Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...

[Tyler Durden]

Eric Cordian wrote...

Perhaps it is so "friggin' hard" because you are trying to do the
equivalent of modular exponentiation with Roman numerals.

Well, you're kind of missing my point. You said that 'M' was for Moron, and I was pointing out that the Morons working on this theory are in some ways some of the most mathematically proficient people on the planet (and some are just plain old great physicsts).

I'd point out the geat lessons to be taken from Kuhn's "structure of Scientific Revolutions (with which I largely disagree, however). Basically, that those of us who sit on "this" side of a revolution not only often disagree with the new approach, we often don't even believe its actually science. That could be the case here. (Feynman didn't think Superstrings was physics as he knew it, but he was also fully aware that some of his most respected colleagues were working on it).

(In fact, I would have thought a member of the OTO, no strangers to alternative thinking, would be a little slower to declare that Superstrings was for morons.)

Manifolds are second countable Hausdorf spaces in which every point has a
neighborhood homeomorphic to the open ball in R^N.  I see no evidence that
the Universe may be infinitely magnified and still remain manifold-like.

If the small scale structure of the universe isn't manifold-like, then a
theory which says it is an 11-dimensional manifold is not a great leap
over a theory which says it is a 4-dimensional manifold.

I don't fully get your argument here, but I never claimed to be a mathematical physicist. If you are familiar with Kaluza and Klein (aparently useless pud-pulling when it was developed), you'll understand that string theory arises directly from the notion that the small scale topological structure of space time is entirely different from the large scale one. Those extra 7/8 dimensions (depnding on how you count) never "unfolded" and are only "visible" at Planck scales.

Remember that Einstein, in the days when gravitation and electromagnetism
were the only known forces, spent a lot of time trying to incorporate
electromagnetism into general relativity by making it the skew-symmetric
part of a non-symmetric metric tensor.  Einstein found inventing the math
to do this "friggin' hard."  It was also "friggin' wrong."

Uh, but the fact that it was "wrong" doesn't make Einstein a "moron". (And also, saying that a physical theory is wrong might arguably be like saying that a Picasso painting is "wrong", if you are a Kuhn true believer!)

I didn't say it was dead.  I said it was a "dead end."

Are you sure that's what you typed?

Make me a machine that does something of practical value, for which string
theory predicts the machine will work, and general relativity and the
standard model predict the opposite.

Well, you seem to have some odd ideas about the goals of Superstrings. Being able to re-extract the standard model as a "low energy" simplification was and is a main goal for superstrings, as far as physics is concerned. Some headway is being made, too.

As for predicting the outcome of experiment, give it time. A few measurable predictions are now being made, but remember the main domain of superstrings are energies that correspond to 10^(-43) sec after the universe began. A brute-force accelerator approach would require a ring larger than the galaxy, so some cleverness will be in order.

Make me something that levitates, or transmutes, or forks off child
universes, or generates traversable wormholes, or takes pictures of
particles that can only exist if the universe is made up of strings.

Child universes are actually kind of predicted by inflation theory, which does not require superstrings per se.

I generally discount greatly any math or physics argument which has to
appeal to "nonhuman civilizations" in search of profundity.

You seemed to have missed the point. You seemed to be claiming that the goals of superstrings included "proving" that General relativity is "wrong", and my point here was to show that one of the main and most brilliant proponents of Superstrings (Witten) considers precisely the opposite as being true.

General

relativity is a simple extension in which Lorentz invariance is a local
instead of a global property, and gravity and accelerated frames are
locally indistinguishable.

Yes, and Saint Peter's dome is a straightforward application of a paintbrush.

Just as non-linear physics is like non-elephant biology,

If I understand you correctly, this is a great phrase (I'll have to steal it). But we're good at solving linear equations. Many nonlinear equations may not have "solutions" that we can write down with pen or paper, (or even simulate on a computer for that matter)...ah well.

M-Theory is a distraction, like injecting opiates, or arguing on Usenet.

Yikes. I understand the concept of having an opinion, but somehow I think your arguments on this issue would not be very quick to discourage the likes of Witten, Bunji Sakita (who I used to bump into on a regular basis), Greene (who I went to HS with) and others. You and Choate should publish a few papers and set 'em straight!

-TD





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