Posted on 01/09/2005 12:26:51 PM PST by snarks_when_bored
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"The son of two Iranian physicists, Arkani-Hamed was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up in Boston. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, his family returned to their homeland, but as religious fundamentalists took over the government, his father was forced to go underground and the family eventually had to flee across the border to Turkey. By 1982, Nima was living in Toronto, Canada."
Non-elitist bookmark bump.
It's not strong enough to provide a good signal. The EM spectrum is far superior.
Thanks for the ping!
Why does this guy think that a uniform distribution of matter and energy isn't the result of a random process? In many cases, this is exactly what would be predicted.
His comment about the universe being "accidental" just shows
how little our language and common understanding incorporates
all of the knowledge we do have.
One major question would be such:
Is there any such thing as an "accident?" If the universe
(no matter how many dimensions or what it is composed of)
is set on ONE solitary physical course, then the concept of
an accident(meaning something happened that wouldn't
"normally" happen) COULDN'T occur at all. EVERYTHING
would be an outworking of the physical plant we find ourselves
in...(e.g. every event which occurs is based on some
physical process which was initially set in motion when the
universe (or multiverse, if you will) began.
This of course raises questions about our belief, that
we can understand "NATURE" at it's core, since our very
thoughts could be considered as outworkings of the
physical processes initially set in motion when the universe
(or multiverse, if you will) began.
"I think, therefore I AM....er....do I really think?", would be
the edited version of that famous philosophical statement.......
You're right about height, width, depth and time being the standard four dimensions of spacetime. But gravity is not a dimension; it's one of the four fundamental forces, the other three being electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force.
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however, observation has shown that the structure of space time is bent into "gravity wells" around massively large objects. Here are two sentences. 1.)Space tells matter how to move. 2.)Matter tells space how to bend. Sentence one describes "height, width, depth and time being the standard four dimensions of spacetime." Sentence one describes how we understand reality. However, all four dimensions seem to be subject to something else described in sentence two. The bend or gravity. But why is this bending of space described as a force rather than the character of space itself. It doesn't seem as if space is empty. Rather it seems that if space can bend than it is more like a material.
Either that or our notion of dimensions is a function of newtonian mathmatics. We're biased or our point of view is in favor of space time rather than matter time--if there is such a beast. I'm no mathmatician but I've heard recently some speculation at free republic that this bias had something to do with Newton's work and that it could be rectified or rebalanced by Newton's contemporary, Liebnitz, who did some work with infintessimals, a number system that is built around a one dimensional zero--or something like that. At this point I'm out of my depth.
atheist scientists don't believe in God since there is no "proof" yet fall all over themselves expousing the existence of cosmic strings and 23 different dimensions, for which there is
no experimental proof whatsoever
ah, hypocrisy. faith is OK, but only if politically correct
Random means uniform does it not? So I was taught in chemistry class.
Dr. Michio Kaku's latest book, Parallel Worlds...Bump for later
I'll never understand how it is that theoretical scientists fail to see the handwriting of God in the essence of their work. Just because something is of divine nature doesn't necessarily mean it defies measurement, it merely defies our current technology to make those measurements. And once measured, that doesn't mean that it has nothing to do with God's work.
God only gave Moses the rules for human behavior, not for the behavior of the universe. To assume that those 10 commandments are the only laws in existence which God created (or enforces) is arrogance in the extreme.
During my undergraduate degree studies in Physics, it became quite clear to me - nearly an atheist at the time - that the only plausible explanation to the universe rested with what we define as God. As I have aged over the last 25 years since, this belief has only become stronger.
Eventually, when humankind learns to overcome mortality, the human invented aspect of linear time will fall by the wayside, opening the doors which are closed today. Quantum theory begins to erase linear time, but time still keeps us "on the plantation" so to speak - locking us into Newtonian mechanics as the basis of our physical understanding.
This could be the answer to Fermi's paradox - in our local miniverse - advanced civilizations have come up with the physics to do this sooner rather than later. We're next.
Has there been any experimental verification of string theory? What if this is a colossal dead end--what's Plan B?
I imagine that we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
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