RE: Stephen Hawking on M-Theory
July 25, 2011 at 9:26 am
(This post was last modified: July 25, 2011 at 10:21 am by lanceromega.)
(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.
actually that not true, it not the complete model or theory but an all incompassing one. Basically M theory includes all the major GUT such as the 5 various string, super Gravity and S8XS8. The main problem is that it is so broad that it cannot not make any independent predictions that we can test to verify if it truely correct...
Lately Cern and other Major Partical accelerators has collected data that seem to fall away from all the major GUT that M theory embrace, instead it appears the data matches the prediction of a subset of SuperSymmetry theory called MSSM (Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model ).
this would be a major Blow to M theory.
the Holographic Principle, depends on symmetry that is only observe in anti Desitter universe, which many observations indicate that our universe is not, but it make useful mathematical models that help M theorist tackle major issues dealing with Structure of Space time. Another blow to the Holographic Principle came recently when Observation of several Frequencies of light from a distant Quasar fail to show any indication of a fine structure of space time, at least at a scale of Planck length or greater...
So at the moment MSSM is the leading candiated for a Grand unfication Theory..
