Sorry, I was incredibly unclear of what I meant by "ultimate truth". I define it as a view that links the mechanisms of objectivity to the mechanisms of subjectivity in the most approximate (possible) harmony. (I hope this definition is clear enough for you to understand my thinking haha but I...
I completely agree that 'to explain' means "forming language that gives us both a sense of understanding and useful predictive power". But, isn't it personal preference if you desire to find the ultimate understanding behind something (or everything) and by understanding it you also get useful...
I agree that it's acceptable and that it's far more important to practice skepticism but*I don't think it's good to say "I don't think we can explain what is actually happening because it looks complicated. So, if you try to explain what is actually happening I'm going to think it's wrong, even...
Hey, I decided that I'm probably going to re-write what I was going to say. I was discouraged to do this last night after I lost everything I had written. Keep in mind that I would like to continue this discussion (if you would like to) not for the sake of arguing but for the sake of learning...
I had a very long and comprehensive reply to your post and took it for granted that when I pressed the button "post reply" that it would work properly. I tried to retrieve the information but couldn't. So, I guess that ends our discussion haha, sorry. Thanks for the info though!
Do you mean we should expect unification without General relativity? I do believe there are some, but what makes them better than string theory?
What are you advocating here, what alternatives? That we shouldn't expect anything?
I disagree with this. What about quantum gravity?
What are...
I think you misinterpreted what he meant. Kaku, just being a physicist, I'm sure has experienced more bizarre things in his life than both us put together. All he was saying is that it would be bizarre if the universe had different, contradictory laws at different scales. We should expect the...
Here's another excerpt from the Lenny Brian interview, explaining the Anthropic landscape idea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzfhtouRM6s&feature=endscreen&NR=1
It seems so beautiful the way he explains it even though it might not be true haha.
Here's a paper written by the famous Leonard Susskind as his way of dealing with the probability issue that slyboy brought up.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3796
Everything I have said thus far agrees with this. Although, I think comparing String Theory to religion is a bit abusive. Again, these physicists are not basing their theory on wishful thinking and bad reasoning like religion and bad philosophy.
Here's the perfect short video for you, that I...
Hence the phrase "in principle". I much rather have a theory based on reality - the way things actually work - and then hope that later on we have the technology to test it. For example, it seems impossible to link every event back to the beginning of the universe to see why it turned out the...
I don't understand what you're saying here.
IF string theory is correct, it predicts, from the number of possible alterations of the Calabi-Yau manifold, that there is 10^500 universes and only very few are capable of life and incidentaly they're the only universes where intelligent life can...
Here's an interesting paper by Susskind and Bousso:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3796
Until I get to college and take some quantum mechanics, I'm sticking with Lenny's idea (based off of String-Theory Landscape?).
Another very interesting paper - on String-Theory Landscape...
But, doesn't the computer (observer) that's measuring make the wave function collapse? Then it must only measure dead OR alive. If it was determined (evolution of the universe) to measure either and it measures one, then that measurement was always going to happen but we never could have...
Please forgive me for I may be deeply embarrassing myself, but I would like to ask a question. If a perfectly determined system (such as a computer in the universe) measures a quantum probabilistic event and makes it deterministic again (Schrodinger's cat is alive now), does the fact that the...