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The Man Who Invented the 26th Dimension
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes Based on all the experiments we've ever been able to perform, we're quite certain that our Universe, from the largest scales down to the microscopic, obeys the physical laws of three spatial dimensions (and one time dimension): a four-dimensional spacetime. But that's not the only possibility mathematically. People had experimented with bringing a fifth dimension in to unify General Relativity with Electromagnetism in the past, but that was regarded as a dead-end. Then in the 1970s, an unknown theoretical physicist working on the string model of the strong interactions discovered that by going into the 26th dimension, some incredibly interesting physics emerged, and String Theory was born.
Here at discount dimension warehouse you can get 27 dimensions for the price of 26. We honor all competitors empirically undemonstrated theory coupons. More dimensions for your money.
Not to detract from his contributions to science, but the photo of him in the Medium article makes him look like some sort of Parakeet Wizard. How he stayed sane with 40 parakeets in his house is something I will never understand.
agreed. nobody can truly vet it because nobody can truly understand it because nothing makes sense. welcome to my world.
Why not postulate an infinite number of dimensions?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Proposing an idea that explains a previously unexplained observation isn't pseudoscience. It can certainly be wrong, and should be treated as such until experimentally tested.
But pseudoscience lives in a special realm, where it wraps itself in the verbiage of science, while not sharing the methods and intent. String theory very clearly falls into the "not testable yet" category, rather than the "designed to resist testing" category that weapons grade bullshit enjoys.
Huh?
How is a theory that attempts to describe the laws of physics *not* science?
Not only does a 2nd time dimension allow for actual time travel (in a one dimensional universe you can't change the order of anything - you need a 2nd space dimension to hop over or around someone in front of you - so a second time dimension allows for time travel).
But also it make it a lot easier to understand why we do not SEE the 5th or higher dimension, let alone confirm it with scientific instruments.
I can look up/down, North/South, and East/West, but I can not look past/future. So it makes sense that I also can not look t2+/t2-.
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How could be unknown if "A study in 2009 ranked him as the 14th most influential physicist in the world for the period 1967-1973.", or was he unknown at the time, which is common for anyone before popular ideas? Unknown in the general public is anyone but Einstein.
Because it isn't testable.
To quote I kan reed:
'String theory very clearly falls into the "not testable yet" category, rather than the "designed to resist testing" category'
Neither is an assertion about the absolute limit on speed in the universe(really: devise a test for that).
At some level, science is about creating a model that explains existing observations. Testing that model, looking for violations is essential but the postulation of an internally coherent parsimonious system that matches what we already see is science.
Test-ability and the Title of Theory. String Theory is a Mathematical Theory, and an interesting Scientific Hypothesis. You can have a Math Theory as long as your math is sound given your assumptions. You can only have a Scientific Theory if your experiments, and data can be tested. Everything String Theory predicts and is testable for is in Relativity and Quantum mechanics. It doesn't provide anything new that we can test for yet. So giving it the mantel of Scientific Theory when it hasn't yet done the work needed gives it more credit then it should have. And doing so gives legitimacy to creationist claims that evolution is "Just A Theory".
You can spin equations out the wazoo (math) but it doesn't mean they model any natural phenomenon in particular (physics).
Let there be myriad mathematical theories. It's okay, no one is going to lose their lunch over it. Einstein's theory of relativity was theoretical at first. It was only later that scientists were able to devise experiments to test it, and they are still conjuring up new experiments for further testing. Even the aether theory had an impact on science. It forced experiments that falsified it and we learned by doing that.
Science posits new theories all the time. Even if the aren't testable now, they may some day.
is his name. Not sure why the summary left it out.
I thought there had to be more than 3 macro-scale space dimensions to allow the whole 'finite but unbounded' thing. You know, so you can't sail off the edge of space?
That's easily defended. All physical theories are math. That's it, there's nothing more to them. We interpret mathematical theories using a model, i.e., in this case, the universe. Some theories are consistent with the model, some are not. Those that are not, are no less scientific because they describe what cannot be the case. All that is required of a mathematical theory is that it be consistent.
