String Theory 'blog

various ^ | before, during, and after 2006 | various

[MHGinTN]

.

[SunkenCiv]

The Emperor of Math
by Dennis Overbye
New York Times
October 17, 2006

In a twist, a flaw has been discovered in the Cao-Zhu paper. One of the arguments that the authors used to fill in Dr. Perelman's proof is identical to one posted on the Internet in June 2003 by Bruce Kleiner, of Yale, and John Lott, of the University of Michigan, who had been trying to explicate Dr. Perelman's work.

In an erratum to run in The Asian Journal of Mathematics, Dr. Cao and Dr. Zhu acknowledge the mistake, saying they had forgotten that they studied and incorporated that material into their notes three years ago.

[SunkenCiv]

another snip, and a non-ping to the non-existent string theory ping list:

The Emperor of Math
by Dennis Overbye
New York Times
October 17, 2006

In a speech later that month during the string theory conference, Dr. Yau said, "In Perelman's work, many key ideas of the proofs are sketched or outlined, but complete details of the proofs are often missing," adding that the Cao-Zhu paper had filled some of these in with new arguments... [Yau] denied that he had ever said there were gaps in Dr. Perelman's work. "I said it is not understood by all people," he said. "That is why it takes three more years." As a "leading geometer," Dr. Yau said he had a duty to dig out the truth of the proof.

cgk, I forgot to mention this list, but only because it doesn't exist.

[SunkenCiv]

String theory: Is it science's ultimate dead end?
by Robin McKie
The Observer
Sunday October 8, 2006

The most ambitious idea ever outlined by scientists has suffered a remarkable setback. It has been dismissed as a theoretical cul-de-sac that has wasted the academic lives of hundreds of the world's cleverest men and women. This startling accusation has been made by frustrated physicists, including several Nobel prize winners, who say that string theory - which seeks to outline the entire structure of the universe in a few brief equations - is an intellectual dead end... An unprovable theory that talks of unseeable parallel universes and 10-dimensional space has proved too much for some physicists. 'Quasi-theology' and 'post-modern' have been among the most polite terms used; 'bogus' and 'nonsense' among the less forgiving. 'Far from a wonderful technological hope for a greater tomorrow, string theory is the tragic consequence of an obsolete belief system,' said Stanford University's Robert Laughlin, winner of the 1998 Nobel prize for physics... 'Too many people have been overselling very speculative ideas,' said Woit - author of Not Even Wrong - last week. 'String theory has produced nothing.' This point was backed by Smolin, whose book is called The Trouble with Physics. Scientists have poured all their energies into a theoretical approach that is proving sterile, he said. 'It is as if every medical researcher in the world had decided there was only way to fight cancer and had concentrated on this line of attack, at the expense of all other avenues,' he said. 'Then that approach is found not to work and scientists discover they have wasted 20 years. That's the parallel with string theory.'

[SunkenCiv]

Theory in particle physics: Theological speculation versus practical knowledge
by Burton Richter
Physics Today
October 2006

String theory was born roughly 25 years ago, and the landscape concept is the latest twist in its evolution. Although string theory needed 10 dimensions in order to work, the prospect of a unique solution to its equations, one that allowed the unification of gravity and quantum mechanics, was enormously attractive. Regrettably, it was not to be. Solutions expanded as it was realized that string theory had more than one variant and expanded still further when it was also realized that as 3-dimensional space can support membranes as well as lines, 10-dimensional space can support multidimensional objects (branes) as well as strings. Today, there seems to be nearly an infinity of solutions, each with different values of fundamental parameters, and no relations among them. The ensemble of all these universes is known as the landscape. No solution that looks like our universe has been found. No correlations have been found such as, for example, if all solutions in the landscape that had a weak coupling anywhere near ours also had a small cosmological constant. What we have is a large number of very good people trying to make something more than philosophy out of string theory... To the landscape gardeners I say: Calculate the probabilities of alternative universes, and if ours does not come out with a large probability while all others with content far from ours come out with negligible probability, you have made no useful contribution to physics. It is not that the landscape model is necessarily wrong, but rather that if a huge number of universes with different properties are possible and equally probable, the landscape can make no real contribution other than a philosophic one. That is metaphysics, not physics.

[RightWhale]

I don't know if A.N. Whitehead is mentioned anywhere in this list, but he ought to be considered even though he predated string theory because he was searching for a different basis for physics that could have easily led to string theory.

