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To: Las Vegas Dave

Thank you for the ping LVD :)
Never heard of it.. but will try to find the series torrent to download ;)


22 posted on 01/07/2012 6:49:16 AM PST by Bikkuri
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To: Bikkuri

I enjoyed the Fabric series as I have the other Brian Greene PBS offerings and his books. His mission is to popularize leading edge concepts of physics such as string theory and inflation cosmology and make the abstract mathematics understandable to the general population. He freely admits that much of this material is very speculative and remains to be verified by experimentation within the scientific community. For me it reveals the vast gap between ultimate truth and the realm of apparent truth that we experience as sentient beings. The whole history of cosmological physics has been about logically demonstrating that our human-centric perception of the universe is a simulation created by the neural processes of our conscious minds. Through the logical arguments of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Hawkings, Wittgen, and now Maldacena humans have gone from being the center of the universe surrounded by the crystalline spheres of the heavens to deterministic quantum algorithms churning away on the surface of some distant 3-brane and projected as a hologram into a 3-dimensional reality. The problem with all such explanations of ultimate truth is that they can only be truly known by a tiny priesthood of scientists that can actually do the math. The vast majority of humans have never actually determined for themselves that the Earth is a sphere or that it orbits the Sun or that the speed of light is the same for all observers in unaccelerated motion, they just believe these “facts” based on faith in others that have done the math. It is much more satisfying and reassuring from the standpoint of our human experience to believe in omnipotent anthropomorphic deities managing the vast cosmos for our ultimate benefit. In the end we can only ever experience apparent reality at our human scale so we should optimize that as much as possible to minimize suffering and not worry too much whether Anti-de Sidder Space/Conformal Field Theory is the real explanation of everything. If such theories prove to have predictive value and improve our species chances of survival in the future then they are worthwhile otherwise they are just mathematical dirt roads. For the limited PBS audience that is fascinated by the quest for ultimate truth they are certainly entertaining as well.


26 posted on 01/07/2012 8:28:59 AM PST by Dave Wright
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