Einstein's general relativity a mathematical theory. Astrophysicists are still constructing tests to see how valid it is. Any testing is only as good as the resolution inherent in the physical system used for testing. In that sense, you could say that general relativity will forever be just a mathematical theory, it can never be fully tested because we'll never have infinite resolution (if that even makes sense). Mathematical theories of physics are merely scribbles on a piece of paper. We manipulate the scribbles and when we see our manipulation mirrored or represented in the Universe, we say the theory describes that part of the Universe. However, the representation is only up to a certain epsilon, so it is more accurate to say the theory describes the representation only up to the limit of resolution of our tests.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but it deserves to be said.
In no way is String Theory anything like Phrenology. Trying to develop a model that unites both the large scale and the small scale is incredibly difficult. Quantum mechanics and relativity are complex enough without trying to unify them. String theory and super-symmetrical models have a basis in advanced mathematics, but the question is whether or not the model matches the immensely complex reality.
Even if it doesn't work out, studying the problem advances our knowledge of the known universe and modelling it in mathematics. That's how science works, you make a hypothesis and you attempt to test it and then you reform your hypothesis. The current problem right now is finding a way to test it. A failed hypothesis is not something to laugh at, because what you learn from that failure helps you forms a new and more accurate model.
No, but if it's inherently not testable ... then what, exactly, is it's value to science? What conditions need to come about for it to ever be tested?
From a science perspective, is it really any different than me saying that deep within every star lives a napping space goat whose farts drive the fusion process? That's untestable as well, but isn't designed to resist testing. Is my farting space goat pseudo science while String Theory is real science?
It may not strictly speaking be pseudo-science -- but at this point, it's pretty far removed from actual science.
It's just awfully hard to take it seriously when it's a claim which can't be tested, verified, or really even investigated.
At which point, it seems hard to conclude that it's still actually science.
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The scientific model is quite simply:
1) Develop testable hypothesis (aka theory)
2) Develop experiments/observations to test hypothesis
3) Perform experiment/observations
4) Repeat
Anyone who participates in any of these steps is performing science. It took a while to find practical tests of String theory given it's extreme generality, but several have been suggested and a few have even been performed, ranging from the scale of planetary motion to LHC data.
"String theory is untestable" is one of those easy to remember phrases that keeps you away from a great amount of interesting information:
1) "String theory" is actually a family of related theories that make different predictions, where they're advanced enough to do so
2) They're neither as a class, nor individually, a priori untestable
3) They're theories of high energy physics, so what predictions they do make will be difficult to test on currently existing hardware
4) The mathematical tools to make sense of the theories and make predictions are novel themselves
String theory is at a stage kind of like parachuting early-20th-century physics into the 15th century. It's not relevant at length scales where we can easily make observations, but we don't have the necessary cognative or physical tools to write it off either. Have we been handed relativity, or the aether? We can't say because we're not smart enough yet.
Now, as a matter of expediency I'd argue that any self-respective physicist should dedicate himself to advanced models that are a little closer to home and might act as stepping stones to string theory's energy scales, but since when has any self-respecting scientist been led away from a beautiful hypothesis by pragmatism? Much less a physicist?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
And until it falls into the testable category, it's speculation not any form of an hypothesis.
Just sayin'.
Really? Then you have empirical evidence disproving my "Things can totally go faster than light in a vacuum once you cross the event horizon of a black hole" theory?
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Why do you allege the lack of testability is "inherent". That's a charge I hear a lot from people who pretend to like science, but mostly just regurgitate nice sayings they've heard about science.
You mean a hypothesis until tested. A theory is a proven hypotheses - something laymen get wrong all the time. FYI string "theory" is dead. It was never alive to begin with only in the minds of people grasping at straws. A spate of recent research has consigned string "theory" to the dust bin.
Science is about observation. Anything else is speculation. Somebody failed high school.
Gotta be over 9000
A theory is not proven. It is just a hypothesis that has not been disproven, despite repeated attempts.
String theory can't be dumped; because it is just an intellectual exercise to find mathematical systems that return the same statistical shadow as quantum mechanics. As they see more statistical shadows, they refine their math. The ones that predicted yet unobserved statistical shadows gain credibility.
Doesn't mean their are actually multidimensional strings vibrating. But perhaps their is a mathematical cousin to vibrating strings operating at a quantum level (as circuits are cousins to structures).
