct predictions, does it really "explain" what is going on?
This is the value of string theory. Before we could have universal gravitation, we needed the fuzzy non-observational concept of potential energy. Perhaps before we can really explain physics on the smallest scales of space and time, we need a fuzzy non-observational string theory.
1. Observe some aspect of nature via /.
2. Google the subject matter
3. Prove the material right or wrong by linking to what you found
4. Offer your unsolicited political or philosophical view
5. Wait for the same story to appear six months from now
6. Lather, rinse, repeat
Now, first off, I consider bmac a friend and a very enlightened fellow, so please don't take this as me saying "Oh, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about."
I don't know exactly what to think about free will. It seems impossible to me on the one hand, and indispensable on the other. In the end, I think my beliefe comes down to, "We should believe in free will and act as if it is real, even though it isn't." See, free will has to come from some place. Where do the individual impulses to will originate from? They must originate within the interconnected system we call the universe. These impulses originate within the system, not outside it. By definition, anything that interacts with the universe is part of it. If our free will is shaped by external forces, it isn't ours. What is ours? Nothing. Everything we consider to be 'self' in fact originates from non-self. There is in fact no true division between self and non-self, just the comfortable illusion of same. Yet we need to believe in free will in order to function effectively in the universe.
Now, bmac and I have had some conversations in our respective journals, and I know his philosophy and respect it, but I ask, bmac or anyone else who cares to respond, where does our free will originate, and how exactly is it ours? Every composite thing comes together due to circumstances, and when those circumstances disappear, so does the thing. Nothing has self-existence apart from it's interaction with the all. Everything originates in the same ground of being. So again, how is our free wil actually ours?
Now I know the concept of free will is a hot-button topic, so let's just consider this a philisophical excercise and not an excuse for a flame-fest. Anyone have any ideas on the matter?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Just after the PBS special was made available online, I put together a page with links to all the segments here. That way my friends who were interested could download them and watch them later.
- sm
You're on.
Killing vectors: take a clock with you on your spaceship. Fly from star A to star B, and time it. Now, you get a new mission: fly from star A to star B along a slightly altered path, displaced at each point by a small amount determined by a particular vector field. (Yeah, in my million dollar PBS special, I get to have cartoons to make this easier to see.) To your amazement, your clock measures the same time!
Some spacetimes have the strange property that you can define an entire vector field (cue cartoon) with this property. Some spacetimes are even weirder! They have multiple vector fields like this. Actually, perhaps they are no so weird (cue cartoon of flat space.)
"diffeomorphism-invariance" is a scary-sounding way to express the fact that physical facts are unchanged by a shift in coordinate system. If I were to write a book, I'd start with the idea of gauge invariance and the difference between coordinates and events.
"You [me] wrote: "Plenty of other physicists and astronomers I work with have read it just to get a sense for what is going on in this rather abstracted part of physics they don't have the time to catch up on." That's all well and good. I'm simply saying that people who work as theoretical physicists/mathemagicians wouldn't read it since they'd never stop picking holes in it. Popularizations, sadly, do have a place in our world."
By "sadly," you seem to imply that anybody -- including other scientists -- who is not at the tail end of a Ph. D. in string theory (which is the level we are talking about) -- is in a sad state. I'm sorry, but this is just crazy.
Your attitude is sufficiently condescending as to be absolutely insane.
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I can't believe I'm feeding the /. science troll but here goes:
String theory is not a religion for scientists or for anyone else. It is an attempt to fix some of the many technical problems with the Standard Model, SM, (ie the current description of EM, Strong, and Weak forces). We know that the SM is incomplete (besides the fact it's a model and not a theory so it describes but doesn't explain) and there are various ideas of ways to complete (ie find the high energy theory for which the SM is the low energy limit) the SM.
Now, there are other ways to complete the SM including such ideas as Supersymmetry, Little Higgs, Technicolor, etc. Some of these like Technicolor have been ruled out, others like Supersymmetry have not been tested and do not have currently testable predications.
It turns out that String Theory is more ambitious than most of the attempts to complete the SM. Most of the approaches like Supersymmetry and the Little Higgs admit that they are not the fundamental theory and at some other energy scale they are incorrect just like the SM. String Theory does not suffer from this problem. This means that the energy scale of String Theory is very high (much higher than the other "easier" theories) and thusly it's implications for the physical regime that we can currently probe are much more subtle. There is lots of work trying to find what the implications are, but currently there is no concrete evidence for or against String Theory.
