Yes, Peter Woit points out that string theory lacks evidence, but what I don't think he realises, is that this problem may go further back. My feeling is that physics theory has exploded far ahead of the evidence, and as a result, it had had to use ever more tenuous arguments to justify itself at all.
I strongly agree. Mostly, I think, because the current physics paradigm (and I include Relativity here with its lightspeed communication barrier) seems to have set itself staunchly against psi, and that seems like a losing horse.
I remember reading Hawkings A Brief History of Time and discussing the speed of light as an absolute speed limit with my mother, who had had an NDE, and she was just like 'well, I don't care what physics says - I know what I saw. Up there, we can travel at the speed of thought, and that's infinitely fast.'
So I've always been skeptical of even Relativity, or at least the way it's often used as the foundation of a hardcore physicalist argument. 'Nothing, but nothing, can ever travel faster than light, therefore even if there were a God, it would take billions of years for your thoughts to reach Him and you'd be dead before He answered'.
Do we have a discussion area for Relativity? I'm trying to get my head around at least SR, and unfortunately I'm more familiar with the arguments against it than the mainstream physical view. Each time I crack open a textbook my mind just glazes over; I can't grasp how two observers can observe each other moving slower than the other and that this is not an illusory, just-observed effect but is also somehow physically 'real' or consistent. Eg, I read Herbert Dingle's 'Science at the Crossroads' at a young age and it warped my brain; and I've read a lot on the various Twin and Clock Paradoxes since. I try to check the mainstream rebuttals but they all seem to be completely missing the point that Dingle made.
I understand, vaguely, I think, the difference between the three kinds of time dilation: observer-dependent relative-velocity-dependant dilation, non-observer-dependent round-trip dilation of an objectively accelerated vs less-unaccelerated observer (as calculated in a shared 'world frame', rather than either observer's frame, eg, something like Earth Centred Inertial for GPS), and GR's non-observer-dependent gravitational time dilation (eg time in orbit moves objectively slower than time on Earth's surface).
I don't have a problem with the two objective, non-observer-dependant time dilations. But I'd like to try to understand what it is that I'm missing in the mainstream view of SR, particularly that first observer-dependent, reciprocal, unaccelerated straight-line time dilation that was the basis of Einstein's 1905 paper. Just can't get my head around (nor could Dingle, who taught Relativity until this problem struck him) how two physical, really-existing values A and B can be simultaneously less than, greater than, and equal to each other, and that this still somehow all comes out okay (?) in the end. How can you build a consistent geometry on an axiom that says lines are both equal and not equal (depending on the observer)? Is there any physical content to such a theory? Woudn't it at the very least require spacetime to be not 'a' single shared geometry but 'an entire multiverse of different geometries', with each observer in a different universe? So the fact that we've ended up with a String Theory multiverse with no predictive value doesn't surprise me; the seed of the multiverse catastrophe was there in 1905. I were going to rewrite physics, I'd start with teasing out what that paradox implies for any theories built on it.
Regards, Nate
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