Eric Cordian wrote...
Yo! Superstring theory is only "continuous math" because the proper mathematical theory describing strings didn't exist. In the past, physics has sometimes lagged (ca 1900) sometimes led (Newton) the development of the needed mathematics. If Superstrings ends up describing "everything", it will be apparent that Ed Witten was right: "Superstrings is really 21st century physics that we accidentally stumbled upon in the 20th century". In other words, progress is slow precisely because the math is so friggin' hard.Continuous math is a dead end. So are strings.
As for Superstrings being dead, I'd suggest that quite the opposite is true, though a lot of the research in strings over the last decade has been done by mathematicians. Read Hawkings' recent "Universe in a Nutshell"...as some Superstring proponents have long suggested, it seems we are now coming very close to experimental verification of one tiny part of this massive theory.
"The manifold folks are never going to produce anything which obsoletes the
big general relativity book by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, which will
live forever as the apex of predictive power of the manifold approach to
spacetime dynamics."
I don't think any Superstring researcher believes that (at least the ones I've spoken to don't, and I have spoken to some of the older big figures). Hell, the whole point of Superstrings was to find a way to reconcile General Relativity with a QM view, and Superstrings is still a very nice candidate.
Hell, Witten himself said something like "The development of General Relativity probably occurs in nonhuman civilizations as a corrollary to Superstrings. The discovery of General Relativity on Earth prior to Superstrings will probably be regarded as an historical accident".
"The "M" in M-Theory stands for Moron."
Uh, no. Even if M-theory has nothing to do with reality, it will yield interesting mathematics for decades. Remember, these branches of physics are ferociously mathematical. Morons never get anywhere near these fields. Even I, a genius among mere mortals am a near-Moron in the presence of people working in these fields. (Want an example? I thought that generating the confluent hypergeometric functions using contours in the complex plane meant you were hot shit mathematically. Math-physicists refer to something like this as "arithmetic".)
-TD
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