Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong

Discover Interview Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics
One of the greatest thinkers in physics says the human brain—and the universe itself—must function according to some theory we haven't yet discovered.
by Susan Kruglinski; photography by Oliver Chanarin

Is it true that you were bad at math as a kid?
I was unbelievably slow. I lived in Canada for a while, for about six years, during the war. When I was 8, sitting in class, we had to do this mental arithmetic very fast, or what seemed to me very fast. I always got lost. And the teacher, who didn’t like me very much, moved me down a class. There was one rather insightful teacher who decided, after I’d done so badly on these tests, that he would have timeless tests. You could just take as long as you’d like. We all had the same test. I was allowed to take the entire next period to continue, which was a play period. Everyone was always out and enjoying themselves, and I was struggling away to do these tests. And even then sometimes it would stretch into the period beyond that. So I was at least twice as slow as anybody else. Eventually I would do very well. You see, if I could do it that way, I would get very high marks.


You have called the real-world implications of quantum physics nonsensical. What is your objection?
Quantum mechanics is an incredible theory that explains all sorts of things that couldn’t be explained before, starting with the stability of atoms. But when you accept the weirdness of quantum mechanics , you have to give up the idea of space-time as we know it from Einstein. The greatest weirdness here is that it doesn’t make sense. If you follow the rules, you come up with something that just isn’t right.


In quantum mechanics an object can exist in many states at once, which sounds crazy. The quantum description of the world seems completely contrary to the world as we experience it.
It doesn’t make any sense, and there is a simple reason. You see, the mathematics of quantum mechanics has two parts to it. One is the evolution of a quantum system, which is described extremely precisely and accurately by the Schrödinger equation. That equation tells you this: If you know what the state of the system is now, you can calculate what it will be doing 10 minutes from now. However, there is the second part of quantum mechanics—the thing that happens when you want to make a measurement. Instead of getting a single answer, you use the equation to work out the probabilities of certain outcomes. The results don’t say, “This is what the world is doing.” Instead, they just describe the probability of its doing any one thing. The equation should describe the world in a completely deterministic way, but it doesn’t.

more:

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/sep/06-discover-interview-roger-penrose-says-physics-is-wrong-string-theory-quantum-mechanics/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=

Feynman offered that all of quantum physics could be understood by studying this experiment. I would be interested in reading Penrose's explanation of this experiment.

Which was basically: It has to be wrong because I don't like it.

To reference Diax's Rake from Neil Stephensons Anathem: "One should never believe a thing only because one wishes it were true"

I wish the interviewer had asked about Bell's Theorem, as that experiment pretty much pokes a hole in what he would like. The result says that either one has to give up the idea of a completely deterministic model, or the accepted notions of space-time, such as locality and causality. For the observed results of the experiment, which are completely predicted by QM, you can have one or the other of those two, but not both.


Edited to restate the first line. Because, of course QM is wrong, just like General Relativity is wrong, just like Newtonian physics was wrong. They don't explain everything, therefore they are an incomplete model of the universe, which work sufficiently well under the right circumstances. However, Penrose, from the brief interview here, seems to be wrong in the sense that the universe he seeks to describe isn't the one that we live in.

to the Anathem punch! I just yesterday finished Neal Stephenson's latest opus, feeling like I was sort of intuitively perceiving what he described, even though consciously, I could barely wrap my head around it.

Maybe Penrose is attempting to describe the Hylaean Theoric World?

Quantum Mechanics is inelegant, true. But it's a pretty difficult field, given the fact that the particles it talks of are impossible to directly observe.

I'm certain it has its flaws. I'm equally certain that standard physics has flaws, too.

What he's ultimately saying is "fuck it, Pi = 3"

No evidence, mind, he just thinks so intuitively.

The human mind is quantum mechanical!
The human mind is fundamentally non-algorithmic!


Really?


The speed with which they leapt to those conclusions, given the huge gaps in our understanding of how our brains function even at the "logic gate" or "network" level, always suggested to me that they were simply bothered by the prospect of deterministic, or algorithmic, models for human minds.

They both start with their biases. I don't respect Penrose enough because through the late 90s early 2000s he was bemoaning any attempts to argue for strong AI, simulated minds, etc. And it seems that he formed his conclusion from the get-go rather than looking at it from the top down.