Now in 2007ish the Large Hadron Collider will come online and we will have lots of "high" energy data. It will still come from well below the String scale but it will be much higher than what we currently have. The economics of high energy physics are such that we have to now wait long periods of time before we get new colliders.
Strictly speaking the scientific method as taught in schools is not really correct anymore. The days of explaining why rocks fall are pretty much over for most branches of physics. Finding aspects of the universe which are not currently explained is no longer so simple. We need to have theories to figure out what the interesting experiments actually are. This means that having a theory is necessary. High energy Physics has progressed to the point where we have to pick and choose our experiments so in most cases we actually need theories.
The major difference then between String Theory and religion is, we will find observable consequences of String Theory and we will test them. If we find disagreement with theory the theory will be discarded/modified, if it agrees we will look for more consequences to test.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Faster Than the Speed of Light just came out on paperback and is a good read AND a good intro to cosmology.
The End of Time is also available in paperback. I never managed to get though more than 4 chapters, but Barbour has some very intriguing ideas about time, and I've seen him mentioned along with Loop Quantum Gravity, which is a good sign.
Hyperspace was written before TEU, and suffers from age a bit. It was written before Witten unleashed M-Theory on everyone (or just after) I read it immediately after TEU so I bored me, the rehash of Relativity and QM can get a bit tedious in these books unless you spice it up like Greene does.
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity looks promising, and details String Theory's main competitor on the Quantum Gravity front, Loop Quantum Gravity. I picked it up, but couldn't get into it.
I've read Hawking and a few others, but I've never been able to get into things from the 'classical' side of the equasion. Feynman is REALLY difficut to get into, his prose just doesn't flow like Greene's. Perhaps I'm a mass consumer and so esoteric physisits don't appeal to me as authors.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Actually, with a few extra words (like including subsets of the path), what I wrote is a workable definition of Killing vectors as they are used in General Relativity. A few more words, and I'd cover even pathological cases.
Weinberg's book eschews the whole talk of manifolds and makes it rather hard to see the issues in a cartoony way. I prefer MTW. Ironically, I think your point would be better made for particle physics, which is a lot less tractable in cartoons. I like those books a lot less, and have not seen a satisfactory one, because it takes a mind the order of Feynman's to really get at the heart of the issues without a huge amount of notation.
Furthermore, had you bothered to address the part of my post that came after "Popularizations, sadly, do have a place in our world," you'd have to admit that I wasn't being condescending at all. Rather, it was a roundabout way of lamenting the continuing fall in the numbers of students deciding to pursue careers in the sciences.
I object to the attitude of your posts on this subject. Scientists have had enough trouble in the past for their arrogance, and I think these popularizations are the best possible news. Essential aspects of high-level science can be conveyed with a minimum of mathematics by those with the skill, and that should be praised to the skies, not damned.
By the way, I know many people around here who loved Greene's book but were less keen on the PBS version. I haven't seen it, but I suggest you give Greene a chance, and try to distinguish between gosh-whiz BS and serious efforts at popularization. Look at the regulars on sci.physics.research, and the amount you can accomplish with a minimum of required background.
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We are all really, really broken in the head. Time, as we experience it, is a total illusion. --But it is an illusion which allows for the perception of physicality; --if you were aware of all possibilities existing at the same time, you would perceive of yourself as being something rather like an ever-evolving smear.
Every choice you make in your current brain-damaged, "single-frame advance" form is what takes you from one step to the next. In the fully aware version, physicality becomes variable, because you can focus on a reality and pull it into being by exercising choices across an entire 'life-time'. Existing in that form, I suspect, probably comes with it's own version of 'time', because that level is probably just a brain-damaged version of the next one above it.
Don't bend your mind trying to picture this stuff. You are mentally impaired and you can't do it. Things are changing though. All those little introns are wiggling around and beginning to come active in those who are struggling to wake up! Lots of perceptive abilities which haven't been expressed yet. .
Some of you will have already started experiencing brief bleed-throughs as the paradigm shift rushes ever-nearer. --Here are a three of the multiple reality 'encounters' I know of, (the last two of which I've directly experienced).
Stuff like that. Yes, quite terrifying, but they only last a few hair-raising moments, and you can snap out of them at will, (for the time being anyway.) Watch for them and learn from them; you'll need to be able to stay calm if you make the transit. And yes, all of this while not on drugs. Drugs are for idiots; they'll just weaken your ability to deal when the shit hits! Gettin' closer real fast, kids!
