posted 05-28-99 10:10 PM ET        

In "A Brief History of Time," Stephen Hawking writes, "The singularities produced by gravitational collapse occur only in places, like black holes, where they are decently hidden from outside view by an event horizon."

I'm just curious how many of you other SMACers have found other quotes that seem to be the basis for the fictitious quotes in the game.

posted 05-29-99 02:56 AM ET            

Also on the subject of naked singularities - Hawking was a little wrong on that too, but A Brief History is getting old - naked singularities probably can exist as very brief quantum fluctuations for newly emerging white holes and for evaporating black holes when they are small enough. Relativity totally breaks down at a singularity, and Quantum Field Theory nearly does, or may - no one can work with it anyway under those conditions.
So when Hawking, Penrose et al slam naked singularities, they are talking about a long term, fairly stable singularity (as much as you can call one "stable") - beyond that, it is just dogma, not science.

posted 05-29-99 02:58 PM ET            

"You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order."

OR

posted 05-31-99 12:58 AM ET            

"The substructure of the universe regressess infinitely toward smaller and smaller components. Behind atoms we find electrons and behind electrons quarks."

The regression (and nothing else in the universe) can't be infinitely small, due to the constraints of the Planck-Wheeler dimensions (the smallest possible units of length, area, volume and time). Also electrons (and all other leptons) ARE elementary. Quarks underlie hadrons (protons, neutrons, mesons, etc. in other words mass carrying particles), but since quarks can't exist freely, no matter how hard we try, there is no basis to assume that they have underlying structure - in fact there are so few of them that underlying structure would complicate physics, not simplify it.

The SMAC/Zaharov string theory quote is bonkers too. String theory in its different flavors has been around for a while, and can't work at all in five or seven dimensions - and the existence of spin as an observable property of particles reduces the number of possible dimensional setups that work even further. 26 dimensional HST (heterotic superstring theory) is actually a superset of the earlier 10 dimensional theory - they're not different. The 10 dimensional theory only accounts for Hadrons (mass carrying particles, and the extra 16 dimensions are needed to account for the leptons (force mediating particles/waves) that produce the forces between the Hadrons.

posted 06-02-99 10:33 AM ET            

"22. If I know my troops are capable of striking an enemy, but do not know that he is invulnerable to attack, my chance of victory is but half.

23. If I know that the enemy is vulnerable to attack, but do not know that my troops are incapable of striking him, my chance of victory is but half.

[...]

26. And therefore I say: Know the enemy, know yourself; your victory will never be endangered. [...]"

Sun Tzu "The Art of War", chapter X, Samuel B. Griffith's translation.

posted 06-02-99 12:33 PM ET            

Semiooops, I *was* a bit slack in my terminology. My background is more pure math and astrophysics, so I was digging deep into the synapses to retrieve the stuff from my previous post. Relativity, and superstrings I can do, but the particle zoo is just a little too bizarre.

Fermions and Bosons are distinguished by their spin values, or more precisely, whether they are subject to the Pauli exclusion principal. Fermions, which are subject to the exclusion principal, are 1/2 integer spin (in the narrow definition, they are limited strictly to spin 1/2 particles) such as Protons, Neutrons and electrons. Bosons are integer spin particles, including photons and mesons, and thus they are not subject to the exlusion principal.

The strict division between Hadrons and Leptons is whether the participate in the strong (QCD) interation. By mass bearing, I meant that most of the "normal" matter we observe is in the form of Hadrons, ignoring the contribution of electrons as pretty minor.

You're right that leptons are not force mediating, I had the wrong names attached to the wrong properties in my head. IIRC, recent experiments suggest a mass of about 0.5 eV for neutrinos, so they have some mass, but a trivial amount, and not enough to make a difference in the dark matter question. By "known" elementary particles, were you refering to the ever elusive Higgs boson?

The 10/26 dimensions part is right - ten dimensions account for matter (including strange, charm, etc.) and the other 16 account for the observable forces. I just put the wrong labels on the divisions.

posted 06-02-99 04:23 PM ET         

Hawkins is correct in pointing out the primary flaw of string theory: the extra dimensionality in string theory will eventually lead to its conceptual obviation. This flaw has certainly retarded acceptance.