[SunkenCiv]

in post #3 there's an omnibus of FR topics on string theory, which includes "The Beauty of Branes [Cosmology & Lisa Randall]", posted by PatrickHenry.

New String-Theory Notion Redefines the Big Bang
Laura Mgrdichian
PhysOrg.com
March 31, 2006

The conventional model for the expansion of the universe assumes that the universe once existed as a very small, point-like volume called a "singularity." Then the Big Bang occurred, and the universe rapidly expanded... The Big Bang/Big Crunch model implies that time existed before the Big Bang. The problem with the Big Crunch/Big Bang model is that the mathematical laws of classical general relativity do not work at a singularity... "Our brane model allows us to mathematically address what might have happened at the Big Bang, and also gives a novel interpretation of time in string theory," said Leigh. He and his group propose that time began when, via a Big Bang-like event, the brane decayed into closed strings (loops) that propagated off to create the ordinary matter that makes up the universe. This scenario, while avoiding the mathematical problems of a singularity, also helps explain some other issues. For example, to us, the universe looks the same in every direction. Within this brane model, the homogeneity of the universe could be explained as the result of an early universe with homogenous initial conditions, such as a brane that evenly filled space. Leigh and his colleagues may further explore this in additional studies.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks!

Google

[snarks_when_bored]

Great mathematician though he his, Yau has made a devilish bargain:  in exchange for glory in his homeland, he assists that homeland in its aspirations to dominate his adopted land.

[SunkenCiv]

A selection of summaries from The New York Times Book Review -- Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions by Lisa Randall (Harper Perennial, 500 pages, $19.95)

Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard, offers a tour of contemporary questions in particle physics, string theory and cosmology, and advances the idea of dimensions beyond the familiar three (or four, if you include time). Her accessible recap includes some surprising historical sidelights -- Dali's Crucifixion, she points out, depicts a four-dimensional cube.

---

Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions by Lisa Randall

---

[SunkenCiv]

Amazon doesn't list this book yet, but the search engine pulled up Paul Davies title, despite my not having plugged his name into the search.

Cosmic coincidences
review by John Gribbin
Sunday Times

The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? by Paul Davies... First, he leads the reader gently by the hand through the basics of what we are sure we understand about space, time and the universe. Then, he leaps off into more speculative territory to ponder why the universe we live in is just right for life, and whether there may be other universes out there in other dimensions of space (and possibly time)... Even the term "Goldilocks world", from which Davies takes his title, is an old one used by astronomers in a variety of ways when discussing why the earth, or the universe, is, like baby bear's porridge in the story, "just right" for us... Why should it be worth entertaining such a possibility? Because, in the words of the cosmologist Fred Hoyle, our universe seems to be "a put-up job", in which many physical features of the universe and even of the laws of physics themselves seem to be fine-tuned to allow our existence... But at the end of his book comes the ultimate cop-out. Having posed the question "How come existence?", Davies concludes that "all of the approaches I have discussed are likely to prove unsatisfactory. In fact, in reviewing them they all seem to me to be either ridiculous or hopelessly inadequate". He dismisses the idea of a unique universe which arose by chance, of "a stupendous number" of parallel universes, of God, and of a self-explaining universe "entailing backward causation and teleology".

[SunkenCiv]

Alastair McKay talks to Astrobiologist Paul Davies
Scotland Sunday Herald
22 October 2006

"One person says it's much easier for me to believe there's an intelligent God who has made the Universe, than to believe that it's just magically there, with all the properties it's got, and Richard Dawkins will say it's much easier to believe that the Universe exists and evolves its complexity than that a being as complex as an almighty God is already there. Well, you'll argue forever. You can't prove or disprove the other person's position – you're just arguing over whose superturtle is easier to accept on faith.

"There's got to be a third way where we escape from having to depend on a superturtle; it's only your cultural prejudice that would leave you to believe a designer superbeing is better or worse than a magical set of laws that just happens to exist."

[SunkenCiv]

Hard Probes (And Soft Ones) To Test The Quark-Gluon Soup
Berkeley Lab
Test and Measurement.com

On a different tack, conference participants were also stimulated by the successes of at least one brand of string theory in interpreting some experimental puzzles much more easily than QCD can deal with the same phenomena. "We don't understand how these theories are related," says Wang, referring to the well-established QCD and the popular if somewhat controversial string theory, but in this case "there's a startling resemblance in their results."

