After the incredible response to two of our recent posts (Krauss on Intelligent Design, Religion (and String Theory); and From the Sublime to the Ridiculous), Sean, JoAnne, Clifford, Risa and I asked Lawrence Krauss if he would be interested in submit…

Wouldn’t this create more confusion? More battles?

I would suspect then that if this was not the case( those well informed as to the nature of quantum gravity and what it is), then we would be looking at about 1% of the population who will guide people along, without pre-biased views right?

How do you wipe away generalizations that may have gone wrong and added to the pot?

I mean really, how do you relieve yourself of the burden of inclination, and not become a stringevangelism(a religion) versus a individual who is a stringevangelist(my mistake was the ism ? This is not my fault Clifford.:)

Wiki needs a clear defintion so we understand Clifford what we do not want in those other respective areas? You’ll have to write it.

So this ism is applicable then is it not, to all areas of respective research? While the Cathiolic church exists and is very concrete there is something magical in our history that has been left for our inspections. Can this co-exist without it becoming a denunciation of all that is good in scientists and the responsibilties that they bear?

Well, the exclusion plots have to be calculated by specifying a model. DAMA uses different elements than CDMS, so the cross sections can’t be related to each other in a model independent way.

Even within supersymmetry it is possible to find a window that will make DAMA consistent with CDMSII. This is the case if you assume spin dependent interactions:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0408346

And very recently the DAMA team suggested another possibility:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0511262

Here one assumes that light pseudoscalar or scalar dark particles cause interactions with electrons and/or atomic elecrical fields inside crystal. One of the criticisms of the DAMA method was that they couldn’t distinguish between electron and nuclear recoils. CDMS and other experiments reject signals due to electron recoils. But in this latest proposed model CDMS would not able to detect the DAMA signal.

The DAMA team claims to have detected such interactions but other teams have disputed their results. See here for an old physicsweb article:

http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/13/4/3/1

Now, since then the DAMA team has collected more statistics, confirming and strengthening their earlier results. However the CDMS team hasn’t detected anything so far. It turns out, however, that the conflict between DAMA and CDMS only exists if you assume certain supersymmetrical models.

But despite the fact that there are plenty of ways to make DAMA consistent with the CDMS experiment, most people working in the field don’t believe that DAMA has detected dark matter. So, this seems to be the case of an unproven popular theory ruling out experimental results.

No disrespect intended, but I never understood why Lawrence Krauss thought that the support of the Catholic Church is so important to science or the ID debate that he would defend multiverse theories and make appeals to the Pope. Origins science isn’t about speculative and known-to-be-fundamentally-flawed theoretical physics projections, multiverse theories have no business in origins science, unless you are “fending-off” an equally unsubstantiable attack. This is fine if the attack includes something the ludicrous plausibility of alien intervention, but it is NOT okay when the anthropic principle is used to support the idea that a fundamental and goal-oriented form of structuring/”design” forever exists in the energy of nature.

If this is correct for only one possible universe, say, the one that’s actually observed and “known”, then this is what defines the values of the forces and the asymmetrical reason why the forces cannot be unified at any level.

If you want to beat-back the lame hop to supernatural forces that’s supposed to lie beyond evidence for goal-oriented “design in nature”, then do it simply, by the fact that there is absolutely no evidence that the structuring of our universe isn’t forever inherent, regardless of how it started for us, and regardless of whatever mathematical “idealizations” may be pointed “toward” by our theories. That doesn’t even come close to actually getting there.

You can’t conclude anything else without an unprovable assumption, so don’t even open the door beyond empiricism until these guys finally find a good reason to quit fighting with each other over which theory is the most screwed up!