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He's wrong, as currently formulated it is testable in the sense that you gain new data (e.g. Higgs boson interactions) you can rule out those string theory formulations that failed to predict the new data.
You can falsify individual 'string theories', but no matter what you do they will always be able to construct/revise a new one.
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That was true for Newton as well.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yeah, genius, you figured it out. Good job. We just observed E=MC2. It was written on a tiny chalk board on some atoms we looked at with a microscope. We didn't extrapolate that idea from any sort of theory or model.
It's absolutely the case that we mapped observational experimental data to the resulting formula, and found perfect matches, but it's not like a plot of data points for mass and heat energy released in radioactive is identical to a smooth curved mapped by a mathematical equation. We create the system, and we examine if it corresponds to reality.
Inasmuch as the math of string theory maps to the behavior of tachyons(as described in this article) it's tested in much the same way. People say it isn't "tested" because your tests, nominally, shouldn't be the same as the data you're trying to explain in the first place, and should represent a divergence from the null hypothesis.
I'm not clear on what magic needs to come into existence to test it.
This certainly says it's untestable:
So, tell us, please ... what is missing from our collective understanding of whether String Theory can be tested?
Because I've been hearing for rather a long time that physicists can't test it, or that parts of it have been refuted by the LHC.
I get the distinct impression that we simply have no basis on which to test it. Reputable scientists say it can't be tested.
So, on what basis are you asserting that it's testable?
Or would be have to create a 26 dimensional device to measure this? Because, really, that's a pretty steep challenge.
I know enough about math and science to know that physicists have been saying String Theory is voodoo for decades, and it doesn't sound like we're any closer to being able to test it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The problem with string theory isn't that it doesn't predict anything. The problem is that it predicts nearly everything and shows no particular bias towards one prediction over another. Pretty much any experimental result that comes out can be accommodated by string theory.
It is interesting. It may one day help to describe an actual theory (making it string toolkit rather than string theory) it may spur thought along new lines, but it isn't a very good theory.
The one thing string theory does predict strongly is supersymmetry, but that was already predicted by less extreme theories. The whole thing may turn out to be moot if LHC can't scare up a supersymmetric particle.
Math is a tool used by science, it is not a science. It belongs somewhere in the useful philosophy neighborhood.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"String theory is untestable" is one of those easy to remember phrases that keeps you away from a great amount of interesting information:
1) "String theory" is actually a family of related theories that make different predictions, where they're advanced enough to do so 2) They're neither as a class, nor individually, a priori untestable 3) They're theories of high energy physics, so what predictions they do make will be difficult to test on currently existing hardware 4) The mathematical tools to make sense of the theories and make predictions are novel themselves
String theory is at a stage kind of like parachuting early-20th-century physics into the 15th century. It's not relevant at length scales where we can easily make observations, but we don't have the necessary cognative or physical tools to write it off either. Have we been handed relativity, or the aether? We can't say because we're not smart enough yet.
Now, as a matter of expediency I'd argue that any self-respective physicist should dedicate himself to advanced models that are a little closer to home and might act as stepping stones to string theory's energy scales, but since when has any self-respecting scientist been led away from a beautiful hypothesis by pragmatism? Much less a physicist?
If I could give out a "comment of the day" award, this one would win it.
So the inventor of multi dimensions, founder of string theory is unknown?
Perhaps you wanted to make a sentence like " at that time unknown scientist ... "?
After all people with the surname Lovelace are very well known in the geek community. Hm, have to check if they are actually related.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Let there be myriad mathematical theories. It's okay, no one is going to lose their lunch over it.
There is only so much funding, and so many tenured positions. So if funding goes to string theorists, there is less for real physics.
Einstein's theory of relativity was theoretical at first. It was only later that scientists were able to devise experiments to test it
This is backwards. Experiments had already been done that the prevailing "ether" theory could not explain. Relativity provided a simple and precise explanation. New experiments were also done. For string theory, no one can even conceive of how there can be an experimental verification.
Yeah, and this is a much much much more valid criticism, but I do get a bit sick of the cargo cult "I don't know anything but like to sound smart by using the word pseudoscience" posts.
Statements like that make me cringe. News at 11: Not everything mathematically possible is physically possible, it's the other way around.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
This isn't what you were saying. I don't disagree with this digest at all. The link is a great criticism, about the nature of how scientific theories fail, but it's nothing about "inherent" untestability.
