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To: shrinkermd
Yeah, but this isn't one of them. String theory has produced no predictions confirmed by observation beyond those offered by the union of general relativity and the standard model of particle physics. It purports to calculate quantities by summing over all possible embeddings of Riemann surfaces in certain spaces (10 or 11 dimensional), but once one is dealing with higher genus surfaces (imagine more and more handles on your coffee cup) there is no proceedure for 'regularizing' the infinite sum to produce a finite quantity. (Such procedures exist for low genus surfaces only up to 'two loops' in the physicists term of art.)

My closest colleague has tried to pin them down: string theorists assert with near clockwork regularity that string theory is 'perturbatively finite', but when you ask them where this is proven, most can't point to a source, and those who can point to a paper in which the methods only work up to two loops. . .or they give bogus arguments based on misunderstandings of a mathematical construct called Teichmuller space. And, to date string theory can only be done in a 'flat background' space-- but general relativity tells us gravity is equivalent to certain kinds of curvature on space. If it's not perturbatively finite, or can't be done in a realistic space-time, string theory isn't even a theory much less a theory of everything.

Of course, neither the popular science press nor the National Science Foundation seem to have noticed this, not even when Edward Witten, one of the leading lights of string theory over its 20 year life has given up on it to turn to work on loop quantum gravity--which according to the string-theorist quoted in the times (who has no basis in either physical or mathematical fact for his assertion) 'must be part of string theory'. It isn't.

13 posted on 12/10/2004 7:35:37 AM PST by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know what this was)
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To: The_Reader_David
It purports to calculate quantities by summing over all possible embeddings of Riemann surfaces in certain spaces (10 or 11 dimensional), but once one is dealing with higher genus surfaces (imagine more and more handles on your coffee cup) there is no proceedure for 'regularizing' the infinite sum to produce a finite quantity.

Huh?

20 posted on 12/10/2004 8:01:53 AM PST by Dogrobber
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To: The_Reader_David
I dont know enough to say for sure, but it seems to me that this string theory may be a bunch of mental mathematical m*sterb*ation. The proof is in the pudding, and as of yet, as you say, there is no unique pudding!

BTW, for some TOE technobabble BS fun in a sci-fi way, read the book called "Distress", by Greg Egan. Takes this stuff and twists it around into ultimately a silly conclusion, but it was kinda fun reading it.. (the person who "discovers" or first interprets the TOE becomes the "keystone", or something like the creator of the Universe....)

29 posted on 12/10/2004 8:31:50 AM PST by Paradox (Occam was probably right.)
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