Podcast: String Theory, Time Travel, White Holes, Warp Speed, Multiple Dimensions, and Before the Big Bang

[Fraser]

We get questions every week about string theory and topics popularized by science fiction. Here’s the problem. There’s just no evidence. Each of these is based on wonderful and well-formed mathematical equations, or wishful thinking, but they’re very hard (if not impossible) to test in the real Universe. ...

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[ronjust1]

I felt frustration after reading Brian Greene’s Elegant Universe and Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages; however, after listening to your 31st Episode, I now feel a sense of vindication. Thank you Fraiser. Its nice to know that there are students of the Universe out there in the media that dispute today’s philosophical movement in science. I like to think of an acronym named TOP while reading the latest thinking in Cosmology - if one cannot Test it, Observe it, nor Predict it, it’s only entertainment for the mind…and, of course a tool for some people to build a career. Thanks again.


edit by Nereid: removed advertising

[parallaxicality]

It's potentially pretty provocative to lump string theory in with scifi concepts like white holes and warp drive. Am I sensing the beginnings of a backlash against it?

[bjflanagan]

"There's just no evidence."

"so few and far between are the occasions for forming notions whose specializations make up a continuous manifold, that the only simple notions whose specializations form a multiply extended manifold are the positions of perceived objects and colors. More frequent occasions for the creation and development of these notions occur first in the higher mathematic." (Riemann)

"

Mathematics has introduced the name isomorphic representation for the relation which according to Helmholtz exists between objects and their signs. I should like to carry out the precise explanation of this notion between the points of the projective plane and the color qualities . . . the projective plane and the color continuum are isomorphic with one another. Every theorem which is correct in the one system S1 is transferred unchanged to the other S2. A science can never determine its subject matter except up to an isomorphic representation. The idea of isomorphism indicates the self-understood, insurmountable barrier of knowledge. It follows that toward the "nature" of its objects science maintains complete indifference. This for example what distinguishes the colors from the points of the projective plane one can only know in immediate alive intuition . . ." (Weyl)

"it became possible to affirm that projective geometry is indeed logically prior to Euclidean geometry and that the latter can be built up as a special case. Both Klein and Arthur Cayley showed that the basic non-Euclidean geometries developed by Lobachevsky and Bolyai and the elliptic non-Euclidean geometry created by Riemann can also be derived as special cases of projective geometry. No wonder that Cayley exclaimed, 'Projective geometry is all geometry.'

The principle of duality in projective geometry states that we can interchange point and line in a theorem about figures lying in one plane and obtain a meaningful statement. Moreover, the new or dual statement will itself be a theorem--that is, it can be proven. On the basis of what has been presented here we cannot see why this must always be the case for the dual statement. However, it is possible to show by one proof that every rephrasing of a theorem of projective geometry in accordance with the principle of duality must be a theorem. This principle is a remarkable characteristic of projective geometry. It reveals the symmetry in the roles that point and line play in the structure of that geometry." (Kline)

"Thus the colors with their various qualities and intensities fulfill the axioms of vector geometry if addition is interpreted as mixing; consequently, projective geometry applies to the color qualities." (Weyl)

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"Thus, the task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees." (Schrodinger)

[trinitree88]

[QUOTE=ronjust1;967582]I felt frustration after reading Brian Greene’s Elegant Universe and Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages; however, after listening to your 31st Episode, I now feel a sense of vindication. Thank you Fraiser. Its nice to know that there are students of the Universe out there in the media that dispute today’s philosophical movement in science. I like to think of an acronym named TOP while reading the latest thinking in Cosmology - if one cannot Test it, Observe it, nor Predict it, it’s only entertainment for the mind…and, of course a tool for some people to build a career. Thanks again.


ronjust1. I'll second that. Thanks Fraser.Pete.

[RussT]

SO, pray tell, HOW are we ever going to test any stellar or Massive Black Holes, which are literally running our universe(s)???

[bjflanagan]

"Its nice to know that there are students of the Universe out there in the media that dispute today’s philosophical movement in science."

“I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.” (Max Born)

[jamini]

"Its nice to know that there are students of the Universe out there in the media that dispute today’s philosophical movement in science." “I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.” (Max Born)

It's worth noting that Mr. Born's field of research at the time of that quote was quantum mechanics, preceding Roger Penrose’s decoherence explanations for wave/particle interference dilemmas.

Another Born quote:
"If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success."
- Quoted in H R Pagels, The Cosmic Code

[Jerry]

It's potentially pretty provocative to lump string theory in with scifi concepts like white holes and warp drive. Am I sensing the beginnings of a backlash against it?

Not all astrophysicists share Dr. Gay's skepticism of string theory. I do.

[bjflanagan]

It's worth noting that Mr. Born's field of research at the time of that quote was quantum mechanics, preceding Roger Penrose’s decoherence explanations for wave/particle interference dilemmas. (jamini)

Decoherence is incoherence in fancy language (and does not vitiate Born's remark). Far superior on every front is the "hidden variables" (HV) approach -- which variables, as noted by Witten, show a family resemblance to both the internal spaces of gauge theory and the additional dimensions of string/M-theory.

