[CCWoody]

It looks like we just got a lesson in Depravity on this thread. Over the past week, I seem to have brought out the "best" in a lot of people. If this keeps up, my feelings might get hurt.

Though, I must confess, I may have made a mistake about the good senator being RC. I'll let him answer and then decide if I need to make a correction.

[Alamo-Girl]

Er, I wish to comment on your remark in post 121 to betty boop. You said:

Well, we live in a just so inverse cubed not an inverse quad universe. Think about that.

I have thought about it. Force (e.g. electromagnetic, gravity, strong and weak atomic) vary with the inverse of the square of the distance (F=1/d^2) If there were four spatial dimension objects, they would vary with the inverse of the cube of the distance (F=1/d^3) which basically means that matter could not form!

I believe this is why super string theory asserts compactification of the extra dimensions. I do not however believe compactification is necessarily required: 5D Space-Time-Matter Consortium

Because the accelerating universe suggests a fluctuating (albeit over huge time intervals) ratio between dark energy and dark matter (cosmological constant (pdf)) - which significantly alters our concept of the age of the universe - I have become quite interested in yet another theory, the ekpyrotic model.

IMHO, the real quandary is why the dark energy we deduce from observation (astronomy) is not manifest in quantum mechanics!