Saturday, June 12, 2010

Unstrings for Dummies

2 comments:

  1. Good diagram. Theories don´t need to be built on observables, but as string theory proves, if they aren´t built on observables, then the "best" (most mainstream) speculative idea has a landscape of 10^500 metastable vacua, with no way to pick out the Calabi-Yau manifold stabilization parameters for any (if any!) of the 10^500 different sets of predictions applies to our universe. Of course, the string theory sees this massive problem as a blessing in disguise (a "blessing in a very good disguise", as Winston Churchill said of losing the 1945 General Election after winning the war). The blessing is that they believe (with no proof) that such a size is so big that it must contain universes with small cosmological constants. If those could be identified, then the other parameters of the vacuum would be able to predict particle properties. Hope can be a deceiving, cruel mistress.

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  2. Hi anon. Many continue to ignore the failure of the Dark Force paradigm, while others are already hopping onto the QI/twistor/holography bandwagon, sidestepping this tricky issue. Since they have jobs and food, they are clearly far more intelligent than I am.

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