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Massive Update on Strings Theory in Wikipedia
S3D writes "There is a massive update on Strings Theory in Wikipedia :
AdS/CFT
, Andrew Strominger
, Cumrun Vafa, Ashoke Sen, Juan Maldacena,
Mirror symmetry,
String field theory,
Holonomy,
Heterotic string,
Closed string
, Open string,
F-theory,
Background independence,
Higgs mechanism,
Conifold,
Tachyon_condensation,
Einsteinian_manifold,
Second superstring_revolution
Now you can easyly tell Open string from Closed string
at last."
why there is a wiki entry if its only a theory... sheesh, flat earth is a theory
All of science is "only a theory". (Yes, to Americans who still believe what they learned at school - no, theories don't "promote to Law" at some point. They stay theories regardless of what they're named). That's what science deals with.
Now superstring theory is a bit different, since as far as I know they haven't actually had any predictions yet that can be tested, they aren't really "connected to reality". In a way they're now a really complex collection of math that has yet to become a theory.
But of course, regardless of all that, there's a huge body of knowledge, terms, specialist language etc that needs to be explained to people who want to know what they mean. And that's what encyclopedias are for, you know. Just that they explain what "open string" means in superstring theory doesn't mean they're saying "this here is the only truth". They're not making any statement about the likely success of this theory at all They just explain the sort of ideas it deals with.
Sheesh.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Most of the links are to stubs, this really isn't a massive update. Wake me when someone who knows what he's talking about adds some real (useful/readable) information on these theories.
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This diversity of opinion, along with its inexorable and accelerating content growth suggest that Wikipedia, or some similar successor, just may become the standard reference of the earlh 21st century.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
Well, positing that tachyons are "really there" probably ought to get you labelled as somewhat misinformed. But as the wikipedia entry explains, there are (mathematical) situations where you end up with fields with imaginary mass (tachyons). You invoke symmetry breaking, fix a gauge, and your previously imaginary masses suddenly become real. No more tachyons - the tachyon field has "condensed" into a real-valued field.
. I wouldn't be surprised if that same person then submitted a story to slashdot about the new entries No, It was me who submitted the story, I'm in no way affiliated with Harvard physics dept or the authers of the articles - moderator of sci.physics.strings Lubis Mottl. I didn't thought that short and in big part accessible for layman explanation of some key concepts of strings theory would meet siuch a hostility on the major tech news site...