Recent content by lumidek

Hasn't someone already told you that it's not your problem with string theory but rather your problem with all of physics? It was Isaac Newton who first figured out that the Universe does calculus every time. To show that it was the case, he had to single-handedly invent or discover the...

Dear Mitchell, I don't want to disappoint you too much but the "research project" you're proposing is a classical textbook example of numerology which is not really rationally justified. Numerology is based on focusing on a single number - for example, the number of particle species in your...

Hi, I was answering the question from the viewpoint of science which builds on scientific arguments, not from the viewpoint of a mindless religious groupthink that worships (fake) authorities. What Schrödinger wrote about this issue is clearly complete nonsense. The "i" factor in the...

Dear Haushofer, it's because -1/12 is the correct answer so any sufficiently consistent regularization technique is guaranteed to end up with the correct result. More concretely, -1/12 is the value that is needed for modular invariance. Imagine a path integral over the torus. The partition...

Dear J.C. Denton, the original papers you're looking for may exist but they're surely not important if they do exist because the point you want to prove is trivial and doesn't have to be checked explicitly (even though the textbooks you mention do show many explicit things about the...

Dear MTd2, it may sound politically correct to argue that Nature chose R,C,H (and O as well?) to be on equal footing, except that She didn't. In quantum physics, all questions are answered by calculating the probabilities, and all elementary terms contributing to probabilities always have to be...

I hope that you're not educating them to think that ZPE is unphysical. That would be unacceptable even for an arrogant sub-par scientist such as Leslie Winkle. ;-)

It was a pleasure and good luck in your adventures.

ZPE is physical whenever it couples to gravity; and whenever one may compare the total energy between two configurations with different net values of ZPE. In other words, ZPE is almost always physical. In particular, the cosmological constant - which is physical because it makes the expansion...

Hi, first: the term "M-theory" is reserved for a vacuum of string theory (in the post-1995 sense) that admits an 11-dimensional description. In 11 dimensions, there are no strings at all. In 11-dimensional M-theory, one only finds M2-branes (membranes) and M5-branes (fivebranes) as the...

Dear Dmitry, you're just taking these spacetime diagrams too seriously - and you seem to think that the complicated answers such as the "speed of something" can be "directly" read out of these naive pictures. Well, that's not the case. When done properly, they should be Feynman diagrams. Such...

Yes, I do. That's the papers. The statement that the multi-minute delay seen by MAGIC was due to the journey through the Cosmos is now known to be ludicrous because the delay can't exceed a second, and probably not even 10 millisecond (and by theoretical reasons, it's almost certainly zero)...

There is no problem with incomplete sets of axioms and there is no unique "true" answer to these unphysical questions. Get used to it. In fact, as you should know, even in pure mathematics, a theorem by Gödel says that every sufficiently strong system of axioms (and all systems that naturally...

Dear Skippy, given the known numbers, your statement about the speculations is just indefensible. The burst occurred 10 billion light years away, i.e. roughly 3e17 seconds ago. The photons went up to 31 GeV which is over 1e-17 of the reduced Planck energy, and that's really the relevant typical...

Not as of August 2009. Science is not about trying to create or invent "diverse approaches"; it is about finding the right answers, and although there are many open detailed questions, string theory as a framework is pretty much a well-established unique framework to ask and answer questions...