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

I cannot believe I am writing again, but here goes, since you took the time to give a thoughtful response..

once again, I think you misunderstand me.. I believe that QCD IS fundamentally different than the dual string…and it is worth emphasizing this.. the example I gave was to show that the dual string was simply the wrong idea at the time.. QCD does NOT deal with those infinities in the same way.. it replaces a theory of an infinite number of strongly interacting particles with an asymptotically free gauge theory for quarks..(there are other infinities, but those are not the ones I was talking about)… it was an example where the approach was simply replaced by the right idea…

..and Kaluza Klein, which I believe was a fantastic idea, and which I said so at the time, IS wrong.. it predicted a mode of gravity that wasn’t there, and it wasn’t appropriate to unify all the forces in any case.. both of which I said.. In an hour talk I would (and do) go on to show the details of how extra dimensions, supersymmetry etc have built on that idea.. but I do think, based on my experience in talking to lay people, that absolutely zero content would have been conveyed if I had tried to do that in 30 seconds to 2 minutes, because it requires far too much intellectual baggage and in the end the message they got would have been the same.. namely…:

My point was to let people know that based on both history, and the way physics is done, they should be skeptical of what they hear.. that string theory is far from being something that is guaranteed to be right or even worth talking about in the long run.. that there is a difference between fascinating ideas and what turns out to be good physics… that large extra dimensions too are fascinating as an idea, but that so far they have not resolved any physics problems…

AND… the context in which I referred to ID was actually to make a point that I am beginning to think is actually relevant… namely that when we (i.e. physicists, and yes, believe it or not, I believe I am one..) refer to ‘string theory’ it is in the context of ‘field theory’… namely as a technical replacement of one physical and mathematical framework for dealing with relativistic quantum mechanics with another.. but unfortunately in the context in which we complain about IDers saying Evolution is ‘just a theory’, the popular use of the term string theory is unfortunate.. because ‘string theory’ is not a theory in the context in which we claim evolution or general relativity is… i.e. something that has been tested time and again against experiment and observation.. calling it the string hypothesis would not be inappropriate in this sense.. there.. that ought to make some others even madder at me, I suppose.. but that was actually not its intent.

This is the last warning… let’s call it quits on the whole business of the inflammatory remarks or the commenting on this thread gets closed. The horse is dead. Let it lay in peace.

-cvj

The idea that string theory is even remotely as well established as evolution is inane.

The pressure must be getting to me.

congratulations that you have forced Jacques Distler to copy a silly – and offensive – statement that you originated. Do you have to see a burned heretic every night before you got to sleep?

Your tendency to force people to write down untrue sentences could have made you useful members of certain institutions in Germany in the 1930s.

Whatever you, Scott, or (under pressure) Jacques Distler will write down can’t make an inconsistent theory consistent. And it can’t upgrade an intellectually inferior person to a rational person either. But that’s apparently not what you want anyway. What you want is to downgrade others to your level.

All the best
Lubos

Thanks. And insufferable politeness is a very good thing. Something to which we should all aspire. I certainly try to.

-cvj

Thanks. In fact, all of us here at Cosmic Variance sent you the invitation, not just Mark.

As I said, I think that you did a good job in the first part of what you were doing. Then you lost your way.

*By emphasizing to the audience that “dealing with infinities” is a suspicious trick, then saying that this is how string theory arrives at extra dimensions, and then introducing QCD (which you and I know uses the same “tricks”) as the saviour, but not mentioning that it uses the same “tricks”, you mislead.

*By not mentioning the ongoing effort to understand the Kaluza-Klein idea in serious physics contexts, but instead dismissing it as a nice but wrong idea, you mislead.

*By stating that string theory is the same as ID, but not explaining what you mean, you mislead.

You say that you inspired the audience to read more. Good. I admire your efforts in this area, and acknowledge that you’ve done a huge amount of good in that regard over many years. But, key point: You cannot rely on the audience to go out and read the books to clear up misconceptions introduced by you in the talk. You should rely on them to find out more that way if they wish to, but not to fix the bugs that you the speaker introduce.

I am not emotionally attached to these physics ideas. I welcome criticism of these ideas, as you now know well from reading the comment stream here.

I am emotionally attached to the idea of making a fair attempt to honestly represent the state of ongoing research in science, especially when talking to the public, who are less inclined, or empowered (due to lack of expertise) to go out and check the details themselves.

I hope we understand each other now.

Best Wishes,

-cvj

at mark’s request, I am going to submit a piece for the blog.. but again, i think you misunderstood me. I give literally dozens of public talks each year, and I did exactly what I intended, and I think it was the correct thing to do. I gave them a taste for science in the 20 min I had.. I talked about Michael Faraday, and how his mathematical invention (i.e. fields) turned out to be real… and we think of space as permeated by fields.. I then gave them a taste for how string theory deals with infinities… and I said, and I absolutely believe this, that this solves a mathematical problem.. and that it may, or may not be right, and it may or may not have anything to do with nature… we do not know at the present time. My example of the strong interactions was right on, I believe, not just cause those guys are my friends.. It is important for people to know that not all fascinating ideas are correct… I really think you over-reacted.. and while perhaps my original response was too flippant because I was upset, I hope I have clarified my view here… and I believe if you talk to the people in the audience,who are not as emotionally attached to the ideas as you seem to be, you will see that I inspired a number of them to read more about this.. which again was my intent.. whether in my own books, which I am proud of, or in anyone elses books..

LMK

Elliot