New at Reason

February 24, 2007

Is string theory dead?

Ken Silber investigates.

Comments

|2.24.07 @ 9:06AM|#

It's understandable that a lot of smart people would be getting frustrated in here, but I'm optimistic too. We are on the verge of The Theory of Everything, and it just ain't an easy nut to crack.

|2.24.07 @ 10:04AM|#

Ken Silber's review of Smolin's book is excellent, but how are rubes like us supposed to decide if string theory is the bunk, as Dr. Smolin would have us believe? Apparently, Dr. Smolin would like us simple folk to rise up and force Harvard to give tenure to more quantum geometry dudes like himself, which for my money is just not in the cards, unless the good doc can rustle up a bunch of hen quantum geometrists, in which case he just might be in business.

The good doc says that physics ought to concentrate on testable hypotheses. Well, if he comes up with one that tests positive, he won't have to write books like this one.*

*One thing I'm not is a physicist, but I remember Richard Feynman, who was a physicist (and a bit of a show-off), complaining that every worthwhile theory had been attacked at one time or another for not stating a testable hypothesis. How are we supposed to referee a catfight like this? Come up with a death ray and we'll give you a medal.

Thomas Paine\'s Goiter|2.24.07 @ 10:40AM|#

We are on the verge of The Theory of Everything, and it just ain't an easy nut to crack.

Well, according to the stringers we are.

|2.24.07 @ 11:25AM|#

"Dark energy" sounds like something a Marvel Comics villain would play around with:

"Now that I have obtained the Kumquat Processor, I will be able to harness all the DARK ENERGY and conquer the Universe!!!!!!"

|2.24.07 @ 11:26AM|#

". . . and Silver Surfer and the Fantastic Four will be powless to stop me!!!!"

|2.24.07 @ 11:27AM|#

powerless

|2.24.07 @ 11:27AM|#

It may be that somebody will soon come up with a mathematically self-consistent theory that unites gravity with the nuclear and electromagnetic forces. But we are decades, if not centuries, away from testing that theory at energy scales that approach the Planck energy. So we are a long, long way from a scientifically sound (i.e. tested) theory of "everything."

But that's not where the fun is in physics. The fun is in stuff that we thought we understood decades ago. Look up "negative index materials" and "superresolution" for an idea of what the optics people are up to these days.

|2.24.07 @ 12:03PM|#

As for string theory:
Hippie Farnsworth: Dig it, all of you fitting in this box is like seriously freaked up!
Professor Farnsworth: Nonsense! Why, there is a whole universe in there.
Hippie Farnsworth: Dude, there's a universe in all of us…
Professor Farnsworth: Get a job!

As for string theorist:
Einstein would never have gotten his theory of special relativity published in ANY journal were he to write it today. He cited almost no sources and his "research" was based primarily on thought experiments. Newton refused to even interact with anyone that disagreed with his theories. He got along with nobody and he spent his days doing weird things like poking himself in the eyeball and trying to explain why the trinity was a scam. Even though Newton and Einstein were certifiable weirdos everybody still recognized that they were right (well not reallly but a reasonable amount of people did). Deciding who was the better scientist used to be about as democratic as deciding who won an arm wrestling match.

Compare that to today when without a citation on every line and million dollar research grant you could never have anything important to say. Like 95% of the world today the scientific process has devolved into nothing but a system of trading hand-jobs.

|2.24.07 @ 12:18PM|#

I'm pretty sure Einstein could have gotten published today. Physical Review publishes plenty of speculative papers showing how certain problems can be resolved if we modify the equations of physics in various manners. Of course, these papers only attract enduring attention if they lead to experimentally verified results. Still, speculative work is published if it is mathematically sound, not contradicted by experiment, and shows promise for resolving existing problems. (I know that Einstein predicted things that had not been observed, but the predictions were for motion close to the speed of light, i.e. in a regime of behavior that had not been tested. The same is routinely done in physics today, where papers make predictions for experiments that have not yet been done but could be done in the near future.)

If string theory can be published in today's climate, then Einstein certainly could have been published in today's climate.

