[ExI] Discontent with the path physics is taking

[john clark]

On Aug 17, 2011, at 1:24 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote:

">There seems to be no physical justification for adding all these dimensions"

There is certainly mathematical justification for adding extra dimensions, but is that reason enough? And did the extra ones really need to be that fantastically small?

">It lacks (from the layman's point of view) the beauty that is so common in the rest of physics and is therefore suspect."

I think the problem is that String Theory has beauty but it has nothing else, this may be a test to see if John Keats was right when he said:

 "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all     
  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

The trouble with String Theory is it can't seem to make a prediction that anyone has a hope of testing for. However Richard Feynman said this was wrong, he said String Theory had in fact made a prediction and that prediction was wrong; it predicted the world would exist in 10 spacial dimensions. The theories' proponents could only save the idea by adding fudge factors about all those extra dimensions curling up into a ball so incredibly small that nobody could ever detect them. There was no mathematical reason they couldn't be infinitely large, but they had to be made not only finite but super small just to save the appearances.

It should be noted however that in the last years of his life Feynman backed off on his criticism of String Theory and admitted that it might have some value after all.

 John K Clark      


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