Upside is that all those mathematicians are being kept busy instead of helping hedge funds game electronic transaction flaws.

Assigning "The Mind of God" as our 9th grade summer reading was probably the most educational thing my high school did, everyone should read it.


tl;dr - humans have a pervasive tendency to explain reality in terms of the most advanced technology available to them at the time. In the middle ages and early renaissance it was the Divine Watchmaker because watches were the pinnacle of human technological achievement at the time.

Right now it's computers and the Internet.

Oh and stars.

Or as I like to say, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

Or to paraphrase Captain Kirk, we can only observe the phenomena we have designed our instruments to detect.

Incidentally the one person I knew who was really into string theory was a completely horrible person on so many levels, and the last I heard of him he had gone to visit an ex girlfriend of mine who had dumped him a couple months earlier because he wanted to clear things up between them, then he flew into some kind of hysteric fit and punched a hole through her wall with his bare fist.

He was BIG on string theory.

And he worked at Radio Shack! HE THOUGHT IT WAS COOL!

I see absolutely nothing wrong with filling all the potholes and plotholes of the universe with God or yogic energy or aliens. It makes people happy and fills the world with rituals that are necessary. I just don't like when it imposes itself upon research. Any faith should ride sidecar to objective research and secular skepticism.

The LHC has blown some big holes in string theory. When it fires up again after this shutdown at twice the power, string theory will be over.

I guess you could argue the Dirac equation and virtual particle pairs are the XOR function of the universe, but it's useless to. It's just a bunch of carts pushing horses down the street.

These block transfer computations were the plot to the Doctor Who serial Logopolis. The Master used them to build Castrovalva.

Dogons from Sirius, Baby!

ancient assonauts butt?

Not really

whoa.

I think you're talking about Ronald Mallett.
It's an interesting theory. He never said he was "going to build a time machine." What he theorized what that if he could create the energy necessary, using lasers targeted on a quantum particle, he could maybe send that particle through time.

He did a lot of marketing about going back in time to visit this dead father and this is likely attached to Spike Lee's interest in making him celebrity and making money off of him.

You have to be right although I don't know any background info (about him).

This time travel lecture also was probably free of charge since I would've been too cheap to go otherwise (thinking: 'who the hell is this guy', it's not going to be a bait-and-switch, pandering to what he probably thinks is everyone being a moron now, all beaming and turned on to modern physics without discernment. Just make us feel like it's easy to understand, like Stephen Hawking's book*.) -- A big smarmy article in the Boston Globe had promoted the event and drew a crowd. Those who could not get in were offered future (future!) discount admissions to the science museum where this was.
The 1st episodes of NOVA Science NOW were really annoying--at least that one episode that was coincidentally about string theory. Imagine such cool helpful visuals like glowing, whirling loops of string on the screen everywhere as experts try to convey something that's all math esoteria in simple language to an audience presumed not to know math.

*(Hawking: There was a really stupid public seminar a friend told me about circa 2003. People at the end just asking him things like if he thinks we'll ever travel through time lol.)

Thanks for your comment and welcome 33333. This is on the internet, so of course you still get your share of dumb comments about race on any video with a person of color in it.