VM|2.24.07 @ 12:50PM|#

"Hippie Farnsworth: Dig it, all of you fitting in this box is like seriously freaked up!
Professor Farnsworth: Nonsense! Why, there is a whole universe in there.
Hippie Farnsworth: Dude, there's a universe in all of us…
Professor Farnsworth: Get a job! "

Futurama rules!

|2.24.07 @ 12:58PM|#

In view of the incredible discoveries made by nineteenth century physics, in experiments using rudimentary equipment coupled with a lot of cleverness, I wonder if a large part of the problem is that equipment for cutting-edge physics experiments have gotten so expensive that they must be funded by govt, which has never been friendly to innovative thinking. For example, the experiments that so undermined Newtonian physics in the 1890s, and set the stage for Einstein's theories, required little more than a few mirrors and some film.

Compare that to the folks at Fermilab freaking out back in the 90s when the feds decided not to fund a bigger, more powerful version of the particle accelerator they already had. Could institutional physicists be in the same position as the Pony Express in 1860, worrying about getting more riders and faster horses, even as the telegraph lines were going up?

Franklin Harris|2.24.07 @ 1:13PM|#

Come up with a death ray and we'll give you a medal.

Look, hook me up with the power of about 100 billion supernovas, and I'll give you your damn hyperdrive!

|2.24.07 @ 1:35PM|#

Some of these involve dissolving space and time into cause-and-effect relations among events, or using geometry that is equivalent to A times B not equaling B times A.

I'm not sure what he means by this; in most algebras (matrices, vectors, etc), A times B is not equal to B times A.

|2.24.07 @ 1:47PM|#

thoreau,
I wasn't saying that papers with far out ideas couldn't get published but that the process by which science occurs seems vastly different from the days when elite weirdos competed according to the standards they set for themselves. Just as with music and other fields, the respect for virtousity has given way to something more "democratic" (i.e. who you know not what you know).

KoWT|2.24.07 @ 2:50PM|#

It's a well known fact that Cyberethics is a pre-req for Superstring Theory

or

maybe everyone went for Pre-Sentient Algorithms instead? (you know, to build the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm first)

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Civ:SMAC_Tech_Tree

|2.24.07 @ 2:58PM|#

Crimethink, while I think I agree with your larger point, the Michelson-Morley experiment which failed to demonstrate the existence of the "luminiferous aether" thus leading to special relativity involved a bit more than that. The few mirrors and film you refer to had to be set on giant slab of marble suspended in a pool of mercury, all housed in the basement of a stone building to minimize vibrations. Genuis was the better part of the MM experiment, but simple and inexpensive it wasn't.

|2.24.07 @ 3:06PM|#

I waltzed into string theory at the beginning of the craze, then backed out again and went off into condensed matter physics, mainly because I was more interested in the latter and the former was starting to look like mathematical theology. A friend at the time working at the Institute of Advanced Physics quit a few years later in disgust as well for the same reason.

I think what really turned us off was the realization that getting experimental verification of anything was not going to occur during our lifetimes. (If you need an accelerator ring as big as the solar system to get the energies necessary, let's place that in the "not likely to be built soon" box, shall we?)

Aside from quantum stuff (quantum computing, other stuff done under liquid helium), most of the really interesting stuff in physics being done right now is in "applied physics" fields that are now considered separate from physics--it's either "solid-state engineering", or "hydrodynamics", or "complex systems", or....

I don't quite agree with the "who you know" comment above--it's more that you have to have at least some form of connection to a reputable establishment. And if we didn't have the cranks mucking up the landscape, scientific publishers would probably be much more amendable to receiving manuscripts out of the blue.

|2.24.07 @ 4:10PM|#

I am pleased that physics remains in a quandry about certain things. Such it has always been, and such it will always be. That's what makes it fun.

|2.24.07 @ 4:35PM|#

The difficulty with String Theory is that it is about half way in between pure mathematical research and physics as such. Some of the best string theorists such as Ed Witten have done some stuff that is pretty darn good from a Mathematician's viewpoint. What is likely is that some elements of string theory will be supported by future experimental results. Meanwhile, some string theorists deserve credit for helping push the frontiers of mathematical research a little further out.

|2.24.07 @ 4:56PM|#

A few things:

1) As has been said, the discoveries of the 19th century weren't done with "cheap" equipment. It may be crude by the standards of our day, but precision machining of parts, high quality lenses, and sensitive detectors have never been cheap. What they called sensitive back then might be laughable now, but the cutting edge has never been cheap and never will be.

Now, that's not to say that all cutting edge stuff is equally expensive. A good laboratory setup for quantum computation is far cheaper than even a mid-grade particle accelerator, and quantum computation is every bit as much a cutting edge field of physics (with deep, fundamental implications) as particle physics.

