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Metalworking (rec.crafts.metalworking) Discuss various aspects of working with metal, such as machining, welding, metal joining, screwing, casting, hardening/tempering, blacksmithing/forging, spinning and hammer work, sheet metal work. |
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#1
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Hadron Collider back online
Ed -
A good book is from several school mates - Katrin Becker, Melanie Becker and John H. Schwarz : "String Theory and M-Theory" A Modern indtroduction :: Cambridge University Press. 0521860695 M-theory (no relation to the letter :-) ) was derived from the mid 90's when the second superstring revolution took place. Discovery is an on-going business in Physics. It covers from the smallest descriptive feature to that of the great cosmos. It is the foundation of many of the sciences and is a pure science. Some sciences are not science and some are meta-science. Martin Ed Huntress wrote: "Martin H. Eastburn" wrote in message ... Wrong. Much closer on lots of things. There are various projects and think tanks working on many things that pose questions to man. In fact simple old string theory is old big time and didn't work. Super strings came closer but failed. But A merger with the string theories and the M-theory will make ends meet. Looks very good. Martin OK, Martin. I just finished reading a fairly weighty book that put M-theory into context, and I'm aware of the current developments in the algebra of branes, but I'm certainly not going to argue it with you. For me, it would be even nuttier than arguing about global warming. I know nothing about the depths of climatology and I know even less about theoretical physics. And the more I read (a fair amount for a layman) the more I realize that I don't know. The interesting thing is that I've reached the point where it appears that no one else knows, either. g I'll just say this: There is no agreement among theoretical physicists that they are any closer to solving the problem of quantum gravity than they were 30 years ago; nor are they any closer to solving various other unifications and other problems with gravity. This I don't "know" in the sense that I understand the math or the physics. I "know" it in the sense that most of the leading researchers in the field, including Witten himself, who came up with the M-theory conjecture, stop short of saying they can see where their theories are going -- if they're going anywhere at all. Furthermore, most of them, except for the (almost politically driven) string-theory acolytes, seem to feel that we don't yet have a mathematics that can carry us any closer to resolution of these issues. And string theorists have had to live for decades with the fact that there have not been any experiments conceived that could test any of their fundamental ideas. Nor do they have any idea where to look for them. If I were a scientist, this would drive me into another line of work. g However, I'm glad that it doesn't seem to have stopped the physicists. As a science enthusiast all my life, I've been astonished to learn over the past few years how little is known at the bleeding edge, and how difficult it all is. The subject is one that I do not have the brainpower to tackle. I don't mean I don't have the commitment or the background; I mean that the sheer mental horsepower required is in the stratosphere above my head. Edward Witten laid out the conjecture for M-theory 14 years ago, and it hasn't changed since. What the new work suggests is that there *may* be a possibility of understanding the fundamentals of M-theory. That's what the physicists seem to be saying. I'm sure there are some who, in their layman's writings, make it sound like much more than that. Smolin has noted that there's been a tendency to make extreme claims for M-theory in the popular literature which aren't borne out by the facts. Again, I have no way of knowing. As with climatology, all I can do is use my sniffer to see who sounds like he knows what he's talking about, and, even more important, who has his head screwed on straight. |
#2
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Hadron Collider back online
"Martin H. Eastburn" wrote in message ... Ed - A good book is from several school mates - Katrin Becker, Melanie Becker and John H. Schwarz : "String Theory and M-Theory" A Modern indtroduction :: Cambridge University Press. 0521860695 M-theory (no relation to the letter :-) ) was derived from the mid 90's when the second superstring revolution took place. Discovery is an on-going business in Physics. It covers from the smallest descriptive feature to that of the great cosmos. It is the foundation of many of the sciences and is a pure science. Some sciences are not science and some are meta-science. Martin I appreciate the reference, Martin. Before I take on something as weighty and time-consuming as a book like this, I try to get a sense of it, to know what I would get for the time I would invest. Having read the publisher's description and a dozen or so reviews, I'm going to pass on it. Apparently it is an introductory textbook for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in physics, and it's the conjectures themselves, rather than the contextual discussion that Smolin provides in _The Trouble With Physics_. I'm not interested now in a textbook of the conjectures. As a layman, I'm interested in what the field's top experts have to tell us *about* the conjectures, in the broad context of the state of the art and science of theoretical physics. I'm not planning to do the physics itself. So, like the physicists, I'll be waiting to hear what we learn from the LHC. It will be a long while, apparently, before the experiments touch on things that give us answers to what is real or not about string theory and its children. Meantime, it may be something like a particle version of the Hubble Telescope, simultaneously providing unsuspected answers and producing more questions. String theory, and M-theory, still have no real material with which to work. And now that I've been given some insight into the nature of these theories -- which, in science terms, are still conjectures -- it looks to me like one would have to be a committed physicist to be interested in working on them at this time. It looks to me like most of what those physicists have to look forward to is the proof or refutation of their conjectures. I have no conjectures to put to the test, so their game, and their interest, is not what I'm interested in. I'm curious about the realities themselves, and the chance we'll discover some new angles on them through experiment. Real experiments will mean something but it's still not clear just what the LHC will produce in relation to those conjectures, because the practitioners can't even propose an experiment to prove or disprove their ideas. Perhaps the LHC will provide answers to the question of what questions might be asked. The Hubble did some of that for cosmology. We can hope that we'll see some parallels in particle physics, given this new instrument to probe things we can't see at all now. But I do appreciate your thoughts and the reference. -- Ed Huntress |
#3
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Hadron Collider back online
In article ,
"Martin H. Eastburn" wrote: Ed - A good book is from several school mates - Katrin Becker, Melanie Becker and John H. Schwarz : "String Theory and M-Theory" A Modern indtroduction :: Cambridge University Press. 0521860695 M-theory (no relation to the letter :-) ) was derived from the mid 90's when the second superstring revolution took place. MMMM, branes! /homersimpsonzombie |
#4
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Hadron Collider back online
Dad took some N-dimensional and other unique classes at Cambridge
many years ago. He was there 'under cover' cold war and all that - he was the system engineer and designer of what was to be the worlds most powerful radar - the top two after the new model years later. Some of the stuff he told me 30 years later was about what I expected - real time ion sorting of shorts. :-) I would have loved to attend Cambridge as a seminar student - and have plenty of time in the Ashmolean Museum to see what the old masters kept for the ages. Martin John Husvar wrote: In article , "Martin H. Eastburn" wrote: Ed - A good book is from several school mates - Katrin Becker, Melanie Becker and John H. Schwarz : "String Theory and M-Theory" A Modern indtroduction :: Cambridge University Press. 0521860695 M-theory (no relation to the letter :-) ) was derived from the mid 90's when the second superstring revolution took place. MMMM, branes! /homersimpsonzombie |
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