18 replies to this topic

[imminstmorals]

http://superstringtheory.com

http://www.theory.ca...le/jhs/strings/

[darren]

Some scientists are unsatisfied with the theory of modern physics behind such things as black holes (Sorce theory claims that they do not exsist), see:

http://www.anpheon.org

http://www.kurzweila...hp?rootID=13620

[chubtoad]

A solution to the Infromation Paradox (for black holes) with string theory.

Now physicists at Ohio State University have proposed a solution using string theory, a theory which holds that all particles in the universe are made of tiny vibrating strings.  Samir Mathur and his colleagues have derived an extensive set of equations that strongly suggest that the information continues to exist -- bound up in a giant tangle of strings that fills a black hole from its core to its surface.
The finding suggests that black holes are not smooth, featureless entities as scientists have long thought. 
Instead, they are stringy “fuzzballs.”

Full Article: http://researchnews....ve/fuzzball.htm

[kevin]

good article chubtoad.. !

I especially like this part..

So when a great many strings join together, as they would in order to form the many particles necessary for a very massive object like a black hole, the combined ball of string is very stretchy, and expands to a wide diameter.

When the Ohio State physicists derived their formula for the diameter of a fuzzy black hole made of strings, they found that it matched the diameter of the black hole event horizon suggested by the classical model.

[Jay the Avenger]

Here's a link where you can watch a 3-part documentary on stringtheory online, hosted by none other than Brian Greene himself:

http://www.pbs.org/w...nt/program.html

[Lazarus Long]

Great Link Jay. I found it separately and posted it to the QM thread.

[chubtoad]

http://www.yale.edu/...-12-04.all.html

Yale Scientist Says Clues to String Theory May be Visible in Big Bang Aftermath

New Haven, Conn. -- Scientists studying the Big Bang say that it is possible that string theory may one day be tested experimentally via measurements of the Big Bang's afterglow.

Richard Easther, assistant professor of physics at Yale University will discuss the possibility at a meeting at Stanford University Wednesday, May 12, titled "Beyond Einstein: From the Big Bang to Black Holes." Easther's colleagues are Brian Greene of Columbia University, William Kinney of the University at Buffalo, SUNY, Hiranya Peiris of Princeton University and Gary Shiu of the University of Wisconsin.

String theory attempts to unify the physics of the large (gravity) and the small (the atom). These are now described by two theories, general relativity and quantum theory, both of which are likely to be incomplete.

Critics have disdained string theory as a "philosophy" that cannot be tested. However, the results of Easther and his colleagues suggest that observational evidence supporting string theory may be found in careful measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the first light to emerge after the Big Bang.

"In the Big Bang, the most powerful event in the history of the Universe, we see the energies needed to reveal the subtle signs of string theory," said Easther.

String theory reveals itself only over extreme small distances and at high energies. The Planck scale measures 10-35 meters, the theoretical shortest distance that can be defined. In comparison, a tiny hydrogen atom, 10-10 meters across, is ten trillion trillion times as wide. Similarly, the largest particle accelerators generate energies of 1015 electron volts by colliding sub-atomic particles. This energy level can reveal the physics of quantum theory, but is still roughly a trillion times lower than the energy required to test string theory.

Scientists say that the fundamental forces of the Universe -- gravity (defined by general relativity), electromagnetism, "weak" radioactive forces and "strong" nuclear forces (all defined by quantum theory) -- were united in the high-energy flash of the Big Bang, when all matter and energy was confined within a sub-atomic scale. Although the Big Bang occurred nearly 14 billion years ago its afterglow, the CMB, still blankets the entire universe and contains a fossilized record of the first moments of time.

Edited by chubtoad, 23 July 2005 - 08:56 AM.

[Lazarus Long]

This link and discussion on the Multiverse, or "Megaverse" as it appears Lenny Susskind refers to it, is wonderful and worth reading.

LL

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What we've discovered in the last several years is that string theory has an incredible diversity—a tremendous number of solutions—and allows different kinds of environments. A lot of the practitioners of this kind of mathematical theory have been in a state of denial about it. They didn't want to recognize it. They want to believe the universe is an elegant universe—and it's not so elegant. It's different over here. It's that over here. It's a Rube Goldberg machine over here. And this has created a sort of sense of denial about the facts about the theory. The theory is going to win, and physicists who are trying to deny what's going on are going to lose.