Still, good experimental physics has rarely been the sort of thing that you can do in your garage out of your spending money (although there are exceptions).

2) "Who you know" has always been important in the job market for every profession. It may matter more for some jobs than for others, but it's never been irrelevant. "Who you know" can get your foot in the door, it can get the attention of somebody who's willing to consider you for an opportunity to prove yourself. A young scientist needs good letters of recommendation from a reputable source, since a young scientist generally has only a few pieces of work to show. And while the work can be evaluated on its merit, the big question looming in the background is always "Did he come up with this himself, or did his professor give him the idea and hold his hand through the process?"

It's no different than other fields of endeavor, where you can show a resume and say "I did this" but an employer will want a reference to find out if you did it well, if you did it on time, etc.

3) I don't think public funding is really the main problem impeding progress in high energy physics. (That's not to say that libertarians should be OK with public funding, but rather that in this case the problems may be springing from other sources.) I think the problem is that they're trying to tackle the target in front of them, even though it's unassailable, rather than search for indirect and more accessable targets that might provide an inroad.

They said "OK, we've got 3 of the 4 main interactions! Let's go for the 4th!" Yeah, well, that's nice, but quantum gravity requires energies far larger than anything we'll achieve for a few generations. We'll never be able to directly verify any theory, be it string theory or whatever Lee Smolin favors. Oh, they might get a few predictions that can be tested, if they're clever enough. But the vast majority of the predictions from any theory of quantum gravity will require particle accelerators that we'll not see for generations. So the meat of any theory of quantum gravity will be untestable.

If I were advising an undergraduate physics student who wants to go into grad school and study quantum gravity, I'd ask "why?" If the student said that it sounds like fun, I'd point out the fun to be had in other areas of physics, and the opportunity to test theories in other areas. If the student said that he or she wants to get fundamental insights into the quantum nature of the universe, I'd point out the fascinating work being done in quantum information theory, work that is now leading to actual devices as well as fascinating fundamental theory. If the student expressed an interest in doing high precision quantum experiments rather than theory, I'd suggest atomic/optical physics, with the opportunity to do delicate measurements of numerous quantum effects, including quantum information or even atoms falling in gravitational fields. (Nice recent paper on using atom interferometry to observe gravitational forces on atoms and the resulting quantum effects.)

So, basically, I'd say that the string theorists started barking up the right tree when they insisted on doing a frontal assault without experimental support.

|2.24.07 @ 5:03PM|#

"Aside from quantum stuff (quantum computing, other stuff done under liquid helium), most of the really interesting stuff in physics being done right now is in "applied physics" fields that are now considered separate from physics--it's either "solid-state engineering", or "hydrodynamics", or "complex systems", or...."

grumpy realist,
What do you think of the Santa Fe Institute?

edna|2.24.07 @ 5:39PM|#

Einstein would never have gotten his theory of special relativity published in ANY journal were he to write it today. He cited almost no sources and his "research" was based primarily on thought experiments.

correspondence is key and what separates crank from interesting. in einstein's case, his equations reduced to newtonian mechanics and neatly tied up well-known loose ends of maxwell and poincare.

disclaimer: i don't understand string theory. i went into 1 dimensional materials because i have a simple and linear mind.

|2.24.07 @ 5:49PM|#

What do you work on, edna? When you say 1D materials I think nanotubes, or maybe multilayer films or highly anisotropic electronic materials, or semiconductor quantum wires.

|2.24.07 @ 7:20PM|#

mtc,

Right, I just looked that up. I guess I got the wrong impression from our replication of the M-M experiment in college. As I recall, I complained that we were using lasers, which obviously weren't used in the original experiment, to which the TA responded with a resounding "Shut up!", the only full English sentence she'd uttered up to that point.

thoreau,

My main point in bringing up Michaelson-Morley was that, as you know, they managed to measure the difference in the speed of light travelling in two different directions, even though there was no way to do so directly with the technology of the time. It seems to me that particle physicists are wedded to demanding larger and larger particle accelerators rather than trying to find an alternate way of probing high energy situations.

|2.24.07 @ 8:30PM|#

It's like anything else in life: the closer you get to the goal, the harder it gets.

edna|2.24.07 @ 8:41PM|#

thoreau, i'm out of that game now. i used to work on 1-d conductors, especially polyacetylene and polyaniline.

|2.24.07 @ 9:01PM|#

edna-

I can't believe I didn't think of polymers! Given that I took a class from Alan Heeger, there's no excuse for that. They should probably just revoke my degree right now...


crimethink-

Granted. They are generally thinking about going bigger and bigger rather than cleverer and cleverer.

|2.24.07 @ 9:28PM|#

If you have a really radical idea, a government-funded research project is not a good way to explore it. Better to find some private investors to fund your research.

