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Lake Views: This World and the Universe: Difference between revisions
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Lake Views: This World and the Universe (view source)
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On the other hand, putting a man on mars would at least give David Bowie<ref>Gawd rest him.</ref> an excuse to re-release his back catalog (not, of course, that he needs one). | On the other hand, putting a man on mars would at least give David Bowie<ref>Gawd rest him.</ref> an excuse to re-release his back catalog (not, of course, that he needs one). | ||
Lest you think I’m being flippant, I’m not: the standard model of modern particle physics fails to account for gravity unless there are 11 space-time dimensions, seven of which are so tiny as to be undetectable (they need to be this small because there is utterly, butterly, no evidence of any kind for them), [[and/or]] a | Lest you think I’m being flippant, I’m not: the standard model of modern particle physics fails to account for gravity unless there are 11 space-time dimensions, seven of which are so tiny as to be undetectable (they need to be this small because there is utterly, butterly, no evidence of any kind for them), [[and/or]] a “Multiverse": an infinite realm of other universes which we cannot (by definition) see or experience (also so required because there's no evidence for them). Similarly, modern cosmology fails unless vacuum space contains undetected, unseen anti-gravitational forces by dint of which the universe can continue not just to expand, but to expand at an ''accelerating'' rate. | ||
These are not trivial problems. They’re barnstormers. Modern physics, that is to say, has many of the hallmarks of a [[research programme]] deeply in crisis: astrophysicists such as {{author|Peter Woit}} and {{author|Lee Smolin}} have published compelling books on the topic in the last decade. | These are not trivial problems. They’re barnstormers. Modern physics, that is to say, has many of the hallmarks of a [[research programme]] deeply in crisis: astrophysicists such as {{author|Peter Woit}} and {{author|Lee Smolin}} have published compelling books on the topic in the last decade. | ||
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So it is an odd chair from which to find a practitioner making lofty declarations. Even Weinberg concedes that the outlook for convergence to one final theory is considerably less certain now than it was when he wrote it. Kind of makes you wonder why he didn’t trouble to update (or just omit) the offending article. | So it is an odd chair from which to find a practitioner making lofty declarations. Even Weinberg concedes that the outlook for convergence to one final theory is considerably less certain now than it was when he wrote it. Kind of makes you wonder why he didn’t trouble to update (or just omit) the offending article. | ||
All this hubris could be forgiven if there were insightful content elsewhere, but there isn’t much. Weinberg includes an essay about the history of military technology (intended as yet another assault on the missile defence issue). This is about as close as Weinberg gets to having anything new to say. But even this (largely concerned with whether the stirrup — which permitted a horseman to charge with a | All this hubris could be forgiven if there were insightful content elsewhere, but there isn’t much. Weinberg includes an essay about the history of military technology (intended as yet another assault on the missile defence issue). This is about as close as Weinberg gets to having anything new to say. But even this (largely concerned with whether the stirrup — which permitted a horseman to charge with a “couched" lance — really was the game-changer its proponents claimed) seems to me to fail badly for selection bias. “Because the stirrup was an exaggerated innovation, ergo so is (in this case) missile defence”. | ||
Now Weinberg is persuasive that missile defence is a waste of money (which isn’t exactly hard), but this argument about stirrups doesn’t help him. For every stirrup there's a horse, rifle, canon or nuke, which really was a game changer. (There will, of course, be countless “stirrups” which have faded from history's pages for precisely the same reasons of selection bias, of course: rather like extra dimensions curling tinily into unseen universes). | Now Weinberg is persuasive that missile defence is a waste of money (which isn’t exactly hard), but this argument about stirrups doesn’t help him. For every stirrup there's a horse, rifle, canon or nuke, which really was a game changer. (There will, of course, be countless “stirrups” which have faded from history's pages for precisely the same reasons of selection bias, of course: rather like extra dimensions curling tinily into unseen universes). | ||