Still doesn't make it untestable. You keep fitting and explaining until you have enough description to make an unambiguous prediction - thats your test.
Pseudoscience is when you never do a test you should and can do. See any free energy insanity, or the recent EMDrive stuff.
Woit has written a book called "Not even wrong" about string theory and how it's not science in his opinion. He actively blogs about string theory hype. He's not a string theorist and although he does have a PhD in physics he's not published anything scientific in decades. He teaches math and writes anti-string rants as a hobby.
Calculus is used in physics all the time. It's untestable, just like string theory. The problem is confusing a tool with a theory. String theory is really a set of theories using strings. It's like calling something calculus theory. There are plenty of calculus theories that are wrong. There's infinitely many theories you can make using calculus. You can't test them all. Same thing with strings. However, any theory you make with strings can be tested. Some we can't differentiate from other theories with current technology. You've taken honest and correct complaints about string theory and extended them way beyond reason.
Of course there were limits to how accurately he could measure, so his mathematical models were only accurate within those bounds (as always with physics).
Then I really wonder why every german university is teaching it. ... yeah, because the germans are so backyard, true.
Ah
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Even worse: he proposes that our universe is only 3 spatial dimensions, when it's well-accepted that this is a consequence of inflation. Originally, we had ten dimensions in balance; but the force between them gave out, and six of these contracted while three expanded. The three expanding dimensions make up our growing bubble of space--the universe--while the six shrinking are not major forces in our universe, but possibly have an impact on the quantum level (see: quantum foam).
Thus we have three-dimensional space-time, and six dimensions of no note. It's like having a few rich people and some non-notable Ska.
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Was his name Buckaroo Banzai?
Neither is an assertion about the absolute limit on speed in the universe(really: devise a test for that).
It's been tested over and over again.
String theory is not dead and never was.
I don't get how you can start a post like this:You mean a hypothesis until tested. A theory is a proven hypotheses - something laymen get wrong all the time. And then come to the brain dead conclusion: FYI string "theory" is dead.
It never occurred to you that the exact same experiment supports Einsteins Theory about Relativity AND String Theory? Do you have any single example of an experiment that 'disproved', 'falsified' the 'String Theory'?
In the last decades no one disproved any prediction the 'String Theory' (s) made ...
Claiming it is no sound scientific / physical theory is nonsense.
Meanwhile looking here on this thread it seems there is comparable to the AGW discussion an anti String Theory 'conspiracy' going on?
What nonsense is that!? 'String Theory(s)' are an established science since 30 or 40 years!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No one "invented" 26-dimensional spaces. Might as write a headline about the man who invented the number 26. Weird that the article is pretty decent.
You're making a false assumption.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
gtall wrote:
Actually, you have that exactly wrong: Einstein's theory of special relativity was a direct attempt to explain a specific experimental result, the negative results of the Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment to verify the existence of the liminiferous aether. The Michelson-Morley results were published in 1887, and Einstein published special relativity in 1905.
just a ghost in the machine.
Unscientific
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The theory of relativity wasn't testable when it was first proposed. Part of the reason Einstein never got a nobel for it was that it wasn't until the 1970's that there was real firm experimental evidence for it.
There's a distinction between something that can never be tested and something that can't be tested now due to technological limitations.
The problem with string theory isn't that it doesn't predict anything. The problem is that it predicts nearly everything and shows no particular bias towards one prediction over another. Pretty much any experimental result that comes out can be accommodated by string theory.
I think what you just described is called "math".
("Maths" across the pond.)
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Trying to develop a model that unites both head shape and psychological attributes is also incredibly difficult.
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String theory was devised as a mathematical model that seems to describe a workable universe which may, or may NOT be our universe. Problem is that we know that the Standard Model cannot be the complete picture but so far we have no experimental data to use as a starting point to figure out what lies behind it. When we finally do get a hint of new physics some of the new math being invented by String Theorists is going to be very useful weather or not String Theory itself correctly describes our universe.
If you're nominating time as a dimension, space-time would be four dimensions. Three dimensions would be just space.
It is close. It does involve a lot of math, but unlike math, it claims some relevance to physical structure. Math makes no such claim.