Someone who's doing just that in the area of quantum mechanics is Randy Mills. He's raised $25,000,000 from private investors and he's coming up with testable hypotheses. See Blacklightpower.com.

|2.24.07 @ 9:44PM|#

I like Spring Theory better, actually. Also know as the "Tigger Hypothesis" it states, quite simply that "...their tops are made out of rubber / Their bottoms are made out of springs / They're bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy fun, fun, fun, fun, fun..."

"They" of course being the particles that comprise the totality of the Hundred Acre Wood.

Then there's Sprint Theory, which states that your cell will stop working as soon as you get on I-70, right outside of Blue Springs, MO. I mean hell that's like twenty miles from the fucking Sprint Campus!

Everbody switch to Verizon.

|2.24.07 @ 9:44PM|#

I just checked out blacklightpower.com. It looks like his work on plasmas is probably pretty good stuff, but some of the claims about quantum mechanics and computational chemistry sound kind of dubious. Specifically:

the true physical structure and parameters of an infinite number of organic molecules up to infinite length and complexity can be obtained to permit the engineering of new pharmaceuticals and materials at the molecular level. The solutions of the basic functional groups of organic chemistry were obtained by using generalized forms of a geometrical and an energy equation for the nature of the H-H bond. The geometrical parameters and total bond energies of about 400 exemplary organic molecules were calculated using the functional group composition.

I'm not sure how one gets all this information on C-H and C-C bonds from the H-H bond. I'm open to being proved wrong on that, but it sounds fishy. And when he starts talking about "up to infinite length and complexity" that sounds even more fishy. Normally a computational scientist will say something like "The time required to solve this problem scales as (some function of the system size), and on the machine we used this enabled us to solve a system of (insert size here) during a run of (insert duration here)."

Also, he claims that he has "closed form solutions" but the link is only to a table of numbers. Usually a "closed form solution" is an equation that shows how the result depends on the mass, charge, bond length, and other parameters of the problem. The link shows that the numbers agree with experiment, but it doesn't show how the numbers were arrived at.

Interestingly, the website indicates that his plasma work has been published in mainstream journals, while his theory papers have mostly gone to obscure journals. If somebody could easily do full quantum mechanical calculations of bond energies for very large organic molecules, I'm pretty sure that academic, industrial, and public sector scientists would be embracing it.

|2.24.07 @ 9:48PM|#

Mick--unfortunately, that's also where you find a lot of the cranks. Poly water, a lot of the woo-woo New Age stuff, Free Power generation....

Some of the Santa Fe Institute's stuff has been very interesting. Unfortunately a lot of would-be entrepreneurs took some of their work on "network economics" and scampered off to use it as justification as to why dot-com companies were The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread and should have really, really high valuations even though they had negative cash flows and no product. Managed to get a few IPOs through on the strength of that--which then imploded.

I worked in chaotic systems theory for a while, until I realized a lot of them were just going around in circles--a lot of cool images and equations, but after you say "Lyapunov exponent" and "strange attractor", there's not much further you can push it.

I think the really interesting areas we're going to continue to see are where different areas of research overlap--nanotech is one area.

|2.24.07 @ 9:59PM|#

grumpy realist-

I agree. The chaotic systems people have some interesting tools for understanding some fascinating things, but they haven't necessarily turned the whole world upside down.


And I just looked at a chapter of the book at Blacklightpower.com:

He starts talking about hydrogen atoms with fractional quantum numbers, and seems to regard them as a source of energy. Basically, he wants states of the hydrogen atom where the electron is even more tightly bound. If an electron could undergo a downward transition into one of these states then energy could be released, and all of our problems would be solved.

However, you can't just plug fractions into the energy equation for hydrogen bound states. I don't think that fractional numbers would even lead to solutions to the wave equation. (I'm open to being proved wrong there.)

Not to mention that I am not aware of anybody observing such a state.

So I'm calling bullshit.

|2.24.07 @ 10:18PM|#

> Not to mention that I am not aware of anybody observing such a state.