Given that the symmetries of the internal spaces are thought to manifest in the symmetries of string/M-theory, it is interesting to note that the secondary qualities of sensory perception satisfy such important symmetries as translation & rotation. Moreover, as is most easily "seen" in the case of visual perception, colors "fiber over" visual space-time.

Happily, recent work by Hartle, Holland, Smolin, Peres and 't Hooft has awakened the long-dormant HV thesis -- though whether that work will rouse the physics community from its dogmatic slumber remains to be seen.

[jamini]

Decoherence is incoherence in fancy language (and does not vitiate Born's remark). Far superior on every front is the "hidden variables" (HV) approach -- which variables, as noted by Witten, show a family resemblance to both the internal spaces of gauge theory and the additional dimensions of string/M-theory. Given that the symmetries of the internal spaces are thought to manifest in the symmetries of string/M-theory, it is interesting to note that the secondary qualities of sensory perception satisfy such important symmetries as translation & rotation. Moreover, as is most easily "seen" in the case of visual perception, colors "fiber over" visual space-time. Happily, recent work by Hartle, Holland, Smolin, Peres and 't Hooft has awakened the long-dormant HV thesis -- though whether that work will rouse the physics community from its dogmatic slumber remains to be seen.

Mr. Bohn was well aware of the “hidden variables” explanations, as posed by the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox; which he adamantly opposed. In 1964, John Bell later disproved the notion that hidden variables affect interactions between particles (Bell's inequalities).

Whatever you want to call it, environmental quantum decoherence with respect to collapsing wave functions had not been postulated at the time Mr. Bohn made that quote. I’m not saying if it were it would have necessarily changed Mr. Bohn’s perceptions of reality, merely that it should be considered in context.

I’m not sure how you feel any of this pertains to string theory.

[bjflanagan]

Mr. Bohn was well aware of the “hidden variables” explanations, as posed by the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox; which he adamantly opposed. In 1964, John Bell later disproved the notion that hidden variables affect interactions between particles (Bell's inequalities).

Whatever you want to call it, environmental quantum decoherence with respect to collapsing wave functions had not been postulated at the time Mr. Born made that quote. I’m not saying if it were it would have necessarily changed Mr. Born’s perceptions of reality, merely that it should be considered in context.

I’m not sure how you feel any of this pertains to string theory.

“Anyone dissatisfied with these ideas may feel free to assume that there are additional parameters not yet introduced into the theory which determine the individual event." (Max Born, quoted in Holland, Peter R. 'The Quantum Theory of Motion.' Cambridge University Press, 1993.)

Bell believed that there "must be" hidden variables (private communication) and his 1964 paper laid the groundwork for the later tests by Aspect et al., which seem to rule out local HVs, whereas we appear to be stuck with nonlocality. Again, I would direct the interested reader to the recent work of Smolin 't Hooft et al. with respect to nonlocal HVs.

If the additional dimensions of string/M-theory are nonlocal, then the variables which range over them look like nonlocal HVs, which would then obviate the need for decoherence.

[blueshift]

Jim Gates has organized the math of string theory to describe a universe with 3 spatial dimensions, 1 temporal dimension and NO hidden dimensions.

He points out in his video course that string theory is not yet science. It is mathematics. He points out that the way that mathematics turns into science is that someone tries to falsify the equations. Science, Gates asserts, does not seek the truth but seeks falsification and finding beliefs that are less false.

1.) String theory ALLOWS for extra dimensions but does not require them.

2.) String theory requires SUSY to work. If the LHC proves SUSY to be false then string theory will likely be in deep trouble.

3.) String theory predicts that the highest mass superpartners transmuted themselves into the lightest supersymmetric partlicle (LSP) that must be absolutely stable. The LSP might not have the same sorts of force laws that are associalted with ordinary matter and, hence, makes a good candidate for dark matter.

4.) String Theory calls for the energy of the coupling constants of the fundamental forces to differ from the predictions of the standard model and
to be at the same energy.

5.) The CMB is arranged into a pattern where one can measure the average size of spots and get information that encodes string theory. Too large or small of spots will put an inbalance between the energy field and the gravitational field which is required for ST to be workable.

6.)String theory calls for strings to be the only thing that, when vibrating, produces particles instead of waves.

7.) Gates says that the math is not ad hoc but points out that occasionally it is physicists that think nothing of ad hocking math to fit experiment just as Feynman did with QED.

IMO,

Mathematicians cringe at trying to make math fit experimental results..They use their two column proofs with axioms, postulates and theorums and prove things based on the mathematical possibilites that arise from them. When math does not agree with or predict experiemntal results, they realize that the math has not grown enough to describe it quite yet and must take a longer journey to arrive at real descriptions.

Gates first set out to tie supersymmetry to EM and the equations of Maxwell. He then tied supersymmetry to GR and the equations of Einstein. He made a great effort to describe his math with visuals in his video course and left me wondering about who should have been the one to bring string theory to the public. There are many things I am still reviewing in order to grasp the concepts behind his math but it is slowly sinking in and appears quite a bit more feasible than other appoaches I have heard so far.


http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursede...%20Mathematics