Leonard Susskind Edge Video DSL+ | Modem

THE LANDSCAPE
A Talk with Leonard Susskind

For some people, the universe is eternal. For me, it's breaking news.

Recently I sat down to talk with Lenny Susskind, the discoverer of string theory. After he left, I realized I had become so caught up in his story-telling that I forgot to ask him "what's new in the universe?" So I sent him an email. Here's his response...

~~~

"The beginning of the 21st century is a watershed in modern science, a time that will forever change our understanding of the universe. Something is happening which is far more than the discovery of new facts or new equations. This is one of those rare moments when our entire outlook, our framework for thinking, and the whole epistemology of physics and cosmology are suddenly undergoing real upheaval. The narrow 20th-century view of a unique universe, about ten billion years old and ten billion light years across with a unique set of physical laws, is giving way to something far bigger and pregnant with new possibilities.

"Gradually physicists and cosmologists are coming to see our ten billion light years as an infinitesimal pocket of a stupendous megaverse. At the same time theoretical physicists are proposing theories which demote our ordinary laws of nature to a tiny corner of a gigantic landscape of mathematical possibilities.

"This landscape of possibilities is a mathematical space representing all of the possible environments that theory allows. Each possible environment has its own laws of physics, elementary particles and constants of nature. Some environments are similar to our own corner of the landscape but slightly different. They may have electrons, quarks and all the usual particles, but gravity might be a billion times stronger. Others have gravity like ours but electrons that are heavier than atomic nuclei. Others may resemble our world except for a violent repulsive force (called the cosmological constant) that tears apart atoms, molecules and even galaxies. Not even the dimensionality of space is sacred. Regions of the landscape describe worlds of 5,6…11 dimensions. The old 20th century question, 'What can you find in the universe?' is giving way to 'What can you not find?'

"The diversity of the landscape is paralleled by a corresponding diversity in ordinary space. Our best theory of cosmology called inflationary cosmology is leading us, sometimes unwillingly, to a concept of a megaverse, filled with what Alan Guth, the father of inflation, calls 'pocket universes.' Some pockets are small and never get big. Others are big like ours but totally empty. And each lies in its own little valley of the landscape.

"Man’s place in the universe is also being reexamined and challenged. A megaverse that diverse is unlikely to be able to support intelligent life in any but a tiny fraction of its expanse. Many of the questions that we are used to asking such as 'Why is a certain constant of nature one number instead of another?' will have very different answers than what physicists had hoped for. No unique value will be picked out by mathematical consistency, because the landscape permits an enormous variety of possible values. Instead the answer will be 'Somewhere in the megaverse the constant is this number, and somewhere else it is that. And we live in one tiny pocket where the value of the constant is consistent with our kind of life. That’s it! There is no other answer to that question.'

"The kind of answer that this or that is true because if it were not true there would be nobody to ask the question is called the anthropic principle. Most physicists hate the anthropic principle. It is said to represent surrender, a giving up of the noble quest for answers. But because of unprecedented new developments in physics, astronomy and cosmology these same physicists are being forced to reevaluate their prejudices about anthropic reasoning. There are four principal developments driving this sea change. Two come from theoretical physics, and two are experimental or observational.

"On the theoretical side, an outgrowth of inflationary theory called eternal inflation is demanding that the world be a megaverse full of pocket universes that have bubbled up out of inflating space like bubbles in an uncorked bottle of Champagne. At the same time string theory, our best hope for a unified theory, is producing a landscape of enormous proportions. The best estimates of theorists are that 10500 distinct kinds of environments are possible.
"Very recent astronomical discoveries exactly parallel the theoretical advances. The newest astronomical data about the size and shape of the universe convincingly confirm that inflation is the right theory of the early universe. There is very little doubt that our universe is embedded in a vastly bigger megaverse.

"But the biggest news is that in our pocket the notorious cosmological constant is not quite zero, as it was thought to be. This is a cataclysm and the only way that we know how to make any sense of it is through the reviled and despised anthropic principle.

"I don’t know what strange and unimaginable twists our view of the universe will undergo while exploring the vastness of the landscape. But I would bet that at the turn of the 22nd century, philosophers and physicists will look back nostalgically at the present and recall a golden age in which the narrow provincial 20th century concept of the universe gave way to a bigger better megaverse, populating a landscape of mind-boggling proportions."

Full Text

How can we post exponents better?