Much of Randy's work has been in measuring the energies released in transitions between his claimed fractional quantum states. Unfortunately he pays much more attention to his physics than to his writing style, so reading his book is hard work.

> So I'm calling bullshit.
Couldn't disagree more. Fortunately, Randy's hypotheses are testable. So we shouldn't have to wait too long to find out who's right.

edna|2.24.07 @ 10:21PM|#

thoreau: bullshit indeed. becuase there's no closed-form solution (but the eigenfunctions and energy states can be calculated arbitrarily closely), the scam artist can always claim that these equations can't be solved by "conventional science." he, of course, has gone well beyond that and found the secrets you dumb scientists overlook because of your orthodox blinders...

i was a macdiarmid postdoc. where did you take a class from heeger? ucsb or penn? alan gave me a recommendation for the job that took me out of the conductive polymers field. small world.

Lao Tzu|2.24.07 @ 10:23PM|#

There was always SOMETHING out there in the deep, mysterious void. IT was ONE. IT was simple when ignored and complex when observed. IT was incomprehensible and without definition. And in its complexity IT was neither "being" nor "non-being;" neither male nor female. IT was without form, and without need of sustenance of any kind. IT knew neither time nor space and yet IT birthed all "being" as yin and all "non-being" as yang. IT was TAO… the Way of Things… the eternal source and sustainer of all things.

…And then there was time and sequence of events, and yin and yang gave birth to the illusion of all division and "being."

When men began to divide things by naming them, many named IT "God" and gave IT cultural names.

And thus it came to be that…

There are as many names for God as there are tongues to speak them.

There are as many faces of God as there are eyes to behold them.

There are as many paths to God as there are feet to walk them.

No name is the complete name.

No face is the complete face.

No path is the complete path.

|2.24.07 @ 11:12PM|#

Mick-

Well, I wish him luck. If he's right, then he should be able to produce a paper with a detailed description of experimental methods, sufficient for others to replicate the work.

edna-

I took the class at UCSB.

|2.25.07 @ 12:04AM|#

> If he's right, then he should be able to produce a paper with a detailed description of experimental methods, sufficient for others to replicate the work.

That's a fine Copernican statement that we can both agree on!

I've heard claims that some of the experiments have already been independently replicated. Haven't tracked these claims down yet though.

|2.25.07 @ 1:20AM|#

Lao Tzu-

That's funny, I always thought "IT" was a giant evil brain. Huh.

You want wackaloon energy claims, here's something:

http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1062

|2.25.07 @ 3:43AM|#

A couple-three years ago I spoke with Robert Laughlin, a recent physics Nobel Prize winner, after a talk in Boulder. He was skeptical of string theory on the grounds that the realities of the universe often reveal themselves as emergent properties. So, sans empirical data directing us that way, string theory is likely to prove unproductive.

Also, he told me of a type equivalence principle experiment that he hinted might well yield results that will be revolutionary. I wonder if this was the type of test to which he was referring. It just came out:

"Steering Atoms Toward Better Navigation, Physicists Test Newton And Einstein Along The Way"

Another mystery that ultracold atoms may help solve is Einstein's equivalence principle, which to date hasn't been proved or refuted. In his equivalence principle, Einstein asserted the gravitation experienced while standing on a massive body, such as Earth, is the same as the pseudo-force experienced by an observer in an accelerated frame of reference

The implications are profound, Kasevich says. "If Einstein's equivalence principle doesn't hold, that means that we would have to rethink the law of physics at a very basic level."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070218132127.htm

The equivalence principle always seemed so commonsensical to me. But I guess that it shouldn't be entirely out of the question that a force exerted by mass would be different somehow than a force exerted by acceleration.

|2.25.07 @ 4:08AM|#

Ken Silber:

A fourth puzzle is why various numbers in the standard model of particle physics-constants such as the masses of particles and the strengths of forces-are what they are. The standard model has many such parameters that are derived from experiment but not A fourth puzzle is why various numbers in the standard model of particle physics-constants such as the masses of particles and the strengths of forces-are what they are. The standard model has many such parameters that are derived from experiment but not logically required by the theory itself. itself.

I'm reading Smolin's book right now and it seems that this is the least of the problems cuz verified constants that simply aren't logically required by a theory neither verify nor falsify that theory. They only hint that the theory may be incomplete. But if the constants are emergent properties, we might expect that they wouldn't have to be a part of a theory that is not concerned with all the components that manifest them.

