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I got four or so links from the NPR website (there was a string theory segment on Science Friday today, it turned up in a Google search for Pluto news):
Is String Theory Even Wrong?
by Peter Woit
American Scientist
March-April 2002
...The reigning Standard Model of particle physics, which string theory attempts to encompass, involves at its core certain geometrical concepts, namely the Dirac operator and gauge fields, which are among the deepest and most powerful ideas in modern mathematics. In string theory, the Dirac operator and gauge fields are not fundamental: They are artifacts of taking a low-energy limit. String theorists ask mathematicians to believe in the existence of some wonderful new sort of geometry that will eventually provide an explanation for M-theory. But without a serious proposal for the underlying new geometry, this argument is unconvincing.

The experimental situation is similarly bleak. It is best described by Wolfgang Pauli's famous phrase, "It's not even wrong." String theory not only makes no predictions about physical phenomena at experimentally accessible energies, it makes no precise predictions whatsoever.

4 posted on 08/18/2006 9:18:10 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (updated my FR profile on Thursday, August 10, 2006. https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: SunkenCiv

It's amazing what's been discovered in the past 50 years.


28 posted on 08/19/2006 11:19:46 AM PDT by My2Cents (A pirate's life for me.)
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To: MadLibDisease

Mark


30 posted on 08/19/2006 2:15:05 PM PDT by MadLibDisease (Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civ. as it commits suicide: Jerry Pournelle)
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