As might be expected, a final area of intense discussion at the summer conference was progress toward future heavy-ion experiments, especially at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

"The Large Hadron Collider at CERN won't just accelerate protons," says Jacobs. "It will also be able to accelerate heavy ions like lead to energies never before achieved."

Jacobs and NSD Director James Symons are heading an effort to equip a CERN experiment named ALICE with a detector called an electromagnetic calorimeter, which will push heavy-ion experiments and the physics of jets into new realms of exploration.

[SunkenCiv]

I found the link to this in an online review of the movie "Deja Vu".

Tenth Dimension website
by Rob Bryanton
Talking Dog Studios

The flash version of this website (www.tenthdimension.com) provides an interactive set of animations with narration and sound effects which explain the basic concepts from chapter one of the book. The media-rich nature of these animations is not recommended for viewing with a dialup connection because of long load times. Below is a transcript of the narration from those animations. The ideas presented here come from chapter one of a new book called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension: a new way of thinking about time, space, and string theory", written by Rob Bryanton.

[SunkenCiv]

Grid accelerates research
Tools help deliver CERN data to labs worldwide
by Joab Jackson

In 2007, CERN will crank up the Large Hadron Collider, which will be the world’s largest particle accelerator. The physics community around this project wants to channel the collision results to labs worldwide, which could test out advanced physics hypotheses concerning supersymmetry, string theory and other theories.

This approach could tap the potential power of distributed computing. CERN itself has the most computer capacity of all the laboratories involved in the project, yet it only has 20 percent of the total computing capability involved in the project globally. The remaining 80 percent is split across the other participating partners, Fisk said.

[SunkenCiv]

This is a test of something I probably won't use that much. "Join it" etc are live zones (this is the client side image map method), with the overall picture leading to "view topics" (the stringtheory keyword). Because of the graphic's size, I don't plan to use this much, but just this once I hope it's amusing.

[SunkenCiv]

a letter to the San Diego Union-Tribune:

The trouble with physics is in eye of the beholder
by Edsel Chromie, Escondido
January 7, 2007

In the review by Fred Bortz ("Relatively Speaking, This Theory's a Mess," Dec. 31, Books) of "The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next" by Lee Smolin and "Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law" by Peter Woit, it stated: "Physics has hit an uncommonly long dry spell."

Actually, Brad Smith, a leader of Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists, said: "Scientists are junking many of their once tidy theories that have been shot to hell by the spacecraft." So, for the first time in history, theoretical science has taken a huge step backward, not just hit a dry spell.

In a Dec. 16, 1997, NASA news conference, Torrence Johnson of JPL said: "Trying to update our textbooks is proving to be difficult. We can't just take our previous text and add a few lines. We're having to tear it up and literally rewrite the textbooks."

As the review states, "Most readers will never succeed in envisioning extra curled up dimensions of space-time or understand the implications of symmetries in those additional dimensions. Still, the books can enable them to appreciate how more mathematically oriented minds can see unification between grainy quantum mechanics and smooth theories of the gravitational force."

Indeed, the problem is the narrow focus on the "smooth theories of the gravitational force" while totally ignoring the contribution of magnetic field current energy in creating the bizarre anomalies of the phenomena that the scientists now publicly concede has them "bewildered explorers."

It is the inability of the theorists to resolve the position of gravity with the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force that prevents the acceptance of the string theory.

Once scientists realize that gravity was not a primary force but a secondary result of the accumulation of a sufficient mass created by the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force generating the force of gravity, the string theory would make sense and match the mathematical equations that are correct. This would lead to the "grand unification" of all known forces and particles into a single theory. Surely, Smolin and Woit would understand this and, undoubtedly, most of the subscribers to the Union Tribune would understand this explanation.

[MHGinTN]

Shor is alot ta think about.

[SunkenCiv]

---

---

[SunkenCiv]

Quantum Mechanics keyword:

