Posted on 03/01/2010 1:31:54 PM PST by Lorianne
"String" may not even be a theory technically, because in order to be a legitimate scientific theory, it needs to be 'testable'. And SST, at least last I heard, cannot be.
Theory: "A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena."
Sorry, don’t have much time right now to find a deeper answer to your qestion, but I did find the following:
“The leading practitioner of superstring theory is Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Time magazine recently named Dr. Witten one of the 25 most influential Americans, and with good reason. Dr. Witten’s papers on superstrings have made him far and away the most cited physicist in the world.
In a now famous paper published last May in Social Text, a quarterly devoted to cultural studies, Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, proposed that superstring theory might help liberate science from “dependence on the concept of objective truth.”
Professor Sokal later announced that the article had been a hoax intended to expose the hollowness of postmodernism. In fact, however, superstring theory is exactly the kind of science that subverts conventional notions of truth.
The tiny domain that superstrings supposedly inhabit is even less accessible than the quasars haunting the edge of the visible universe. For instance, a superstring is to a proton in size as a proton is to the solar system. To probe this realm directly would require a particle accelerator 1,000 light-years around. (The entire solar system is only one light-day around.) In other words, it is highly unlikely that we will ever know whether superstring theory is true; that’s what makes it ironic.
Ironic science has flourished on the macro end of physics as well. Physicists like Sidney Coleman of Harvard and Andrei Linde of Stanford have speculated that our galaxy-emblazoned cosmos is merely one of an infinite number of universes, some perhaps with similar laws of physics and even similar inhabitants. A fascinating possibility — and one that will probably never be verified.
The phenomenon of human consciousness is a seed from which myriad ironic blooms have sprung. Every year more books and conferences are devoted to the question of how mere matter can possibly give rise to subjective thought.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/16/opinion/science-set-free-from-truth.html?pagewanted=1
[Quote]
“ Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think there’s an obfuscation here, regarding the meaning of the word, ‘observe’.
The word ‘observation’ implies the physical act of investigating the phenomenon. How is that done? In particle physics, it is by examining how particle or photon beams interact with the particles under study. It’s not merely as benign an act as “looking with the eye” that is causing the change in quantum events, but rather, the very act of interfering in the sequence of the quantum events, by introducing tools to observe, thus disturbing those events. Sort of like prodding a lying animal with a stick, to see if it is alive or not.
It’s not as if your awareness of a process changes that process. Rather, what you do to become aware of that process, requires the physical disruption of that process, thus causing the change.”[Quote]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQe0oiaBssg&feature=related
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