The theory of relativity wasn't testable when it was first proposed. Part of the reason Einstein never got a nobel for it was that it wasn't until the 1970's that there was real firm experimental evidence for it.
There's a distinction between something that can never be tested and something that can't be tested now due to technological limitations.
You mean the observations Eddington took in 1919 confirming light bending in accordance with predictions by general relativity didn't take place? From the Wikipedia entry:
"Eddington's observations published the next year[5] confirmed Einstein's theory, and were hailed at the time as a conclusive proof of general relativity over the Newtonian model."
Also, relativity made a number of testable predictions. From the wiki page on the theory of relativity:
"The predictions of special relativity have been confirmed in numerous tests since Einstein published his paper in 1905, but three experiments conducted between 1881 and 1938 were critical to its validation. These are the Michelson–Morley experiment, the Kennedy–Thorndike experiment, and the Ives–Stilwell experiment. Einstein derived the Lorentz transformations from first principles in 1905, but these three experiments allow the transformations to be induced from experimental evidence."
Obviously the testing of the theory still continues as we gather more data from around the universe, but to say there wasn't firm experimental evidence until the 1970s isn't correct.
Until string theory makes some testable predictions it's just mathematical and philosophical wanking.
Enigma
"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection" - David Wheeler
"All problems in physics can be solved by another dimension" - Some jackass
Is 26 dimensions better or worse than 26 levels of indirection?
Yeah, and so have some of the predictions of string theory, since it asserts certain kinds of relationships that the standard model assert. The problem it has in meaningfully distinguishing itself, empirically, which only happens at scales that are either too large or too small for existing tech.
Relevant wikipedia section
I wouldn't say I assert any truth to the claims, only that they fit the mold of science.
26 happens to be a very important number kabbalistically .. it is the numeric value of the 'name of god' (jehovah, for those not afraid of being stoned) which represents the complete manifested universe. im just saying - kinda neat.
Yes four-dimensional space-time, not three-dimensional space.
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The issue there is that more parsimonious theories already predicted everything that has been tested in string theory.
The problem is that practically any experimental outcome can be shown to be a 'prediction' of string theory. String theory predicts nearly anything and everything depending on where you set the constants. It is far more descriptive than predictive.
It's not a total waste, it's just premature.
But, but, History Channel says ancient aliens had nuclear power!!! :-P
*styling mousse & hair gel*
*poses*
"Aliens!!!"
Yes. I'm saying the the total set of all physics is currently (and likely to remain) untestable. Which isn't to say that science cannot handle it. We use principles like Occum's Razor to say that if it is the best description of what we can observe, then we assume (pending further disproving) it is true.
Which works out great. I mean, "truth" is a nebulous concept. One can construct a universal coordinate system that treats the earth as the unmoving center, and has the sun moving around it in strange shapes. And, in fact, that's the coordinate system we use through most of our daily life (folks at NASA, SpaceX, etc. excluded). But we recognize when it becomes more convenient to have a different truth. Also, similar to how I've never concerned myself (outside of class) with relativity, but GPS engineers had to.
Heck, even relativity wasn't testable when postulated. It took like 40 years to conceive of a test.
So I suppose my entire point was against the unreasonable goal of testability for all facts.
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Ah, but that's the question the string theory proponents claim to be working towards: parsimony. Fewer, more elegant equations for more of the universes' behavior.
Is that better occam's razor material than the standard model that applies several different core mechanics more straightforwardly? Maybe. Maybe not. Tough question, and irrelevant if string theory doesn't hold up its end on predictive value.
Look, you insensitive clod. I know the aliens will come if I just add enough dimensions to my cardboard saucer. Now take off, I have to get to my Origami class so I can learn to fold space.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's what makes "Ludicrous Speed" possible.
I would have a sig but I am too busy updating programs and restarting my computer
Exactly, that's why the Standard Model is so resilient and unsatisfactory at the same time. A collection of facts glued together by bits of knowledge and mathematical modeling.
Achille Talon
Hop!
String Theory has made testable predictions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
The problem is that all of them either require particle accelerators that are far beyond our current ability to power or require measuring some aspect of space that we haven't come up with a device to measure yet.
