Call me SKEPT1KAL
Call me SKEPT1KAL
27 comments
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Are string theorists... braneiacs?
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If we ever find the cosmic strings, I wanna see someone plucking them to play Stairway to Heaven. Perhaps doing so will create a literal stairway to actual heaven.
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Unfortunately cosmic string and string theory are different things.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_string says
Not to be confused with String, the subject of String Theory.
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What kind of string we talking about? Nylon? Kevlar?
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fair
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Btw, does string theory consider zero point energy? I get the impression that both, quantum mechanics and string theory, just ignore that phenomenom.
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He should discuss it on TAWK TUAH
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not with current technology.
but as it sometimes happens, we might find a way a couple hundred years from now, who knows. maybe even a practical use of the knowledge.
maybe string theory was flawed all along and we come to understand the universe a whole another way.
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The same was true of relativity
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The relativistic model was demonstrated to better describe the transit of Venus than Newtonian mechanics. It had been quickly proposed as a good test, was generally accepted as the crucial experiment, and all of this happened very fast.
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Another one was GPS: They had prepared two sets of maths for the satellites, Newtonian and relativistic. They started operating them with the Newtonian model, and the satellites went out of sync, nothing really worked. Then they flipped the switch to relativistic, and everything worked flawlessly.
Even before that they took an atomic clock, put it on a plane, and flew it around the earth to later compare to one that stayed on earth. They differed by the expected fraction of a fraction of a millisecond.
Neither of those two could be done right when Einstein proposed relativity, but experiments like that could already be envisioned, "move a sufficiently precise clock sufficiently fast and compare it to a stationary one" is kind of a no-brainer. That's not the case with string theory, noone has any idea how to test any of it.
OTOH, physics shouldn't feel bad about that stuff. E.g. number theory is notorious for results which are considered useless even by the people formulating them, only for an application to appear a century or two later.
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Special Relativity was the theory to explain the results of the Michelson Morley Experiment from 20 years earlier that everyone else ignored because it made them uncomfortable and didn't want to do the math.
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Was
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27 comments