At 07:55 AM 02/14/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
As one approaches the plank length,
I'm getting kind of board with this. (Alternatively, Bob Hettinga can make some kind of pirate comment here...)
TD> Hell, Witten himself said something like "The development of General TD> Relativity probably occurs in nonhuman civilizations as a corrollary to TD> Superstrings. The discovery of General Relativity on Earth prior to TD> Superstrings will probably be regarded as an historical accident". EC>I generally discount greatly any math or physics argument which has to EC>appeal to "nonhuman civilizations" in search of profundity. I checked with the local non-humans, and they said that strings really are kind of fun, remind them of mouse tails, but that the historical accident was Not Their Fault...
JD> Suppose we had the ultimate theory of everything handed to us JD> on a platter by supercilious aliens.
.. and they objected to being called supercilious, as well. There's a theory that the standard pictures of space aliens have a strong resemblence to what a half-awake human sees when there's a six-month-old kitten staring you in the face from a few inches closer than your eyes' normal focal lengths...
