From: "Rich Gauszka" 


"John Beamish"  wrote in message
news:op.te78jto1m6tn4t{at}dellblack.wlfdle.phub.net.cable.rogers.com...
> Explained in a flash ... well, actually, explained in a Flash
> presentation.
>
> http://www.tenthdimension.com/flash.php
>
> Or, for the more text-based of us, try here
> http://www.tenthdimension.com/

Just when I thought I understood a bit about String Theory with your posted
link, Slate publishes an article that calls it all claptrap 

http://www.slate.com/id/2149598/?nav=ais

It's claptrap, a new book argues.
By Gregg Easterbrook

The leading universities are dominated by hooded monks who speak in
impenetrable mumbo-jumbo; insist on the existence of fantastic mystical
forces, yet can produce no evidence of these forces; and enforce a rigid
guild structure of beliefs in order to maintain their positions and status.
The Middle Ages? No, the current situation in university physics
departments. I just invented the part about the hoods.

The upper rungs of the particle-physics faculties at Princeton, Stanford,
and elsewhere in the academy are today heavy with advocates of "string
theory," a proposed explanation for the existence of the universe.
String theory seeks to explain why, at the very minute scale, matter
appears to be constructed from vibrating nothing. Smash up subatomic
particles into smaller units such as quarks, and the quarks don't appear to
have content-puzzling, to say the least. String theory says that these
seemingly amorphous infinitesimal aspects of matter are made from other
dimensions, compressed to a smallness that strains imagination. In various
versions, the theory also seeks to explain how the Big Bang could have been
possible, to reconcile the extremely tiny realm of quantum mechanics with
the cosmic kingdom of general relativity, and to answer whether the
expansion of our universe will stop or continue forever.

Important stuff! But string theory works only if you assume the existence
of other dimensions-nine, 11, or 25 of them, depending on your flavor of
string thinking-and there's not one shred of evidence other dimensions
exist. This may render string theory highfalutin nonsense that has hijacked
academic physics. Such is the thesis of The Trouble With Physics, a
compelling new book by Lee Smolin, among the leading physicists of the day.
Smolin's is the most important book about cosmology since Steven Weinberg's
1977 volume The First Three Minutes. If you worry that even in the 21st
century, intellectual fads have as much to do with university politics and
careerism as with the search for abstract truth, The Trouble With Physics
is a book you absolutely must read. "String theory now has such a
dominant position in the academy that it is practically career suicide for
young theoretical physicists not to join the field," Smolin writes.
Yet since string theory became ascendant about three decades ago,
"there has not been a single genuine breakthrough in understanding of
elementary particle physics." Not only is string theory rife with
malarkey about imperceptible dimensions, Smolin fears, it may be holding
back legitimate science.

Who is Smolin? A former physics instructor at Yale and Penn State, he now
works at this new Canadian think tank, established with seed money from the
entrepreneur behind the BlackBerry. About 15 years ago, Smolin's name
became among the most talked-about in science, for an idea that's a cosmic
version of Darwin. Modern physics is troubled by the anthropocentric
character of the universe. For instance, had gravity been only a teensy bit
stronger or weaker, planets and stars could not have formed. So, does the
fortuitous value of gravity for planets and stars show that a higher power
is manipulating physical law? Some theorists have responded to this
quandary by supposing that our 60-billion-galaxy universe is but a slice of
a far larger "multiverse" with a cornucopia of different
realities, each operating under its own physics. By chance one section of
the multiverse got physical laws that favor us, and chance was all that was
involved. Smolin countered with his theory of cosmic natural selection. The
theory goes like this: Black holes cause Big Bangs. Any universe whose
physical laws do not result in black holes thus will hit a cosmic dead end
and fail to "reproduce." The set of physical laws that result in
stars and planets also results in black holes, allowing universes like ours
to copy themselves. Over eons, the firmament would become dominated by
universes possessing the kind of laws we observe, because universes with
such laws "reproduce." Therefore it is not weird that our cosmos
has stars and planets; it is exactly what we should expect.

he physics establishment reacted adversely to Smolin's cosmic natural
selection because the idea implies direction: Over time, existence
progresses toward a condition more to the liking of beings such as us. In
recent decades it has become essential at the top of academia to posit
utter meaninglessness to all aspects of physics. Multiverse thinking is as
meaningless as it gets-thousands or billions of universes uninhabitable and
pointless, ours just a random-chance variation signifying nothing. Smolin's
idea is full of problems, including the lack of any evidence that black
holes cause Big Bangs. But Smolin could hardly have failed to note that he
was heckled for speculating about conditions for which there is no evidence
while the entire edifice of string theory rests atop no evidence. The
Trouble With Physics is his rejoinder.

String theory became a media obsession about 20 years ago, with one of its
proponents a cover boy of a New York Times Magazine article proclaiming
string theorists were super-ultra geniuses cracking the ultimate riddles of
creation. Smolin's book suggests that this caused string theorists to
believe their media hype and to speak of their concepts as if they were
proven. For example, they talk of "branes" (short for membranes)
of limited dimensions passing through realms of multitudinous dimensions
and describe branes as actual physical regions. Yet after decades of
attempts, no experiment has detected any hint of additional dimensions,
branes, or other core elements of string theory. Meanwhile string theory
failed to predict the biggest astrophysical discovery in decades, the 1998
finding that cosmic expansion is accelerating, apparently owing to powerful
"dark energy" that nobody can explain. After dark energy was
discovered, string theorists simply revised their equations to predict it.
That's not science, The Trouble With Physics contends.

Maybe string theory eventually will prove out; maybe the apparent vibrating
nothing on which we are based is but a slice of some far grander reality.
But string theory seems to contain significant helpings of blather designed
to intimidate nonscientists from questioning the budgets of physics
departments and tax-funded particle accelerator labs. And consider this.
Today if a professor at Princeton claims there are 11 unobservable
dimensions about which he can speak with great confidence despite an utter
lack of supporting evidence, that professor is praised for incredible
sophistication. If another person in the same place asserted there exists
one unobservable dimension, the plane of the spirit, he would be hooted
down as a superstitious crank.

Really, string theory isn't a theory at all. Creationists who oppose the
teaching of Darwin have taken to deriding natural selection as "just a
theory," and Darwin's defenders have rightly replied that in science,
"theory" does not mean idle speculation. Rather, it is an honored
term for an idea that has been elaborately analyzed, has not been
falsified, and has made testable predictions that have later proven to be
true. The ordering of scientific notions is: conjecture, hypothesis,
theory. Pope John Paul II chose his words carefully when in 1996 he called
evolution "more than a hypothesis." Yet the very sorts of
elite-institution academics who snigger at creationists for revealing their
ignorance of scientific terminology by calling evolution "just a
theory" nonetheless uniformly say "string theory." Since
what they're talking about is strictly a thought experiment (just try
proving there are no other dimensions), from now on, "string
conjecture," please.

Smolin concludes The Trouble With Physics with a sense of urgency. The
first two-thirds of the 20th century produced fundamental breakthroughs in
physics-relativity, quantum mechanics, the Standard Model of the interior
forces of the atom. The final third was nowhere near as productive, while
researchers repeatedly got hit over the head by the unexpected, such as
dark energy. It is imperative, Smolin thinks, to stop talking sci-fi
claptrap about alternate universes and get back to figuring out why our own
physical world is as we observe. Perhaps Smolin is right that pure-physics
breakthroughs are an imperative. Or perhaps stumbling around in the dark
will be the physicist's lot for generations to come-my guess is that we
know the first 1 percent of what there is to be known, and it may be
centuries before we learn such things as why matter exists. If we ever
know.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5