Germany is shutting down all their nuclear reactors. Clearly they are the best at sciencing using logic.
but since when has any self-respecting scientist been led away from a beautiful hypothesis by pragmatism? Much less a physicist?
More frequently than you might think.
I highly recommend Lisa Randall's "Warped Passages" as a fairly recent meditation from a working physicist on the strengths and weaknesses of multi-dimensional theories, as well as some of the background on what motivates them.
The short story is that higher dimensions make it easier to generate universes like ours, which are almost flat gravitationally and have this ridiculous difference in scale between gravity and everything else. Regular 3+1 dimension Standard Model physics requires a ridiculous level of fine-tuning for this to happen, so it is interesting to look for deeper theories where these features arise naturally.
The problem with String Theories in particular--and as other posters have pointed out it really is a family of theories--is that they are almost useless for "model building", which is the activity of generating simplifications we can actually calculate with to describe the world as it is today vs the world as it was a few Planck times after the Big Bang.
So while string theory is neither "untestable in principle" nor "designed to resist testing" it is "naturally test-resistant." Some simpler variants--including a rather elegant heuristic model that Randall herself co-created--have been killed off by the LHC, but the diversity of possible low-energy models enabled by String Theory is so large and heterogeneous that in practical terms they cannot all be falsified.
In the meantime, String Theories continue to take up an inordinate amount of theoretical physicist's time and effort, and there have been fairly senior voices raised in concern about this, particularly because it has been going on for so long that we may end up with a generation of theorists who have never done anything but string theory and have come to the conclusion that it won't work.
Rather than waiting for this Big Reset, it would be nice if we started spending more time looking at non-stringy alternatives.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Very well put - I was trying to figure out how to say this, but that nails it.
String Theory is a toolkit - an infinite set of theories. You can specify some of the tunable parameters and get a specific testable theory, but there's no non-arbitrary way to do that. So many physicist-decades sunk into something which "might be useful one day".
You can say it's all math, not physics, and so uselessness is fine, but then the problem is it's pretty bad math - no elegance, most equations aren't solvable yet.
String theory started as an attempt to simplify the standard model to a few primitives, but it has totally failed in that regard.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
General Relativity is math. Math is not science. General relativity should not be in the "science" section of /.
Quantum Mechanics is math. Math is not science. Quantum Mechanics should not be in the "science" section of /.
Thermodynamics is math. Math is not science. Thermodynamics should not be in the "science" section of /.
See the problem?
If you throw enough indirection and meta-ability into your model, it becomes analogous to a Turing Machine that can "run" and match just about any conceivable universe. It's almost at the level of Creationism in that instead of: it's that way because "God did it", you have "because my meta model (language) can be re-programmed to match that too". I smell a cop-out.
Either that, old-fashioned parsimony perhaps should be downplayed and emergent-behavior explanations be considered. But "God did it" is then a valid candidate.
Table-ized A.I.
If it or any other theory can explain why the other mechanics are what they are, that would be an accomplishment, but it can't do that. There is nothing to suggest why the constants would be what they must be for the other mechanics to fall out of it.
It may one day get there but right now it shouldn't be called theory.
For germany it is pretty logical to shut down 50 year old reactors.
If you like to store our nuclear waste, please give us a call, perhaps we consider to extend the running time of the younger ones.
Oh, you don't like 10,000ds of cubic yards of nuclear waste, mostly dangerous chemicals in your basement?
So don't I!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You mean the observations with error bars large enough to encompass both the Einsteinian and Newtonian predictions for the bending of light?
by a Greek physicist. It's a matter of available labels.
If he invented the 26th dimension, then it did not previously exist and probably still does not. If he discovered it, then it previously existed and probably still does. Both within reasonable uncertainty bounds, of course.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
The link in the articel seems to be broken and show chaotically formated text.
Please correct.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
But why couldn't you use 10 dimensions and just make them *larger*?
Ours goes up to 11.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I've got some testable predictions for other theories - but they're currently beyond our current ability to make a time machine and a FTL space craft, but I'm sure we'll get around to that at some point.
If you can't build the experiment then it is untestable, even if you have some vague idea of what the experiment requires.
