Zombie Central

Peter Woit:Hopefully Nature won’t take its place as Zombie-central…

December 30th, 2007 at 11:10 am if link deleted(yep! it sure has:) see here

Plato said,

"I have never deviated from the name I use, so you get the sense of who I am.

I do not see how "pushing back the physics and energies involved" would have made these issues abut cosmology inept or classed as fantasy in the making.

Tim May, some things helped toward our understanding whether they are in the kitchen "to help gain in conceptual understanding, what others are less then able to explain in their opinion biased.

Gabe:I really don’t have any knowledge of this, but: What exactly are they trying to say about liquid helium phases and extra dimensions?

Has anyone has sufficiently answered Coin or Gabe in their questions to have offered a conclusion?

Thanks Bee for challenging what would have otherwise been a chorus of the same ole, same ole."

Now what choice do I have, if I were to comment on anything that had to do with what "String theory is doing?" Now, I would have supposedly worn out the title of any string theory article as coming from Zombie central.

Now you know the title of this post and it's origination. The source of inspiration that allows me to comment and let stand, as to the substance of Peter Woit's post. The comments that come along as well.

Zombies

What more can I say, that by putting out front the reasons why this process is not just some fantasy woven for illusionists Peter seems to qualify. To all those who may speak toward the topic of string theory or not.

Will media just leave it "to the expert" to speak for them and not challenge what is the highest opinion Peter has for the topic of string theory? I guess if you are not willing to do the work, then like Scientist, it is better to not write an article and let it die a quick death.

The Articles in Question?

Since I too cannot gain access to the Nature article without paying, I can only go by the "press releases" that Peter has been kind enough to show us. So these are directed to the Nature article.



ow-temperature physicists at Lancaster University may have found a laboratory test of the ‘untestable’ string theory.

The test – which uses two distinct phases of liquid helium - is reported online this week in Nature Physics (published 23 December). Their paper will also be published as the cover article in the paper edition of Nature Physics in January.

String theory is a multidimensional theory based on vibrating strings, as opposed to the point particles described in the Standard Model.

Second Article

DOI: 10.1038/nphys815-Richard Haley, George Pickett and co-workers have taken a lateral step to address this barrier. They cool helium-3 isotope to a superfluid state — that is, a quantum fluid with non-classical properties such as completely frictionless flow. Adding a magnetic field creates a second superfluid phase, and the interface between these two phases behaves like a two-dimensional brane. Indeed, the collision of a brane–antibrane pair leaves traces of a stringy residue of defects: a tangle of vortices.

Third article

Can you model what happened after the Big Bang in your lab?

Helium-3 experiment replicates colliding-brane theory of cosmology.

Yes, according to one group of physicists. A team at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom has used liquid helium and a magnetic field to build a finger-sized representation of the early cosmos. Their findings, published today in Nature Physics 1, could help string theorists to refine their models.

Fourth Article

Again it is one that has to be purchased from nature. All I can do it "re-quote" the selections Peter has made, and direct you to the quotes in question. You have to take my word for what is represented and how it is used by Peter. Sorry. See source of quotes here

The subject of string cosmology is a hot one these days, with theoretical advances in understanding string dynamics riffing with recent precise observations of the cosmic microwave background

The quality of the details of the comparison between 3He and cosmology is not really the point. Like a tap-dancing snake, what is amazing is not that it is done well, but that it is done at all.

Contribution to Zombie Central?

I can only assume that the example given is none other then what Peter has classified?

Does one of these test tubes hold a baby Universe?

The test tube, the size of a little finger, has been cooled to a fraction of a degree above the lowest possible temperature, absolute zero, which is just over 273 degrees below the freezing point of water.

Inside the tube an isotope of helium (called helium three) forms a "superfluid", an ordered liquid where all the atoms are in the same state according to the theory that rules the subatomic domain, called quantum theory.

What is remarkable is that atoms in the liquid, at temperatures within a thousandth of a degree of absolute zero, form structures that, according to the team at Lancaster University, are similar those seen in the cosmos.

