string theory - complete nonsense?

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by emanuel</i>
<br />This sounds like complete nonsense to me.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">You have good instincts. -|Tom|-

From what I know about string theory (which is very little) the main idea is get someone to fund this. They can offer anything you want to buy and if you do they have more. The medical field had this kind of problem before the FDA.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">This sounds like complete nonsense to me.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
You might even pass it off as insane.
I remember reading a mag one day where a kahoona of string theory said if they turned out to be wrong ... They would be disappointed. Since when is it disappointing when the truth be known?

Hey thanks. It's good to have my intuition validated. While I was listening to this guy talk about "curled up dimensions" I noticed myself look at my fingers and start to curl them. "There's no place else for them to curl except in space," I thought. Then I thought, "Why am I even taking this seriously?"

He also kept referring to "the math" and "the equations" which "proved" these extra dimensions exist. I thought: "Since when can math 'prove' extra dimensions?" I always thought dimensions were simply given. They are these things we intuitively grasp. Since when did we start letting mathematicians dictate how many dimensions there are in the universe? (This is a serious question, along with "how" this state of affairs came about.)

Emanuel

This is a summary of string theory history
Michael Green and John Schwarz continued development of string theory – discovered in 1968 by Gabriele Veneziano and improved on in 1970 by Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Nielsen and Leonard Susskind – and in 1984 they released superstring theory. It suggests that matter is made from incredibly small one-dimensional quantum strings 10^-35 m in length that exist in a 10-dimensional environment – six hidden and four visible to us.
These strings have no mass – like light; they spin, vibrate and rotate, yielding different quantum energy states. Their energy states or harmonics correspond to different fundamental particles within the same family. The extra invisible dimensions can be regarded as mathematical artefacts.
David Gross later added 16 extra dimensions to account for bosons – the transmitters of force. A total of 10 dimensions are needed for fermions, and 26 dimensions are needed for bosons in order to be consistent with quantum theory.
Superstring theory (string theory for short) has incorporated supersymmetry in an attempt to unify the four fundamental forces of nature. But physicists are still a long way from being able to say whether string theory is correct.


wisp

- particles of nothingness

emanuel

Personally I think string theory is way off the mark. Mathematically it is able to predict the existence and properties of new fundamental particles. But in terms of telling us what nature is, it’s wrong, and I think this has something to do with special relativity. Using the rules of special relativity string theory is constrained to one-dimensional strings. They tried developing it with 3-dimentional blobs, but it failed to comply with the rules of Einstein's relativity.
Maybe Einstein’s concept of spacetime is wrong and a 3-dimensional blob theory would give us a better understanding of how the universe works.

Myself, I just believe in 3-dimensions of space and a separate time dimension. I can’t see how the universe can have more than 3-dimensions of space.



wisp

- particles of nothingness