i feel like i jumped on the bandwagon, which is never a good feeling.
this week i found two more articles denouncing string theory with the usual complaints and talking points. the first can be found @ american scientist online and the other is in new yorker magazine book review.
after reading the first article, i decided to hop off the fence and write something about it. i wonder if the trolls will swarm by that blog post, this weekend.
[shrugs]
at any rate, i found this excerpt from the new yorker article an interesting one:
String theory came into existence by accident. In the late nineteen-sixties, a couple of young physicists thumbing through mathematics books came upon a centuries-old formula that, miraculously, seemed to fit the latest experimental data about elementary particles. At first, no one had a clue why this should be. Within a few years, however, the hidden meaning of the formula emerged: if elementary particles were thought of as tiny wriggling strings, it all made sense. What were these strings supposed to be made of? Nothing, really. As one physicist put it, they were to be thought of as “tiny one-dimensional rips in the smooth fabric of space.”
why strings?
then again, why atoms of protons and electrons?
i wonder what the mathematical formula was. centuries old?
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