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Sunday, September 09, 2007

String theory strung out further

String theory has been going through hard times and more hard times.

Don't know what string theory is? Don't care? Wait for another post. Otherwise ...

David Warren, my favourite evil Toronto journalist and a confederate in some of my crimes, quotes Richard Feynman on string theory, circa 1986, and comments:
"I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation -- a fix-up to say, 'Well, it still might be true'."

(String theory is the future of philosophical & religious Darwinism. It is a game played with extremely difficult math, in which extra dimensions & alternative universes may be freely postulated, that can never be visited or observed, & then demonstrated to "exist" by circular reasoning. It is constantly promising to explain everything, while never actually explaining anything at all. Feynman invented much of the math that made it possible, but then saw through it. He also noticed that no two proponents of string theory understood each other, or could possibly understand each other, in the nature of the case. By mutual backscratching they are nevertheless able to raise billions to fund Large Hadron Colliders & so forth. I had dinner once with ten particle physicists toiling in this vineyard, & all were very obviously quacks poseurs & frauds, united only by vertiginously high opinions of themselves.)

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