Gravity's quantum leaps detected
	Posted by Ernest_at_the_Beach OnNews/Activism 01/17/2002 7:06:29 PM EST · 103 replies · 1,061+ views New Scientist | 19:00 16 January 02 | Hazel Muir Gravity's quantum leaps detected   19:00 16 January 02 Hazel Muir   Gravity's subtle influence in the quantum world has been directly observed for the first time. On tiny scales, nature makes particles behave according to curiously rigid rules. For instance, negatively charged electrons trapped around a positive nucleus under the pull of the electromagnetic force cannot have any energy they want -they have to fall into a set of distinct energy levels. In the same way, the pull of gravity should make particles fall into discrete energy levels. But because gravity is extremely weak on small scales, the effect has been ...
Is God In Time?
	Posted by P-Marlowe OnReligion 04/19/2002 12:22:22 AM EDT · 4 replies · 53+ views Stand to Reason | 1995 | Gregory Koukl Is God In Time? Gregory Koukl Is it possible that all of history is one big space-time manifold--a "block universe"? Put your thinking caps on today. We're going to talk about time. It's common for us to make the comment "The spaceless, timeless God" or "Then we'll pass out of time, into eternity." However, the Scripture is not clear about God's timelessness. Most of the verses seem to indicate God is in time: Rev 1:4; Rev 4:8, Ps 90, Jude 25, 2 Pet 3:8. Two popular books describe a picture of God as timeless. Philip Yancey's book Disappointment...
"Exact uncertainty" brought to quantum world
	Posted by sourcery OnNews/Activism 05/07/2002 2:50:28 PM EDT · 32 replies · 94+ views NewScientist.com | April 02 | Eugenie Samuel "Exact uncertainty" brought to quantum world 00:01 27 April 02 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition Exact uncertainty sounds like a contradiction in terms, but that is what governs the quantum world, according to a theoretical physicist who has created an improved version of the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Heisenberg worked out that there is a degree of inherent fuzziness to the world. You cannot measure both the position and the momentum of any particle with perfect accuracy. The better the accuracy of your momentum measurement, the more uncertain your position measurement must be, and vice versa....
Time Trip - questions and answers (How widely accepted is the theory that we can travel in time?)
	Posted by Momaw Nadon OnNews/Activism 12/25/2003 11:12:15 PM EST · 91 replies · 1,121+ views BBC | Friday, December 26, 2003 | BBC The Future According to Professor Paul Davies "Scientists have no doubt whatever that it is possible to build a time machine to visit the future". Since the publication of Einsteinís Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, few, if any, scientists would dispute that time travel to the future is perfectly possible. According to this theory, time runs slower for a moving person than for someone who is stationary. This has been proven by experiments using very accurate atomic clocks. In theory, a traveller on a super high-speed rocket ship could fly far out into the Universe and then come back...
About Those Fearsome Black Holes? Never Mind
	Posted by neverdem OnNews/Activism 07/23/2004 12:17:06 AM EDT · 30 replies · 799+ views NY Times | July 22, 2004 | DENNIS OVERBYE Dr. Stephen W. Hawking threw in the towel yesterday, or at least an encyclopedia. Dr. Hawking, the celebrated Cambridge University cosmologist and best-selling author, declared at a scientific conference in Dublin that he had been wrong in a controversial assertion he made 30 years ago about black holes, the fearsome gravitational abysses that can swallow matter and energy, even light. As atonement he presented Dr. John Preskill, a physicist from the California Institute of Technology, with a baseball encyclopedia. The encyclopedia was the stake in a famous bet Dr. Hawking and another Caltech physicist, Dr. Kip Thorne, made with Dr....
Natural selection acts on the quantum world
	Posted by PatrickHenry OnNews/Activism 12/23/2004 11:31:39 AM EST · 74 replies · 1,057+ views Nature Magazine | 23 December 2004 | Philip Ball Objective reality may owe its existence to a 'darwinian' process that advertises certain quantum states. A team of US physicists has proved a theorem that explains how our objective, common reality emerges from the subtle and sensitive quantum world. If, as quantum mechanics says, observing the world tends to change it, how is it that we can agree on anything at all? Why doesn't each person leave a slightly different version of the world for the next person to find? Because, say the researchers, certain special states of a system are promoted above others by a quantum form of natural...
Black holes 'do not exist'
	Posted by Michael_Michaelangelo OnNews/Activism 03/31/2005 7:41:46 PM EST · 75 replies · 2,982+ views Nature | 03/31/05 | Philip Ball Black holes are staples of science fiction and many think astronomers have observed them indirectly. But according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, these awesome breaches in space-time do not and indeed cannot exist. Over the past few years, observations of the motions of galaxies have shown that some 70% the Universe seems to be composed of a strange 'dark energy' that is driving the Universe's accelerating expansion. George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain...