Phil|2.25.07 @ 5:25AM|#

There are two problems with Smolin's book. First, it pretends that a problem with string theory is somehow of immense import for the whole field of physics. In fact, as has been pointed out, string theory is a small portion of what's going on in physics today. Smolin's list of the most pressing problems in physics is at best a list of the most pressing problems in particle physics. Any such list that fails to include high-temperature superconductivity, quantum computing, and even the coming experiments at the LHC cannot be taken seriously. Smolin's gripes that physics is no longer relevant to technology or the real world are utterly ridiculous.
Second, Smolin's criticisms of string theory are entirely uncompelling. Smolin is a proponent of a rival theory called Loop Quantum Gravity. What he fails to mention in his book is that LQG is vulnerable to all the same criticisms that he levels at string theory. No theory of quantum gravity is yet prepared to make experimental predictions. However, string theory is by far our most promising candidate. Anyone reading Smolin's book should at least look at Briane Greene's book for the other side of the story. It's hard to see how high energy physicists are wrong for gravitating towards whatever theory they think is the best.

|2.25.07 @ 10:18AM|#

Damn! Why'd they have to post this late on a Fri. night.

Throw me in with the nay-sayers. The tremendous successes High-Energy physics achieved in the first half of the twentieth century, earned it a prestige that it still carries. But it got to where even its successes were embarrassing. At one time predicting a new particle was a theoretical triumph. But we got so good at finding stuff that you almost couldn't make up a particle that couldn't be found. I agree with those that say there are more promising and exciting areas of research. String theory is more religion than science, and it's that ole time religion at that.

Nobody Important|2.25.07 @ 6:32PM|#

mtc | February 24, 2007, 2:58pm
Crimethink, while I think I agree with your larger point, the Michelson-Morley experiment which failed to demonstrate the existence of the "luminiferous aether" thus leading to special relativity

I'm not sure what to make of this (emphasis added):

http://jamesphogan.com/bb/bulletin.php?id=161

And, indeed, when thought of as the terrestrial electromagnetic field environment, the "ether" is indeed entrained and moves with the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The plots from NASA's own space probes show nothing clearer than the sharply defined boundary of the terrestrial magnetosphere ("geosphere"), extending out to about ten Earth radii, elongated like a teardrop pointing away from the Sun, forming a huge shock front around which the solar wind streams like the slipstream outside the hull of an airplane. And here, in our laboratories solidly nailed to our planet deep inside this bubble, is where, for a century, we have been attempting to measure our orbital slipstream. But, if the field-referred proposal is correct, that slipstream exists not in the vicinity of the Earth at all, but at the boundary where the embedded geosphere meets the magnetic "heliosphere" of the Sun (and very likely moves with it through a greater "galactosphere"). We've been trying to measure our airspeed with our pitot tube inside the cabin instead of outside in the atmosphere.

(The geosphere travels with the Earth but does not appear to rotate with it. Accordingly, a suitable Michelson-Morely type of experiment performed on the Earth's surface ought to be capable of detecting a "rotational wind" -- although it would need to be far more sensitive than the 1881 experiment. Such an experiment was performed in 1925 by Michelson and Gale. Not only was a fringe shift observed, but it was possible to calculate the Earth's rotational velocity quite accurately from the results. Michelson himself was never enthusiastic about the orthodox interpretation, and continued to favor the entrained-ether alternative until his death.)

I would propose, therefore, an interferometry experiment designed along the lines of the Michelson-Morely prototype, but taking advantage of today's technologies, to be performed from a spacecraft outside the geosphere boundary -- preferably trailing the craft itself, to eliminate possible shielding effects within the structure. On emerging from the geosphere, the craft would be moving through the heliosphere with its shared orbital velocity of the Earth around the Sun, direct measurement of which should be easily accomplished if the field-centered hypothesis is valid. Thus, for the first time ever, an experiment would have been performed to distinguish between the observer-referred theory (SRT) and the alternative.

|2.25.07 @ 10:05PM|#

Whenever I think about particle physics, I remember the comment by--I think it was Fermi--"If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a biologist."

And you very rarely get fractional numbers of anything unless you're dealing with condensed matter systems with strong coupling, e.g., fractional quantum Hall effect. So I fall in the skeptic camp as well.

|2.26.07 @ 11:45AM|#

"If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a biologist."

grumpy realist,

That is really funny. It cracks me up.