Finding the Ultimate Theory of Everything

RedNove ^ | Today? | Marcus Chown

[thefactor]

You lost me at "Could"...

[longshadow]

"However, it is always possible we are seeing two galaxies that just happen to look surprisingly similar."

Watch for a supernova, and see if it appears in both images..... that ought to resolve the question.

[Uncle Miltie]

"These are dubbed branes, or p-branes"

[-YYZ-]

No no no. Alternate universes are exactly like this one, except that everyone has bad goatees and is evil (everyone who is good, and beardless, in this universe, anyway). C'mon, every Star Trek: TOS fan know that :)

[dangus]

Read in "A brief history of time," about Steven Hawking's encounter with the Pope. Hawking thought he was explaining away the mysteries of the universe to the Pope, nullifying the need for God. The Pope asked many questions, and Hawkings notes how the Pope understood what he said with uncanny brilliance. He asked the Pope what he thought about it all. The Pope asked to meet him again the next day. The Pope's reply, highly paraphrased, was "See? We told you so."

Hawkins understood at that moment that cosmology had actually been certifying as correct the Catholic Church's understanding of the nature of the universe. From that time on, he has been maniacal in his attempts to undermine the theories he had presented to the Pope, with preposterous results that have been proved wrong at every opportunity to observe excpected consequences.

IIRC, Hawkins believed in many dimensions, but rejected the string theory's notion that they were flat. Rather, he believed that the 5th dimension was quantum probability, where every possibility occurs in an infinite number of "parallel universes."

Just wait 'til he finds out that the 5th dimension is stitched together like a quilt, and the junctures in time and space occur at the Holy Sacrifice.

(I'm sort of playing: The Catholic Church holds that time and space are suspended so every instance of the Holy Sacrifice of Mass, is really the same Holy Sacrifice at Calvary, presented miraculously through time and space into every tabernacle in the world. Pretty heady stuff to have come up centuries before Galileo had tried to use Copernicus' observation to prove God as we know him did not exist. And yes, to all the Protestants who love to cluck at the Catholic Church's heresy trials of Galileo, that was what the fuss was about.

And I'm sort of not playing: I truly will be fascinated to go to heaven and find how all this multidimensional stuff relates to mystical constructs. It's way above my understanding to relate two incredibly divergent topics like I've done, but I'd seriously love to know if there is any relation.)

[dangus]

MMmmm.... Branes!

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Not charged vacuum emboitments??

[SuzyQue]

Great article. Thanks.

Oh - if you want to read the paper on CSL-1, there is a link from the article at RedNova that takes you to a .pdf of the paper.

[roaddog727]

....... 42

[spunkets]

"Finding the Ultimate Theory of Everything"

These guys are slow. My daughter's already found it.

[cspackler]

Don't forget the South Park episode that took this pattern. Only, Cartman's counterpart was "good"...

Hillarious stuff.

[cspackler]

I knew when I read the thread title that someone would beat me to it.

Anyone think the movie will be any good?

(If you don't know what we're discussing, never mind...)

[Thebaddog]

Beer is the answer to everything. What was the question again?

[spunkets]

That explains the foam.

[newheart]

"The Catholic Church holds that time and space are suspended so every instance of the Holy Sacrifice of Mass, is really the same Holy Sacrifice at Calvary, presented miraculously through time and space into every tabernacle in the world."

Thanks, dangus, that is the simplest explanation I have ever heard.

Strings, dimensionality, time/space issues are all endlessly fascinating. One does have a tendency to become unstuck (ala Billy Pilgim in Slaughterhouse 5) unless one is grounded in the reality that: "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." Col 1:17

[jpsb]

"And Schild and his colleagues calculate that the string must be remarkably close to us - well within our Milky Way galaxy."

Hmmmm, this does not sound good to me.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[Junior]

"I always felt there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe."

[RightWhale]

This is some of the big string news that string theory has been looking for. Whether it holds up or not remains to be seen.

[Darkwolf377]

Thanks for such a terrific post. I'm not a believer but I find the subject of belief and how it confronts scientific explanations for reality and the creation of the universe fascinating. Too often it turns into some atheist sourpuss going "one up" (in his mind) on a beleiver who merely doesn't have the capacity to get into the topic at hand in much depth.

It's interesting how you pointed out that Hawking was peeved at the Pope's responses and then spent time trying to disprove the Pope's position. I'd never heard about that. Thanks again for posting.