That number above "10500" is 10 to the 500th power, and didn't copy paste correctly.

[Lazarus Long]

I found this article in the NY Times on String Theory and I think it is both a wonderful historical treatise of its development and a good basic primer as to what mTheory hopes to accomplish and where are its drawbacks.

As String Theory attempts to bridge Relativity and Quantum Mechanics I think it belongs on the pinned topics list as well. If you link back to the original article there is an interactive slide show too.

http://www.nytimes.c...012000mUiuVUi_G

String Theory, at 20, Explains It All (or Not)
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: December 7, 2004

ASPEN, Colo. - They all laughed 20 years ago.

It was then that a physicist named John Schwarz jumped up on the stage during a cabaret at the physics center here and began babbling about having discovered a theory that could explain everything. By prearrangement men in white suits swooped in and carried away Dr. Schwarz, then a little-known researcher at the California Institute of Technology.

Only a few of the laughing audience members knew that Dr. Schwarz was not entirely joking. He and his collaborator, Dr. Michael Green, now at Cambridge University, had just finished a calculation that would change the way physics was done. They had shown that it was possible for the first time to write down a single equation that could explain all the laws of physics, all the forces of nature - the proverbial "theory of everything" that could be written on a T-shirt.

And so emerged into the limelight a strange new concept of nature, called string theory, so named because it depicts the basic constituents of the universe as tiny wriggling strings, not point particles.

"That was our first public announcement," Dr. Schwarz said recently.

By uniting all the forces, string theory had the potential of achieving the goal that Einstein sought without success for half his life and that has embodied the dreams of every physicist since then. If true, it could be used like a searchlight to illuminate some of the deepest mysteries physicists can imagine, like the origin of space and time in the Big Bang and the putative death of space and time at the infinitely dense centers of black holes.

In the last 20 years, string theory has become a major branch of physics. Physicists and mathematicians conversant in strings are courted and recruited like star quarterbacks by universities eager to establish their research credentials. String theory has been celebrated and explained in best-selling books like "The Elegant Universe," by Dr. Brian Greene, a physicist at Columbia University, and even on popular television shows.

Last summer in Aspen, Dr. Schwarz and Dr. Green (of Cambridge) cut a cake decorated with "20th Anniversary of the First Revolution Started in Aspen," as they and other theorists celebrated the anniversary of their big breakthrough. But even as they ate cake and drank wine, the string theorists admitted that after 20 years, they still did not know how to test string theory, or even what it meant.

As a result, the goal of explaining all the features of the modern world is as far away as ever, they say. And some physicists outside the string theory camp are growing restive. At another meeting, at the Aspen Institute for Humanities, only a few days before the string commemoration, Dr. Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, called string theory "a colossal failure."

String theorists agree that it has been a long, strange trip, but they still have faith that they will complete the journey.

"Twenty years ago no one would have correctly predicted how string theory has since developed," said Dr. Andrew Strominger of Harvard. "There is disappointment that despite all our efforts, experimental verification or disproof still seems far away. On the other hand, the depth and beauty of the subject, and the way it has reached out, influenced and connected other areas of physics and mathematics, is beyond the wildest imaginations of 20 years ago."

In a way, the story of string theory and of the physicists who have followed its siren song for two decades is like a novel that begins with the classic "what if?"

What if the basic constituents of nature and matter were not little points, as had been presumed since the time of the Greeks? What if the seeds of reality were rather teeny tiny wiggly little bits of string? And what appear to be different particles like electrons and quarks merely correspond to different ways for the strings to vibrate, different notes on God's guitar?

It sounds simple, but that small change led physicists into a mathematical labyrinth, in which they describe themselves as wandering, "exploring almost like experimentalists," in the words of Dr. David Gross of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif.

String theory, the Italian physicist Dr. Daniele Amati once said, was a piece of 21st-century physics that had fallen by accident into the 20th century.

And, so the joke went, would require 22nd-century mathematics to solve.

Dr. Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., described it this way: "String theory is not like anything else ever discovered. It is an incredible panoply of ideas about math and physics, so vast, so rich you could say almost anything about it."

The string revolution had its roots in a quixotic effort in the 1970's to understand the so-called "strong" force that binds quarks into particles like protons and neutrons. Why were individual quarks never seen in nature? Perhaps because they were on the ends of strings, said physicists, following up on work by Dr. Gabriele Veneziano of CERN, the European research consortium.