One Hundred Years of Uncertainty
	Posted by infocats OnNews/Activism 04/08/2005 7:57:45 AM EDT · 12 replies · 549+ views New York Times | April 8, 2005 | Brian Greene JUST about a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein began writing a paper that secured his place in the pantheon of humankind's greatest thinkers. With his discovery of special relativity, Einstein upended the familiar, thousands-year-old conception of space and time. To be sure, even a century later, not everyone has fully embraced Einstein's discovery. Nevertheless, say "Einstein" and most everyone thinks "relativity." physicists call 1905 Einstein's "miracle year" not because of the discovery of relativity alone, but because in that year Einstein achieved the unimaginable, writing four papers that each resulted in deep and formative changes to our understanding of the...
3 Share Nobel for Work on Behavior and Use of Light
	Posted by neverdem OnNews/Activism 10/05/2005 3:09:50 PM EDT · 9 replies · 344+ views NY Times | October 5, 2005 | KENNETH CHANG A scientist who worked out a theory describing the behavior of light using quantum mechanics and two scientists who used that knowledge to develop a powerful laser technique for identifying atoms and molecules were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics yesterday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced. Half of the prize, and half of the $1.3 million in prize money, go to Roy J. Glauber, 80, a professor of physics at Harvard, for calculations that laid the foundation for quantum optics. John L. Hall, 71, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder and at...
Quantum Physics and the Media
	Posted by Logic Times OnBloggers & Personal 10/26/2005 1:44:35 AM EDT · 13 replies · 444+ views Logic Times | 10-26-05 | Dan Hallagan This inherent inaccuracy stems from the violent interaction of the information gatherer(s) with the event being observed, and what emerges no longer represents the actual event. The violence done during the observation phase is not a physical violence, but a disruptive, prejudicial and dysfunctional pattern of thought and action by all members of the news gathering infrastructure, from factors as well-understood as biased reporters and editors, to elements as subtle as camera angles, props, timing, tone and the selection of adjectives. The end result is that no event of any complexity can run the gauntlet of distortion erected between the...
Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory
	Posted by snarks_when_bored OnNews/Activism 12/28/2005 4:42:38 PM EST · 122 replies · 2,532+ views The New York Times | December 27, 2005 | Dennis Overbye December 27, 2005 Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory By DENNIS OVERBYE Einstein said there would be days like this.This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in...
A Quantum Sampler
	Posted by neverdem OnNews/Activism 12/28/2005 5:23:45 PM EST · 9 replies · 759+ views NY Times | December 26, 2005 | NA Thoughts on quantum theory by various scientists:"On quantum theory, I use up more brain grease than on relativity." Albert Einstein to Otto Stern in 1911"Those are the crazy people who are not working on quantum theory."Albert Einstein referring to the inmates of an insane asylum near his office in Prague, in 1911"I could probably have arrived at something like this myself, but if all this is true then it means the end of physics."Albert Einstein, referring to a 1913 breakthrough by Niels Bohr"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word."Niels Bohr"I don't like it,...
Is Consciousness Quantum?
	Posted by TBP OnReligion 02/13/2006 12:37:11 AM EST · 42 replies · 363+ views I AM Spirit | February 14, 2006 | Tim Phares, RScP "Consciousness is the singular for which there is no plural," wrote the scientist Erwin Schroedinger. Schroedinger, famous for his theoretical disappearing cat, was one of the pioneers of quantum science. Lately, I've been contemplating the idea, if I understand it correctly (I am emphatically NOT a scientist), that things in a quantum Universe are essentially wavicles -- potentially, at least, in several places at once, achieving locality only when observed. Only when we focus on them do they show up in a specific place called here. The essential principle is that there is an observer consciousness that is the overriding...
Quantum Entanglement
	Posted by strategofr OnNews/Activism 02/23/2006 10:15:29 PM EST · 22 replies · 651+ views joot.com Introduction These pages explain quantum entanglement by way of colourful pictures, helpful analogies, and absolutely no math. To understand quantum entanglement, several ideas and words must be explained, especially the idea of a photon. The photon is a key concept in physics, and so critical to entanglement that its behaviours must be fully understood. But before delving into the details of photons, let's take a look at the world of the very tiny, beginning with waves and atoms. What is a Wave? Tossing a pebble into a pond creates ripples that travel from where the pebble landed to the edge...