When? Well, the shit is supposed to hit at the same time as the big cloud of comets wipes out everything on this planet. Be a nice time to be able to morph your reality, eh? Otherwise, it's apocalyptic fire storms for you! (But don't sweat it. You'll just reincarnate where you need to. It'd be cool to actually make the transition without dying, though! And certainly into a reality where there isn't an ice age in full swing and nothing left but smoking rubble and black glass.)
Final note: I don't care what you believe, no collection plate will be passed, there is no book to buy and no representative will come to your door. Deal with it. (And no, I have no relation to 'Time Cube' guy. He's just insane. Whereas I'm the guy who is going to haunt your thoughts every time you trip over something which jars your reality. --Unless, of course, you're already way ahead of me, in which case, 'Cheers!')
-FL
Related site about physics
Jhon Baez site
especially interesting
Open Questions in Physics
Alternative approach - quantum gravity without strings Building Spacetime from Spin - this theory have some troubles - they arn't able to get a flat space-time as a classical limit of their theory, but now they are tryng apply the same approch to strings - a lot of math which I don't understand, but little part which I understand fascinating...
Sigh. I really wish there would be fewer, but weightier attempts at making science understandable to people. The trend in recent years to try to make everything in the form of infotainment simply hurts everybody's understanding of things - people end up having a kind of view of science that only fits into a Superman cartoon - you know, where 'mutations' can magically change a person into a slimy monster, temporarily, and where 'X ray vision' can look through 10 miles of granite, but not 1 millimeter of lead, etc etc. Even Startrek did a better job of popularising science than much of what I have seen recently.
As for the fundamental understanding of time and space - there is literally nobody, I'd claim, who understands this, which is why we see such concepts launched as eg. 'quantisation of space and time', which is profoundly nonsensical. (the reason, if you must know, is that since we live 'inside' space, we have some considerable difficulty seeing space from 'outside', which is where this discontinuity would be apparent).
The truth is - physics is stuck in a rut, and we need a fundamental change in viewpoint before we can progress any further. String theory and quantum mechanics are all very well, but they all build on ideas that are now about a century old, and which have been stretched to their limits. The Copenhagen interpretation hasn't really helped either - this massive block of philosophy stating that 'there is nothing smaller than whichever quantum limit' has been a religion that has done a lot to block our progress towards a better understanding of things on a small scale. In case you'd care to know - all quantum mechanics really says (in this respect) is that because of the dual wave-particle nature of matter, it is impossible to measure things on an arbitrarily small scale using only particle interactions; this clearly doesn't mean that there is nothing going on there.
To compare: imagine that we try to observe ships in the ocean by standing on the beach and making waves - we wouldn't be able to 'see' ships smaller than the length of the waves. So to se better, we create shorter waves, but since they contain more energy, they push the smallest ships around, so we can't locate them precisely. Does this means that there's nothing smaller than what we can observe? Of course not - we just need to find another way to observe them. The limitations in quantum mechanics are more about limitations in the observation methods than about reality.
The most eloquent of the group promoting loop quantum gravity as an alternative to string theory, Lee Smolin, makes what I believe to be a significant point that string theories, like quantum theory but unlike general relativity, are background dependent, that is they just assume the existence of spacetime rather than establish it.
Yet there is something about all current approaches that smacks of epicycles. Great scientific theories have an elegance which appears to be missing from current attempts to bridge the gap between the micro and macro domains. Theory needs that kind of elegance and the wider comprehensibility which comes with it to be accessible to real critique.
If those who have not shared a lifetime of indoctrination are unable to play in the sand pit, the "experts" can get away with ever more circular cases of theoretical blinkers and instrumental blindness which only ever return the answers they are looking for, as well as all the funding advantages that come from having sidelined the nay sayers.
One side of me wants to suggest that our current infatuation with anything to do with information really might produce A New Kind of Science which breaks down a few barriers, but the only honest position is that the jury is still out on that one too.
Some of my own work hints that computer models of seemingly irreversible systems readily generate local time reversibility and that starting inflation may be a lot easier than stopping it, but leaves some other fundamental phenomena needing to be explained within the same frrame of reference. I mainly try such experiments to get a better feel for the state of play and right now my best estimate is that the next real revolution in physics might still be a generation away, but that one is coming.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Lynds is so obviously right it's not funny. Some of you are either so jealous, ignorant or just plain crazy it is. It makes me think of the craziness and negativity Einstein probably faced with s.r. Watch this boy Lynds...mark my words.