That would explain why you cannot have a single quark - you cannot have a string with only one end. Strings seduced many physicists with their mathematical elegance, but they had some problems, like requiring 26 dimensions and a plethora of mysterious particles that did not seem to have anything to do with quarks or the strong force.

When accelerator experiments supported an alternative theory of quark behavior known as quantum chromodynamics, most physicists consigned strings to the dustbin of history.

But some theorists thought the mathematics of strings was too beautiful to die.

In 1974 Dr. Schwarz and Dr. Joel Scherk from the École Normale Supérieure in France noticed that one of the mysterious particles predicted by string theory had the properties predicted for the graviton, the particle that would be responsible for transmitting gravity in a quantum theory of gravity, if such a theory existed.

Without even trying, they realized, string theory had crossed the biggest gulf in physics. Physicists had been stuck for decades trying to reconcile the quirky rules known as quantum mechanics, which govern atomic behavior, with Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes how gravity shapes the cosmos.

That meant that if string theory was right, it was not just a theory of the strong force; it was a theory of all forces.

"I was immediately convinced this was worth devoting my life to," Dr. Schwarz recalled "It's been my life work ever since."

It was another 10 years before Dr. Schwarz and Dr. Green (Dr. Scherk died in 1980) finally hit pay dirt. They showed that it was possible to write down a string theory of everything that was not only mathematically consistent but also free of certain absurdities, like the violation of cause and effect, that had plagued earlier quantum gravity calculations.

In the summer and fall of 1984, as word of the achievement spread, physicists around the world left what they were doing and stormed their blackboards, visions of the Einsteinian grail of a unified theory dancing in their heads.

"Although much work remains to be done there seem to be no insuperable obstacles to deriving all of known physics," one set of physicists, known as the Princeton string quartet, wrote about a particularly promising model known as heterotic strings. (The quartet consisted of Dr. Gross; Dr. Jeffrey Harvey and Dr. Emil Martinec, both at the University of Chicago; and Dr. Ryan M. Rohm, now at the University of North Carolina.)


The Music of Strings

String theory is certainly one of the most musical explanations ever offered for nature, but it is not for the untrained ear. For one thing, the modern version of the theory decreed that there are 10 dimensions of space and time.

To explain to ordinary mortals why the world appears to have only four dimensions - one of time and three of space -string theorists adopted a notion first bruited by the German mathematicians Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein in 1926. The extra six dimensions, they said, go around in sub-submicroscopic loops, so tiny that people cannot see them or store old National Geographics in them.

A simple example, the story goes, is a garden hose. Seen from afar, it is a simple line across the grass, but up close it has a circular cross section. An ant on the hose can go around it as well as travel along its length. To envision the world as seen by string theory, one only has to imagine a tiny, tiny six-dimensional ball at every point in space-time.

But that was only the beginning. In 1995, Dr. Witten showed that what had been five different versions of string theory seemed to be related. He argued that they were all different manifestations of a shadowy, as-yet-undefined entity he called "M theory," with "M" standing for mother, matrix, magic, mystery, membrane or even murky.

In M-theory, the universe has 11 dimensions - 10 of space and one of time, and it consists not just of strings but also of more extended membranes of various dimension, known generically as "branes."

This new theory has liberated the imaginations of cosmologists. Our own universe, some theorists suggest, may be a four-dimensional brane floating in some higher-dimensional space, like a bubble in a fish tank, perhaps with other branes - parallel universes - nearby. Collisions or other interactions between the branes might have touched off the Big Bang that started our own cosmic clock ticking or could produce the dark energy that now seems to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, they say.


Toting Up the Scorecard

One of string theory's biggest triumphs has come in the study of black holes. In Einstein's general relativity, these objects are bottomless pits in space-time, voraciously swallowing everything, even light, that gets too close, but in string theory they are a dense tangle of strings and membranes.

In a prodigious calculation in 1995, Dr. Strominger and Dr. Cumrun Vafa, both of Harvard, were able to calculate the information content of a black hole, matching a famous result obtained by Dr. Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University using more indirect means in 1973. Their calculation is viewed by many people as the most important result yet in string theory, Dr. Greene said.

Another success, Dr. Greene and others said, was the discovery that the shape, or topology, of space, is not fixed but can change, according to string theory. Space can even rip and tear.