...so basically it's not testable. I fail to see how these new conditions change anything.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Well put.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
There's a big difference between "not testable except with stuff we know how to build and haven't actually built" and "untestable" or "only testable with an FTL starship".
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
A theory is some sort of model that describes what we know and makes predictions that are at least theoretically testable. General Relativity was a theory before anybody tested it. Once it's withstood repeated attempts to disprove it, it gets better established.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It's not difficult: we've got one (Phrenology). Now, if somebody were to do a blind experiment, giving a phrenologist information about individuals and letting him feel their skulls (they can be restricted from any other examination), we could see if the phrenologist could match information and skulls more accurately than random chance. (Personal opinion: the phrenologist can't.)
I've read that certain types of hand shapes have been correlated with personality traits, so a few aspects of palmistry may well be valid (again, though, I'd bet against finding a correlation between lifespan and any characteristic of the "life line").
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
We have extensively tested the effects of applying a force to something and watching what speeds we get out of it at what times. We have a simple theory based on certain simple assumptions that says that isn't going to work, so any other evidence supporting Special Relativity is a test of the absolute speed limit.
That being said, it only applies to trying to exceed lightspeed by acceleration, and all Special Relativity really has to say on FTL is that it's effectively the same as time travel. We have a design of something that might be able to exceed lightspeed provided we can get enough matter of negative mass* and a sufficiently powerful power source (and, really, producing enough antimatter to power it is more of an engineering than a scientific challenge), but provided we can use it for time travel also it doesn't violate Special Relativity.
*I really don't know enough about physics to know if (a) we have some theories predicting such exotic matter, (b) we have a place for it in physical theories if we ever find some, or (c) we know how we could change physical theories to accommodate it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That's a hypothesis. They get promoted to theory when they have been tested. Shades of grey exist.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Mathematics does not have theories in the same sense physics does (although it does use the word to apply to a number of related theorems, like number theory). Theories of physics do not actually have to use numerical math. We can have qualitative theories of physical systems (i.e., increase the temperature here and the temperature there decreases), although the numbers are usually not far below the surface. In fact, most theories of physics are mathematical models.
General relativity is not a mathematical theory. It is a theory of physics that is usually expressed by a mathematical model and rules for applying it to the Universe. It cannot be fully tested, any more than (say) Newton's theory of gravitation. After all, we can't release objects of all substances in all points of even the solar system at all times. By simple observation we can't rule out the possibility of H.G. Wells' Cavorite, a material that blocked gravitation. By observation, we can't know (inside Newtonian physics) if the gravitational constant has changed slightly over the past billion years.
Physicists, in my observation, do like to keep track of how precise their experiments are as compared to their theories. After all, there's very little evidence of quantum mechanics on normal human scale (black-body radiation is an exception), and so Newtonian physics breaks down on a sufficiently small scale. Similarly, General Relativity either requires observations on a much larger scale or extremely precise observations (like the time correction in GPS satellites).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Universities teach dead stuff. For example, Latin.
I come here for the love
((Fifth Dimension) ^2) + One Direction
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Conversely, our view of reality is shaped by our brains, which are in some way wedded to mathematical analysis and constructs. Which would explain why even complex theoretical physics barely even scratches the surface of the world of mathematics.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Or you could make the case that in fact no equation really models any natural phenomenon; they just provide asymptotically more accurate estimates. F=MA. No it doesn't, you have to correct for relativity. OK, now it does. Nope, you have to correct for dark matter and dark energy. And so on.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
That's an old argument. Did Newton invent F=MA? Or did he discover it, floating out there in some cognitive space waiting to be discovered?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
K.I.S.S. or Keep It Simple Stupid' - Occam's Razor. The solution isn't more dimensions its less. By using an FTL model you can reduce the four dimensions used by General Relativity to Three. The thing is that three works better and it fits better with actual observation. It can even be made to fit with the general relativity mechanic by allowing a physical dimensional time but only on quantum scales.. .
They deduced dimensional time from the observation of dimension like time - and time like space in the dilation caused by travel at relativistic speeds. Unfortunately they didn't notice that the vector of movement defines a direction - giving a free dimension - so at the speed of light dimension like time is just an ordinary dimension of space. It can be generalised to say that the 'speed' of light is actually a 'velocity'. KISS wins.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Nice one. I actually appreciated that joke. :)