Posted on 03/29/2019 5:59:07 AM PDT by C19fan
Physicists who have been roaming the “landscape” of string theory—the space of zillions and zillions of mathematical solutions of the theory, where each solution provides the kinds of equations physicists need to describe reality—have stumbled upon a subset of such equations that have the same set of matter particles as exists in our universe.
But this is no small subset: there are at least a quadrillion such solutions, making it the largest such set ever found in string theory.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
My cat is a big believer in string theory and performs experiments with it quite frequently.
I will be impressed when kitty vibrates the string to the right frequency to produce the graviton. As with these curled up extra dimensions kitty is very good at folding to strange positions. :)
"Anyway, like I was sayin', shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. There's uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There's pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That- that's about it."
Keep Schrödinger away from him
“A quadrillion here, a quadrillion there, pretty soon you’re talking real universes” </Everett Dirksen>
3. For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. 5But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.
I guess these folks just can’t accept their creator.
In the end, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that He is Lord.
I quite recently figured out that some of those kneeling and confessing won’t be happy to do it.
My first reaction on reading the headline was “A quadrillion permutations and zero testable hypotheses.”
And so, is the difference between mathematics and physics. In mathematics, all things are possible. More than three dimensions? No problem, just 'compactify' the ones that aren't physically possible. Infinity and singularity? No problem. Infinity lies just beyond the edge of the chart. A singularity lies just under the zero.
Physics has a problem with this. No matter how far away you look, you can't see to the end. No matter how small you compress something, you can't make go to zero. Mathematics is great. It can be used to describe physical things, and doing so mankind can make things of wonder. Spaceships, lasers, smart phones, GPS, and mag-lev trains are but a tiny few. Sometimes, though, the fit isn't quite perfect, and we have to 'compactify' the mathematical things that don't quite fit. That still doesn't mean that they are possible in the physical world. And calling time a 'dimension' doesn't make it a fourth dimension. 'Space-time' is mathematics, not physics.
In Theory many people can be lead by a string. String Theory in and of itself as proven this theory beyond any question or doubt. String Theory is therefore real and should be renamed String Fact. Dark Matter is what floats around inside the “Many” heads.
I am so totally getting that.
Physicists haven’t noticed that they’ve become Theologians.
Years ago, I watched a documentary on the possibility of time travel. A string theorist came on and said because there are infinite number of parallel universes in existence and if we could learn how to move between them, a person could go to the parallel universe that matches say, 1870 Dodge City, Kansas.
As he was talking about this, I thought this same person would call me nuts if I mentioned the Christian concept of Heaven and Hell. However, I guess turn-about would be fair play.
Sounds a lot like the the “climate change theory”.
I wasn’t so long ago that the mathematics of Dirac and Schrodinger that required going beyond classical set theory and understanding vector states in Hilbert space to explain the observable probabilities of of quantum field theory was derided as nonsense also. The mathematics of Yang-Mills and other Lie algebras was the key to organizing the symmetries of the Standar Model none of which are intuitive to non scientists. Using these tools Higgs and others predicted the existence of the Higgs boson long before the LHC or any device was capable of confirming it. String theory is just dealing with forces and particles at the Plank scale that are tens of orders of magnitude in energy beyond what out tools can realize. That doesn’t mean that the Calabi Yau shapes and dualities that it generates aren’t still useful in gaining a useful model of the fundamental workings of the universe.
You know nothing about the religious affiliation or theological orientation of the String Theorists.
How in Sam Hill is trying to understand the fundamental Laws of Physics, that govern the way the Universe works, the least bit un-Godly?
Aside from the possible practical applications...
Regards,
I don't think that that person would cast aspersions upon your sanity - if you were able to back up your speculations with any sort of coherent mathematics.
Can you?
Regards,
I actually understood that. Brian Greene is good at explaining things.
*ping*
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