But the scorecard is mixed when it comes to other areas of physics. So far, for example, string theory has had little to say about what might have happened at the instant of the Big Bang..

Moreover, the theory seems to have too many solutions. One of the biggest dreams that physicists had for the so-called theory of everything was that it would specify a unique prescription of nature, one in which God had no choice, as Einstein once put it, about details like the number of dimensions or the relative masses of elementary particles.

But recently theorists have estimated that there could be at least 10100 different solutions to the string equations, corresponding to different ways of folding up the extra dimensions and filling them with fields - gazillions of different possible universes.

Some theorists, including Dr. Witten, hold fast to the Einsteinian dream, hoping that a unique answer to the string equations will emerge when they finally figure out what all this 21st-century physics is trying to tell them about the world.

But that day is still far away.

"We don't know what the deep principle in string theory is," Dr. Witten said.

For most of the 20th century, progress in particle physics was driven by the search for symmetries - patterns or relationships that remain the same when we swap left for right, travel across the galaxy or imagine running time in reverse.

For years physicists have looked for the origins of string theory in some sort of deep and esoteric symmetry, but string theory has turned out to be weirder than that.

Recently it has painted a picture of nature as a kind of hologram. In the holographic images often seen on bank cards, the illusion of three dimensions is created on a two-dimensional surface. Likewise string theory suggests that in nature all the information about what is happening inside some volume of space is somehow encoded on its outer boundary, according to work by several theorists, including Dr. Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study and Dr. Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley.

Just how and why a three-dimensional reality can spring from just two dimensions, or four dimensions can unfold from three, is as baffling to people like Dr. Witten as it probably is to someone reading about it in a newspaper.

In effect, as Dr. Witten put it, an extra dimension of space can mysteriously appear out of "nothing."

The lesson, he said, may be that time and space are only illusions or approximations, emerging somehow from something more primitive and fundamental about nature, the way protons and neutrons are built of quarks.

The real secret of string theory, he said, will probably not be new symmetries, but rather a novel prescription for constructing space-time.

"It's a new aspect of the theory," Dr. Witten said. "Whether we are getting closer to the deep principle, I don't know."

As he put it in a talk in October, "It's plausible that we will someday understand string theory."


Tangled in Strings

Critics of string theory, meanwhile, have been keeping their own scorecard. The most glaring omission is the lack of any experimental evidence for strings or even a single experimental prediction that could prove string theory wrong - the acid test of the scientific process.

Strings are generally presumed to be so small that "stringy" effects should show up only when particles are smashed together at prohibitive energies, roughly 1019 billion electron volts. That is orders of magnitude beyond the capability of any particle accelerator that will ever be built on earth. Dr. Harvey of Chicago said he sometimes woke up thinking, What am I doing spending my whole career on something that can't be tested experimentally?

This disparity between theoretical speculation and testable reality has led some critics to suggest that string theory is as much philosophy as science, and that it has diverted the attention and energy of a generation of physicists from other perhaps more worthy pursuits. Others say the theory itself is still too vague and that some promising ideas have not been proved rigorously enough yet.

Dr. Krauss said, "We bemoan the fact that Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life on a fruitless quest, but we think it's fine if a thousand theorists spend 30 years of their prime on the same quest."


The Other Quantum Gravity

String theory's biggest triumph is still its first one, unifying Einstein's lordly gravity that curves the cosmos and the quantum pinball game of chance that lives inside it.

"Whatever else it is or is not," Dr. Harvey said in Aspen, "string theory is a theory of quantum gravity that gives sensible answers."

That is no small success, but it may not be unique.

String theory has a host of lesser known rivals for the mantle of quantum gravity, in particular a concept called, loop quantum gravity, which arose from work by Dr. Abhay Ashtekar of Penn State and has been carried forward by Dr. Carlo Rovelli of the University of Marseille and Dr. Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, among others.

Unlike string theory, loop gravity makes no pretensions toward being a theory of everything. It is only a theory of gravity, space and time, arising from the applications of quantum principles to the equations of Einstein's general relativity. The adherents of string theory and of loop gravity have a kind of Microsoft-Apple kind of rivalry, with the former garnering a vast majority of university jobs and publicity.