There are hints of better hypotheses all around, but we need an Einstein or Feynman to see through the muck and rescue pure science from its self-promotion towards obfuscatory oblivion.

posted 06-02-99 04:49 PM ET            

The dimensions issue throws lay people, and some physicists as well, because the term dimension is misleading - there are still only three spation dimensions, and time, and the rest are mathematical devices which are essentially gages or meters for different quantum values - they have zero correspondence to any physical reality, let alone any correspondence to observable physical reality.

Multi-dimensional approaches to physics is common, for example, in working with the wave functions in Quantum theory, you work with a separate three dimensional "configuration space" for EACH wave function in you system. So the total number of "dimensions" can be pretty huge, but just as in string theory, it is all an abstract mathematical tool, never intended to represent what we think of as "real" dimensions.

I think Hawking and Feynmann both pointed out that the ultimate failing of all the string theory ideas is that it fails to predict anything - it can't be tested, because it does nothing more than tell us a different story about what we already know.

posted 06-02-99 05:18 PM ET            

Icosahedron, typos above should be spatial dimensions, etc.

posted 06-02-99 05:42 PM ET         

And I think the idea of using mathematical vector spaces of whatever dimension is convenient is generally okay (though simpler would be better, right?).

But the popular conception of 'dimension' makes the extra-dimensionality inherent in string theory hard for the public to grasp. This is not a simple theory, and will die by Occam's razor; the seemingly carefree use of extra dimensionality is just a symptom of the unwieldy complexity of the theory.

And as you say, it seems purely descriptive, so what is the use?

BTW, I wonder if the traditional dimension concept needs a bit of shaking up. It seems to me that the only valid use of the term is as the order of the minimum basis set in a vector space or similar mathematical notion.

Whereas, the phrase 'spatial dimensions' makes a non-intuitive connection between the mathematical object RxRxR and universal volume. In the process, by assuming differentiability of space (i.e., assuming that the notion of continuous parsibility is a priori valid), one can totally miss the potentially natural and geometrically rich fractionations of space (can you say fractals?)

I think it is time to refocus. Spacetime is neither space nor time. It is, at minimum, 4-directional. Space is the memory of time's passage in at least 4 linearly independent directions. Four rays emanating from the center of a tetrahedron, together with a frequency, and you have a spacetime system. Think about it.

If you would like to continue this discussion outside the forum, my email is [email protected] (I need to change my profile, I inadvertently turned off my email when I signed up).

(Or is it 20 directions?)

posted 06-03-99 01:27 PM ET            

The recent hullabaloo surrounding the Hubble constant led to some predictions of the age of the universe, i.e. 12-14 billion years. Now, does that figure really have any meaning in the conventional sense? For instance, at the Big Bang, space was changing radically, as was time (according to my understanding). But when magazines or newspapers try to explain the Big Bang, they list a kind of chronology, i.e. ".000037 seconds--temperature reaches 47 gazillion google Kelvin" or some such nonsense. Does such a measure of time have any meaning that close to the Big Bang, if time itself was changing as radically as space? And does any measure of time dating the universe today have any more meaning?

Please help, if possible. My poor liberal arts brain gets all confuzzled by this stuff.

posted 06-03-99 01:48 PM ET            

Time measurement like that is relevant, if you choose the right reference frame, which encompasses a big enough region of space outside of the severely distorted part. That kin of time measurement makes no sense in a smaller reference frame encompassing only the distorted region. Also, time dilation is one directional, unless you look at some of the issues in inflation theory, which is almost at the point of burial, at least in it's present form. But if it can be resurrected, Andrei's the one to do it.

posted 06-03-99 01:58 PM ET            

I am fascinated, by the subject matter though I have always stayed at the periphery of the subject as far as my own education. I will be happy to follow this conversation wherever it may lead even if my specialty is throwing in Sarcastic comments and not restructuring current thought on space/time.

I will look forward to the next tidbit of information.