(July 25, 2011 at 7:35 am)Ziggystardust Wrote:(July 25, 2011 at 7:29 am)theVOID Wrote: Sure, it's the only candidate because it's essentially the only anywhere near completed model we have. There is always Garret Lisi's E8 theory but it's got a lot of problems, for instance he needs to achieve some intricate symmetries between leptons and bosons which as many physicists say is not like adding apples and oranges but apples and thunderbolts.
I'm a huge fan of M-Theory, it's just more surprising and fascinating the more you learn about it, and there might just be some evidence for it in cosmology, depending on whether or not the phenomenon of Dark Flow is adequately confirmed - It was predicted by string theorists prior to turning up in the WMAP data, so that kind of predictive power impresses me immensely.
Another favourite of mine is the Holographic Principle, that really fucks with my head, I can't begin to comprehend it beyond it's description of black holes and even that is dense, but that applied to the entire universe, the thought that my 3D experience is a projection from a 2D vibrating surface encompassing the universe is truly mind boggling.
I know only a little about M-Theory and virtually nothing about the Holographic Principle. I need to read more about it in the very near future.
Read some work by Leonard Susskind, his books are awesome.
The book "The Black Hole War" about his battle with Hawking on whether or not black holes destroy quantum information is my excellent and describes a lot of relevent concepts in physics, the other one "The Cosmic Landscape" is less specific and deals with 'the illusion of intelligent design'.
http://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Landscape-S...t_ep_dpt_2
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