Dr. Witten said that string theory had a tendency to absorb the ideas of its critics and rivals. This could happen with loop gravity. Dr. Vafa; his Harvard colleagues, Dr. Sergei Gukov and Dr. Andrew Neitzke; and Dr. Robbert Dijkgraaf of the University of Amsterdam report in a recent paper that they have found a connection between simplified versions of string and loop gravity.

"If it exists," Dr. Vafa said of loop gravity, "it should be part of string theory."


Looking for a Cosmic Connection

Some theorists have bent their energies recently toward investigating models in which strings could make an observable mark on the sky or in experiments in particle accelerators.

"They all require us to be lucky," said Dr. Joe Polchinski of the Kavli Institute.

For example the thrashing about of strings in the early moments of time could leave fine lumps in a haze of radio waves filling the sky and thought to be the remains of the Big Bang. These might be detectable by the Planck satellite being built by the European Space Agency for a 2007 launching date, said Dr. Greene.

According to some models, Dr. Polchinski has suggested, some strings could be stretched from their normal submicroscopic lengths to become as big as galaxies or more during a brief cosmic spurt known as inflation, thought to have happened a fraction of a second after the universe was born.

If everything works out, he said, there will be loops of string in the sky as big as galaxies. Other strings could stretch all the way across the observable universe. The strings, under enormous tension and moving near the speed of light, would wiggle and snap, rippling space-time like a tablecloth with gravitational waves.

"It would be like a whip hundreds of light-years long," Dr. Polchinski said.

The signal from these snapping strings, if they exist, should be detectable by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, which began science observations two years ago, operated by a multinational collaboration led by Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Another chance for a clue will come in 2007 when the Large Hadron Collider is turned on at CERN in Geneva and starts colliding protons with seven trillion volts of energy apiece. In one version of the theory - admittedly a long shot - such collisions could create black holes or particles disappearing into the hidden dimensions.

Everybody's favorite candidate for what the collider will find is a phenomenon called supersymmetry, which is crucial to string theory. It posits the existence of a whole set of ghostlike elementary particles yet to be discovered. Theorists say they have reason to believe that the lightest of these particles, which have fanciful names like photinos, squarks and selectrons, should have a mass-energy within the range of the collider.

String theory naturally incorporates supersymmetry, but so do many other theories. Its discovery would not clinch the case for strings, but even Dr. Krauss of Case Western admits that the existence of supersymmetry would be a boon for string theory.

And what if supersymmetric particles are not discovered at the new collider? Their absence would strain the faith, a bit, but few theorists say they would give up.

"It would certainly be a big blow to our chances of understanding string theory in the near future," Dr. Witten said.


Beginnings and Endings

At the end of the Aspen celebration talk turned to the prospect of verification of string theory. Summing up the long march toward acceptance of the theory, Dr. Stephen Shenker, a pioneer string theorist at Stanford, quoted Winston Churchill:

"This is not the end, not even the beginning of the end, but perhaps it is the end of the beginning."

Dr. Shenker said it would be great to find out that string theory was right.

From the audience Dr. Greene piped up, "Wouldn't it be great either way?"

"Are you kidding me, Brian?" Dr. Shenker responded. "How many years have you sweated on this?"

But if string theory is wrong, Dr. Greene argued, wouldn't it be good to know so physics could move on? "Don't you want to know?" he asked.

Dr. Shenker amended his remarks. "It would be great to have an answer," he said, adding, "It would be even better if it's the right one."

[johnbpilot]

I was thinking on how we never really touch anything, how it's just electromagnetism repels our atoms from the floor or a wall, our atoms never touch. So how do we know that our atoms have a physical substance. If we can't touch anything, then they may not be solid at all, that it's just one collective energy putting electromagnetic force on another set. That its entirely possible to have more than just a positive and negative charge. there may be charges that repel several forms of energy but several other forms may be attracted, or just ignored. Like each spectrum of light has its own polarity, and is only repelled by an energy that repells that polarity. Same with matter. Matter may repel certain other energies, like spectrums of light, but may totally ignore others. So looking at the Dark Matter theory from Steven Hawking, there may be energy that has a particular energy that is not repelled by either light or matter, bassing right through, but radiates its gravitational force. So that there may not be several independant "dimensions" so much as there might be different types of polarity other than positive and negative. Since the only type of energy that we can percieve is either affect by light and matter (both consisting of +/- energy), the universe can be a giant soup filled with energy not affected by the two previously mentioned forces. there could be completely different universes surrounding us with completely different rules of physics, but go unpercieved by us who are made of proton and electron energy. Also, just to thow in as an afterthought, what if black holes are made up of atoms with an electron nucleus with valence protons, such as "antimatter" drawing in other atoms with a superpowerful electromagnetic force, rather that some freak anomoly of the weak force of gravity. That would explain the immense pull that Black holes are beleved to have. This presentation was brought to you by Burger!

