Thanks LibWhacker.
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Posted on 03/26/2018 9:56:53 AM PDT by LibWhacker
The Big Bang Theory - Sheldon Doesn’t Dance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ7Tj-Hxx1o
In a few worlds he is a clown made of candy.
Thanks LibWhacker.
For a period of time in the 70s my brother was the closest working associate of Hugh Everett and has many stories to tell about him.
The problem with the pure math modelling going on with things like the mutliverse and string theory is that the theories might begin with math for which there is some empirical basis, and then not just the formula but factors plugged into the formula are invented to make the model produce what the theorists has already imagined. Its as if you could invent factors and math for them, what you have invented MUST be real, somewhere. It’s not science, it’s science fiction.
The work of DeWitt, Deutsch, and others led the many-worlds interpretation to become much more popular over the ensuing decades. But Everett didn’t live to see the many-worlds interpretation achieve its current status as the most prominent rival to the Copenhagen interpretation. He died of a massive heart attack in 1982, at the age of 51.
...
Everett used Many Worlds as an excuse to live a gluttonous life and disregard his health. He figure he’d always be alive in one of the worlds.
The many-worlds interpretation hit a roadblock almost immediately in the person of Everett’s PhD advisor at Princeton, the eminent physicist John Wheeler. Wheeler was a physicist’s physicist; he wasn’t terribly well known outside of the field, but he knew absolutely everyone important within it. He was a protégé of Bohr, and had also been close with Einstein. Fifteen years before Everett showed up at his door, Wheeler had supervised the PhD of a young Richard Feynman; he would later go on to supervise the PhDs of dozens more renowned physicists (including Kip Thorne, one of the winners of last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics).
...
Wheeler may be one of the greatest physicists ever. He came up with his own crazy idea, one so nuts that his student Feynman had to call it too outlandish to be true.
It’s not science, it’s science fiction.
...
It’s science in the early stage of formation. And it seems to be stuck there.
Experimental physics catches up and shows the math intuition was sound (antiparticles, neutrino, etc). Unfortunately nowadays both cosmology & particle physics are at a point where experiments are either very hard & super expensive or (mostly!) there’s no know way to do them.
...
It does seem to have changed. For relativity and quantum mechanics it was the strange experimental results that led the way.
Philanthropists can fund it, taxpayers should not.
Think of space-time as a solid - Astronauts moving in "time" fast enough to break the bonds of illusion...
Astronaut's gene expression no longer same as his identical twin, NASA finds
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/14/health/scott-kelly-dna-nasa-twins-study/index.html
Of course! I wondered why he (probably) let himself go like that.
Okay, gotta ask, which idea was as crazy (not that I don’t believe you, but I love crazy ideas).
I’m glad somebody finally asked.
The idea was that all the electrons and positrons in the Universe are only one particle, since the positron is the same as an electron going backwards in time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
I like Feynman’s quote in the article from his Nobel speech:
I did not take the idea that all the electrons were the same one from [Wheeler] as seriously as I took the observation that positrons could simply be represented as electrons going from the future to the past in a back section of their world lines. That, I stole![
Is this the single electron idea?
See my post just above yours.
Interesting link.
That’s a new one to me, thx!
Wheeler also developed the participatory anthropic principle, another outlandish idea that I find intriguing.
Here’s an excellent article about Wheeler. It includes his regret that he didn’t push for the development of the atomic bomb sooner, which could have saved millions of lives, including the life of his brother.
http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/haunted-by-his-brother-he-revolutionized-physics
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