Three cosmic enigmas, one audacious answer [bye-bye to black holes?]
	Posted by snarks_when_bored OnNews/Activism 03/09/2006 11:34:42 PM EST · 103 replies · 2,080+ views New Scientist | March 9, 2006 | Zeeya Merali Three cosmic enigmas, one audacious answer 09 March 2006 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition Zeeya Merali DARK energy and dark matter, two of the greatest mysteries confronting physicists, may be two sides of the same coin. A new and as yet undiscovered kind of star could explain both phenomena and, in turn, remove black holes from the lexicon of cosmology. The audacious idea comes from George Chapline, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin of Stanford University and their colleagues. Last week at the 22nd Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting in Santa Barbara,...
Raiders Of The Lost Dimension (quantum mechanics)
	Posted by Ben Mugged OnNews/Activism 06/06/2006 12:59:36 PM EDT · 37 replies · 1,169+ views Space Mart | Jun 06, 2006 | Unattributed A team of scientists working at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory's Pulsed Field Facility at Los Alamos has uncovered an intriguing phenomenon while studying magnetic waves in barium copper silicate, a 2,500-year-old pigment known as Han purple. The researchers discovered that when they exposed newly grown crystals of the pigment to very high magnetic fields at very low temperatures, it entered a rarely observed state of matter. At the threshold of that matter state--called the quantum critical point-the waves actually lose a dimension. That is, the magnetic waves go from a three-dimensional to a two-dimensional pattern. The discovery is...
Quantum Leap
	Posted by Neville72 OnNews/Activism 07/28/2006 6:46:51 AM EDT · 10 replies · 391+ views Fortune Magazine/CNN | 7/27/2006 | Peter Schwartz & Rita Koselka Brain prosthetics. Telepathy. Punctual flights. A futurist's vision of where quantum computers will take us. (FORTUNE Magazine) -- She awakes early on the morning of April 10, 2030, in the capable hands of her suburban Chicago apartment. All night, microscopic sensors in her bedside tables have monitored her breathing, heart rate, and brain activity. The tiny blood sample she gave her bathroom sink last night has been analyzed for free radicals and precancerous cells; the appropriate preventative drugs will be delivered to her hotel in Atlanta this evening. It's an expensive service, but as a gene therapist, Sharon Oja knows...
Why Quantum Mechanics Is Not So Weird after All
	Posted by snarks_when_bored OnNews/Activism 09/15/2006 1:27:24 AM EDT · 123 replies · 2,165+ views Skeptical Inquirer | July 2006 | Paul Quincey Why Quantum Mechanics Is Not So Weird after All Richard Feynman's "least-action" approach to quantum physics in effect shows that it is just classical physics constrained by a simple mechanism. When the complicated mathematics is left aside, valuable insights are gained. PAUL QUINCEY The birth of quantum mechanics can be dated to 1925, when physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrˆdinger invented mathematical procedures that accurately replicated many of the observed properties of atoms. The change from earlier types of physics was dramatic, and pre-quantum physics was soon called classical physics in a kind of nostalgia for the...
Physicists seek to put one thing in two places
	Posted by snarks_when_bored OnNews/Activism 09/26/2006 7:23:06 AM EDT · 57 replies · 1,276+ views World Science | 25 Sept 2006 Physicists seek to put one thing in two placesSept. 25, 2006 Special to World Science Physi!=cists say they have made an ob!=ject move just by watch!=ing it. This is in!=spir!=ing them to a still bold!=er proj!=ect: put!=ting a small, or!=di!=nary thing in!=to two places at once. It may be a ìfan!=ta!=sy,î ad!=mits Keith Schwab of Cor!=nell Uni!=ver!=si!=ty in Ith!=a!=ca, N.Y., one of the re!=search!=ers. Then again, the first ef!=fect seemed that way not long ago, and the sec!=ond is re!=lat!=ed. The gray sliv!=er reach!=ing from top to bot!=tom, slanted in the im!=age, is a na!=no!=me!=chan!=i!=cal re!=s!=o!=na!=tor, a sub-mi!=c!=ro!=s!=co!=pic de!=vice...
It's official, Elvis lives [inflationary cosmology saves the King!]
	Posted by snarks_when_bored OnNews/Activism 01/15/2007 9:32:55 PM EST · 72 replies · 777+ views Telegraph.co.uk | 16 January 2007 | Marcus Chown It's official, Elvis lives Last Updated: 12:01am¬ GMT¬ 16/01/2007 It might sound a little crazy, but our standard theories of cosmology and physics suggest that an infinite number of Presleys still exist, says Marcus Chown. And if that's not scary enough, it also means that you, and these words, are repeated ad infinitum across the universeElvis is alive. No, really! He didn't die of a cardiac arrest in his bathroom at Graceland on August 16, 1977. Instead, he slipped out of the back door under cover of darkness dressed as a nun, had a sex change and worked for several years...