[Infernity]

John,
I thought about all that for years, and I came to same conclusions as you just did.
Some little piece of information that may solve something since the most- I wonder the same:
We feel due our nerves that transfer information to the brain. All of the brain and nerves are made out of atoms too.
That's some mechanism...
Even if nothing touches anything- the is always some kind of press. You feel and you are because you are more than a single vacuum, you are some energy made creature.
Great thoughts you have! really.

Yours truthfully
~Infernity

[hightrain]

Actually an antihydrogen composed of one antiproton and an orbiting positron could make up a black hole. It could very well draw in normal matter and entrap it with its huge gravity pull. We would never know for nothing can escape the black hole's hold. Yet if the black hole is composed of antimatter then any matter sucked in would annihilate to form energy, and of course we would still never know.

Anyways, this String Theory is interesting.

[kraemahz]

I don't know where you heard that, but the physics of antimatter is very well understood. A single antimatter molecule could no more make a black hole than a single molecule of standard matter. Perhaps you're thinking of supersymmetric particles instead? The only difference between a positron and an electron are their charge and spin. In that respect, it is perfectly feasable for there to be an antimatter black hole if there were somewhere in the universe an antistar large enough to collapse that way, however antimatter is pretty damn rare for that to happen.

[sdf42450]

as interesting as string theory is, i just read a book lately called "The Big Bang Never Happened" by Eric J. Lerner.

its an alternative thoery to the BB with a LOT of evidence against the BB as well as a pretty solid sounding theory. i was never really a big fan of the BB as there were questions that seemed to be answered with mere "faith" instead of scientfic reasoning and is probably the reason i even picked up a book that had alternative theories... but this book does a good job of disecting the approach to the BB theory vs the approach to his theory of a Plasma Universe. talks about the GUT theory as well and how it is pretty much a pipe dream.

its a good read, and it'll make you think...

[patryn]

Sorce Theory looks like it explains the whole thing, and extremely well too.

I'm sure you've all experienced how frustrating it is to work so hard on a particular problem and find that the solution you're getting is getting more and more complicated... only to find out at some later point that the solution is actually pretty simple, you've just made a simple mistake/invalid assumption back at the beginning.

Thanks for those links Darren, im pretty much convinced that modern physics has been going off on a tangent for the past half century.

Sorce Theory.. nice eye opener.

[subjunk]

Sorce Theory looks like it explains the whole thing, and extremely well too.

I'm sure you've all experienced how frustrating it is to work so hard on a particular problem and find that the solution you're getting is getting more and more complicated... only to find out at some later point that the solution is actually pretty simple, you've just made a simple mistake/invalid assumption back at the beginning.

Thanks for those links Darren, im pretty much convinced that modern physics has been going off on a tangent for the past half century.

Sorce Theory.. nice eye opener.

String Theory is mathematically sound, there are only 2 things standing in the way of it.
The first is that with today's technology it isn't testable (it will be in a couple of years when a particle accelerator is built that is powerful enough to prove or disprove the existence of predicted particles) and the second is that CPU technology isn't good enough yet to test the more complex math.
Again, there are computer technologies on the way (quantum computing options such as the CPU that uses magnets to control electrons forcing them to act as binary switches, etc.) but nothing at the moment.
I am a supporter of String Theory and though I won't put all my eggs in one basket by saying it's correct, it's the best candidate for unification I know of.

[patryn]

I'm not putting all my baskets into one egg either
But for me, sorce theory seems like the best contender.

Anyway, there's a new book out on sorce theory, "A Flower for Einstein by Gerald Lebau" and the author has requested feedback (critical or otherwise) on the new book. If anyone is interested the book can be found at
http://www.lulu.com/content/1005469

Enjoy

[albedo]

Just bumping this up....

 

I finally got the time reading Prof. C. Rovelli's "Quantum Gravity" and find Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) a very appealing approach, different than strings and better resonating with other authors I love (Penrose, Smolin, etc...). Also (but not yet clear to me the connection, if any), I guess what happened importantly in the recent years, is the ER=EPR proposal. Great stuff too.