All I think one wants to do is get off the cycle, and recognize that we can aspire to something? Yet we are still part and parcel of it. It’s hard to break the chains that bind us:)Hard to rise above these emotive sufferings. Hard to rise above the spoken words that resound from our youths as we were growing up. We are “better sons and daughters” for being the adult with clarity, in the situations?

Who saids it’s easy? That for every gain in happiness that sadness will become encountered sometime and the length of time greatly enhanced in “hot stoves of miseries.” While indeed, Einstein’s happiness is quite fleeting.

Doesn’t mean that there is not a higher being and science isn’t trying to disprove that. Personally it makes no difference to me. It’s as irrelevant as trying to determine if red cars or white cars are better.

The world isn’t flat, dinosaurs existed,heaven doesn’t exist above the white fluffy clouds – scientific facts. Accept it and move on. People see ghosts, have out of body experiences, bleed from the hands at Easter. Science doesn’t have an answer, but it doesn’t deny that it could happen. Science doesn’t claim to have all the answers as religeon does and it doesn’t make up happy stories to fill in the blanks. (Indeed, the moon is made of magic cheese)

Personally, I feel I am a mass of quarks, electrons, strings,etc. I have no soul. The universe will go on without me long after I’m dead. Do I need comfort to believe in a story were I carry on and my thoughts are still intact and I meed up with all my long lost dead pals and family? No. Would it be nice, sure. Will it happen, doubtful. Just as I die every night when I go to bed and I’m re-born in the morning. If I didn’t wake, did I miss the world? No. Did I even know I was no longer in existance for 8 hours? No. So, why then all the fuss? If religion is bogus and you die and that’s it, who cares?! I certainly don’t. I hope the worms have a feast on my remaining particles which allows them to be healthy and produce beautiful offspring.

Now that I can live each day without fear of burning in hell and I have zero fear of dying (other than the brief moment of pain should I get hit by a train and I have no expectation of grandeur I can leave my mind open to many answers. Science seems to provide the most logical so far (my opinion). There is no magic in science – people walking on water and parting of seas. There is also no Santa and no Easter Bunny. Who cares?! You’re not going to burn for eturnity for being curious and for questioning the contents of the ole black book. There is a statement in the Bible that I believe parallels science and then all goes haywire from there and that’s “Let there be light”. Light in a fundamental building block of science.

And if I’m wrong and I burn in Hell for saying all this. Who cares?! I’m only human. Not my fault that this so called creator so many swear exists gave me an inquisitive brain. Believe me, I’ll be calling my lawyer if I wake up in such a place as Hell!

If you dismiss science because you want to believe in religion, it comforts you and helps you get through your daily life where you can sit safe and sound in your house waiting to die so that you can go some place better. That’s fine too. More power to you. Good luck on your journey. Just don’t knock people who like to open the front door of their house, walk out on to their lawn and roam around in the woods loking for more answers. And please don’t strap a bomb on your body and blow up my family because I don’t believe in your peaceful religion.

Point being, think for yourself. Don’t box yourself into only believing in religion since you have been trained to think that way since Einstein know’s when.

Maybe give ‘em both a try as I have and determine for yourself which makes more sense.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

Thanks.

Either I misheard you, or you are misremembering what you actually said. It does happen. From the questions and comments that I got from people who were in the audience, I think that my memory of what was said is not too inaccurate. Also, if, I was confused, imagine how confused others who don’t work in the field might have gotten. As you said, you were in a hurry and did not take the audience very seriously, and so you were maybe not as careful as you usually are.

It is probably some mixture of all the above, so let’s not carry on with the “yes you did”– “no I didn’t” part of the discussion.

As long as we all agree to be careful about what we say (and don’t say) to a general audience, and realise that it is important to strive for honesty and clarity in the presentation of ideas (especially those of others not present) -even in a highly constrained situation/centext- then we have no quarrel.

Let me end with an extract from Lee Smolin’s comment on the other thread.

there is no conflict between having a good, honest, respectful debate over the open questions and presenting the science to the public. In my experience the best way to present what science is and how it works to the public is simply to carry out such debates in publically accessible forums like this-as well as in books and public talks. The public is smart and savy and they want the real thing.

Thanks.

-cvj

again.. I think you mis-heard me… which may also reflect that I wasn’t as clear as I would have liked.. My point was not to use infinities to argue against anything.. but to point out that canceling infinities, as the dual-string did, was not by itself a guarantee that it was right, but that a completely different theory ended up coming along and replaced it.. as could easily happen again… I didn’t use it to argue that anything was flawed.. but merely that it is a mathematical problem that needs to be solved, but not every solution of it needs to correspond to reality.

And my point was not to kill extra dimensions at all.. even from a self-serving perspective that would be bad, because a large part of my book is based on discussing why it is fascinating to think about them… my point was to stress that even though a huge amount of research is currently being done on them, large extra dimensions have thus far not yet added anything to our understanding of the world of our experience.. haven’t solved any physical problems, and may have nothing to do with reality. I think it is very important to stress this, if one is not to mislead, as I know you felt I did..

Thanks. This is an interesting discussion. I see no reason not to have it.

Much of what you say is true. But you did not say it in the talk, you see. That’s my point. What you chose to say, vs what you left out, struck me as very very misleading. I do understand the difference between how divergent quantities appear and are removed in QCD and string theory, but at the level we’re discussing, in fact the similarities are much more up front. So to use the presence of infinities, (and a suspicious handling of them) as your damning evidence for an idea’s flawed status on the one hand, and then bring along another theory to save the day but not mention that it has the same (at this level) ingredients seems to me misleading.

Moshe, thanks. I know what you are saying. But to the audience in hand, and at the technical level we are talking about, there is no difference. Lawrence seemed keen to kill all notions of extra dimensions, saying at the outset that it is wrong, and not informing the audience that the key aspects of the idea are actually alive and well, and form part of a large and interesting research program, and is part of a collection of ideas that can and will be challenged (at least to some extent) by experiments such as the LHC very soon. This seems to me to be misleading.

Cheers,

-cvj

(and I had not realized Duff was an Oskar Klein professor, very appropriate)

Would this help?

http://feynman.physics.lsa.umich.edu/cgi-bin/seminar1.cgi?oklecture+11+r