Lee Smolin:
"Here is a metaphor due to Eric Weinstein that I would have put in the book had I heard it before. Let us take a different twist on the landscape of theories and consider the landscape of possible ideas about post standard model or quantum gravity physics that have been proposed. Height is proportional to the number of things the theory gets right. Since we don’t have a convincing case for the right theory yet, that is a high peak somewhere off in the distance. The existing approaches are hills of various heights that may or may not be connected, across some ridges and high valleys to the real peak. We assume the landscape is covered by fog so we can’t see where the real peak is, we can only feel around and detect slopes and local maxima.
Counter arguments are good things if we can understand where this next step takes us.
Science Saturday: The Recipe For Our Universe
People need to understand something about dialogue( Pirsig is being offered here as gesture of what I am paying forward by implication) as a means of bringing out the best of us and of each other. I could of course digress to the Socratic method of searching the population for the most "wisest of words" but we are living in a new age of media now aren't we?:)
I thought to replace Sean's head with Plato and Mark Troddens with Sir Francis Bacon, just to encapsulate further "the rhetoric" that seems "to find the most viable method of presenting the place were we can step off of," and if the moon step taken on one rung down would have you think of Michael Jackson current passing, this would be far from what stepping on new worlds should mean, although I would present his passing as a higher perspective of viewing the world from which he had lived in and shared.
Such conceptual boundaries are then moved in kind. Working the earth in higher geometrical perspective and it's curvature, is a Geometers historical place once part of the discussion of earth as a postulate, to find that all of this becomes part of what the earth as a pearl could look like for the very first time as that first space walk took place.
Photo from NASA of the Bullet Cluster
These stills show four stages from an artist's representation of the huge collision that is taking place in the bullet cluster. Hot gas, containing most of the normal matter in the cluster, is shown in red and dark matter is shown in blue. During the collision the hot gas in each cluster is slowed and distorted by a drag force, similar to air resistance. A bullet-shaped cloud of gas forms in one of the clusters. In contrast, the dark matter is not slowed by the impact because it does not interact directly with itself or the gas except through gravity. Therefore, the dark matter clumps from the two clusters move ahead of the hot gas, producing the separation of the dark and normal matter seen in the image. More Images
'An unexpected gift' from string theoryThe possibility that enormously large galaxies originated from tiny quantum fluctuations may seem too strange to be true. But many aspects of inflationary theory were confirmed by recent astronomical observations, for which the observers won the Nobel Prize in 2006. This gives some credence to an even more surprising claim made by Linde: During inflation, quantum fluctuations can produce not only galaxies, but also new parts of the universe.
Take an expanding universe with its little pockets of heterogeneous quantum events. At some point one of those random events may actually "escape" from its parent universe, forming a new one, Linde said. To use the ball analogy, if it experiences small perturbations as it rolls, it might at some point roll over into the next valley, initiating a new inflationary process, he said.
"The string theorists predict that there are perhaps 101000 different types of universes that can be formed that way," Linde said. "I had known that there must be many different kinds of universes with different physical properties, but this huge number of different possibilities was an unexpected gift of string theory."
According to string theory, there are 10 dimensions. We live aware of four of them—three of space plus one of time. The rest are so small that we cannot experience them directly. In 2003, Stanford physicists Shamit Kachru, Renata Kallosh and Linde, with their collaborator Sandip Trivedi from India, discovered that these compacted dimensions want to expand, but that the time it would take for them to do so is beyond human comprehension. When a new universe buds off from its parent, the configuration of which dimensions remain small and which grow large determines the physical laws of that universe. In other words, an infinite number of worlds could exist with 101000 different types of physical laws operating among them. Susskind called this picture "the string theory landscape."
For many physicists, it is disturbing to think that the very laws and properties that are the essence of our world might only hold true as long as we remain in that world. "We always wanted to discover the theory of everything that would explain the unique properties of our world, and now we must adjust to the thought that many different worlds are possible," Linde said. But he sees an advantage in what some others could see a problem: "We finally learned that inflationary universe is not just a free lunch: It is an eternal feast where all possible dishes are served."
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