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New Calculations May Lead To a Test For String Theory
dexmachina writes "A team of theoreticians, led by a group from Imperial College London, has released calculations that show string theory makes specific, testable predictions about the behaviour of quantum entangled particles. Professor Mike Duff, lead author of the study from the Department of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London, commented, 'This will not be proof that string theory is the right "theory of everything" that is being sought by cosmologists and particle physicists. However, it will be very important to theoreticians because it will demonstrate whether or not string theory works, even if its application is in an unexpected and unrelated area of physics.' In other words, string theory may finally have shed its critics' most common complaint: unfalsifiability. However, given the second most common complaint, I can't help but wonder: which string theory?" Update: 09/03 23:34 GMT by S : Columbia University's Peter Woit, author of the Not Even Wrong blog, says these claims are overblown, and adds that a number of string theorists said as much to Wired.
You can tell someone is used to writing academic papers when they show a small bullet point list of statements (10% of the text), then reach a conclusion (another 10% of the text), then proceed to spend the other 80% of the text repeating the conclusion over and over again.
Is a bunch of people trying to hack on physics to bridge GR and QM. There are a couple different ways to do this. Strings are one, loop quantum gravity is another.
Right now, everyone is still in pre-release debugging, not even beta-testing. It's ALL VAPORWARE. Complicating things, as always is money - grants, funding, publication, as well as ego and rep - appointments, tenure, etc. The truth will out eventually - the theories WILL mature and develop; testable, falsifiable hypotheses will be formulated - patience, grasshopper.
What I'd like to know, now, is who's the "Home Brew Computing Club" of this mess and who is the "Bill Gates writing bitchy whiny letters complaining about shit"?
Witten and Greene I've heard of. String theory and string theoreticians are carrying the day (in political / "marketing" terms) in the academy. Who is losing and bitching? Apart from their economic incentive to bitch, should they be?
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
Indeed, then later on we had to deal with the closet bigotry brought in by the women's movement. A group so ignorant as to start making up meanings and context where really there is none. Personally I like it when women spell it womyn, it makes it clear who the bat shit crazy, bigots are so that I can avoid them. I mean really, woman is derived in part from the German word "man" which is sort of the rough equivalent of what the Brits say as "one." It's neither masculine nor feminine, singular nor plural and is used in all those cases where one requires a generic placeholder noun.
Which is why we have the words mankind and woman. And don't get my started on the rather tenuous story that is "history." Given that that one predates the English language I have a really hard time buying the common explanation that it's a portmanteau of his story.
Well, ask him if he did. If he says yes, then he did. If no, then he did not.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.