"In effect, we have made a universe in a test tube," says Richard Haley, who did the work with Prof George Pickett and other members of the "Ultra-low Temperature Group."

Now, just hold your horses here while we consider not only the context of this article by Richard Highfield, but of the very questions I myself have asked that we might consider the context of the Telegraph article other then contributing to Zombie Central.

Warning to Viewers

It is true that there has been a lot of debate about how information currently being dealt within in science articles are giving concern to people at the forefront of science. So in this effort I see what Peter is saying. Scientists are indeed asking for this responsibility, and not just of the media themself , but of the individual in their "pursuit of the truth" of what is being portrayed out there in the science media's global vision.

I do not sanction "the classifications" that have been drummed up by Peter Woit, from intelligent design theorists, to Zombies.

The View of the Cosmos?

Now why is it that we would look to the cosmos and ask ourselves about the views that would happen in the context of universal display, as having some relevances to the microsomal world that surrounds us.

Over and over again, we are directed to applications of what happens in that cosmos as experimental processes which reveal the origins of the universe in that microcosm view? So they use a test tube. The origins of life has it's basis in that tube on a simplistic level, whether you'd like to think so or not.

Would it have been better to use the "image of the tube" and an emergent image of the colliders over top of it, as a better view of the microscopic view of the world we live in?

Powers of Ten

Many physical quantities span vast ranges of magnitude. Figures 0.1 and 0.2 use images to indicate the range of lengths and times that are of importance in physics.

Many of us understand the powers of ten, Qui?

See: Perspectives on the Power of Ten

So to get from the cosmos pallet of investigation, to one of drawing analogical
views of the vortices, is not so uncommon that we can see such vortices out there in the cosmos and not draw some conclusion to the "relativistic interpretation" that may arise in some super fluid?

I can understand Tim May's "bubble in the test analogy in the kitchen," but I would have drawn a better parallel to sonofusion(you can find examples of this on this site) as an example about reduction to the "principals of the early universe." While I see such collapse dynamically related to "gravitational collapse" this is my view with regards to the increase in temperature values that may have been attributed to the ideas about the energy increase in blackhole development and motivation for providing the routes for cosmological expansion rates. An analogy, yes.

The escape pathway for that "extra energy" to loose itself, while the computations of the values of particle creations are left for inspection. Where did that extra energy go? Is it such a "bad question" to have when looking at the microscopic view of particle creation in the birth of our cosmos? To have the universe being in such a cosmological state, that the variance of speed of expansion shall vary? Explained, with such a idea?

Relativistic Fluid Dynamics: Physics for Many Different Scales-Nils Andersson and Gregory L. Comer

In writing this review, we have tried to discuss the different building blocks that are needed if one wants to construct a relativistic theory for fluids. Although there are numerous alternatives, we opted to base our discussion of the fluid equations of motion on the variational approach pioneered by Taub [108] and in recent years developed considerably by Carter [17, 19, 21]. This is an appealing strategy because it leads to a natural formulation for multi-fluid problems. Having developed the variational framework, we discussed applications. Here we had to decide what to include and what to leave out. Our decisions were not based on any particular logic, we simply included topics that were either familiar to us, or interested us at the time. That may seem a little peculiar, but one should keep in mind that this is a “living” review. Our intention is to add further applications when the article is updated. On the formal side, we could consider how one accounts for elastic media and magnetic fields, as well as technical issues concerning relativistic vortices (and cosmic strings). On the application side, we may discuss many issues for astrophysical fluid flows (like supernova core collapse, jets, gamma-ray bursts, and cosmology).

In updating this review we will obviously also correct the mistakes that are sure to be found by helpful colleagues. We look forward to receiving any comments on this review. After all, fluids describe physics at many different scales and we clearly have a lot of physics to learn. The only thing that is certain is that we will enjoy the learning process!

So you understand that the views of the string theorist is not limited to the microcosmic view, but endorses the cosmological one as well.:) See the Lagrangian views supplied on this site to understand how gravity has been incorporated in the cosmological view.