The more we learn about the brain the more deterministic is most assuredly is looking to be. There's a reason all of these data mining projects work. Humans are susceptible to manipulation and predictable.

Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson:

'Obviously, I retain a special affection for Uncle Tim. If any of these men could legitimately be called complex, it is probably Leary. A brilliant scientist, he was often reviled by traditional scientists, whom he called "arrogant motherfuckers who deny their role in the military industrial complex's manipulation of the American people." Leary rejected what he called the "grim Newtonian mechanics of objective fact" for the "free flowing quantum physics approach to consciousness" that the changing, not the static, governs consciousness and the outcome of the world. "Understanding this even intuitively," he said, makes people unmanageable by agents of the criminal government syndicate that runs and ruins America." That sort of talk was why Nixon called him "the most dangerous man in America."

If God really is an authoritarian prison warden of mankind, Leary and Thompson are hanging from their tongues on hooks somewhere in hell. And if not, then they are basking in the glow of that 40-foot rainbow pussy. Meanwhile, a few old beatnik and hippy coots still understand how arbitrary even the most deeply held concepts of reality are. It's like the old cliché about jazz, "You either you get it or you don't."

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2007/05/ghosts_of_tim_l.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/oct/10/drug-use-spiritual-practice

I wonder if Tim Leary ever expanded on his "free-flowing quantum physics approach to consciousness".

and behave more quantum mechanically than other elements due to their low mass.

Abe Pais evoked it elegantly when describing his walk with Al in Princeton and they discussed whether the moon exists when no one is seeing it. The conversation is described in the opening passages of http://books.google.com/books?id=U2mO4nUunuwC&dq=subtle+is+the+lord&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=pd5O8OMkjx&sig=ruvii-c3vZxFGnL1p8DjEY4zTsE&hl=en&ei=oS_NStnMBo_N8Qa_2bDQCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#v=onepage&q=&f=false">Subtle Is the Lord.

From my perspective - and I am clearly not at the level of Roger Penrose - Bohr was right and Al was being, um, quaint.

Maybe Roger is being quaint. There is no intrinsic reason that the infinitely small should be governed by the same equations as the infinitely large, and no reason to choose one type of reality over another, any more than there is any reason to describe a wave as a particle or vice versa. Whether something is a particle or a wave is a function of how one sees it. The assumption that it is so only holds true if it is consistent.

We know that the chemistry of stars, as measured spectroscopically is consistent with chemistry on earth because there are few phenomena that call that assumption into question. But it is an assumption, and as such is only valid until something calls it into question.

It is interesting that Al was one of quantum mechanics founders, since the explanation of the photoelectric effect was one of the first serious indications that Planck's mathematical trick, replacing an integral with a sum, was actually relevant to the nature of the universe and not a kind of curve fitting.

But quantum science passed Al very quickly and the future belonged to Neils.

The theory is supposed to fit the data, not the other way around. If the data is "nonsensical" than what we view as "sensical" is wrong, not the data. Our intuitive notions of what is "sensical" are based on evolutionary pressures and cannot be expected to conform to what is actually true. That is why Aristotle thought heavy objects fall faster than lighter objects, our instinctive "folk physics" assumes air resistance.

has been known for a long time.

And I'm awful with numbers/arithmetic as well. Thankfully that's not math - anymore than skilled penmanship is literature. I'm sure Penrose is perfectly competent with Hilbert spaces, linear operators, Lagrangians, and other basic mathemtical tools.

We don't get quantum mechanics and we can't see the greater implications of it as it relates to the structure of the entire universe because it has never mattered, and perhaps it can't matter. We don't perceive things we can't manipulate. There may be aspects of this universe that we have no possible way of manipulating ("observation" is a manipulation too...) thus making them forever invisible to our perception. A grand unified theory of physics may be impossible for creatures such as ourselves.

I'm not arguing we are anywhere near that point of "unknowability" but it is a most uncomfortable reality that the universe is very big and our minds our very small.

My own intuition (for what it's worth, that of a dog riding in an unknowable car his head out the window and his nose to the wind) is that we are creatures of three identical dimensions, each of these three dimensions at once space-like and time-like. There is no dimension of time itself, time is simply an artifact of the way our minds are wired, time is merely an evolved shortcut of calculation, a way of making quick decisions whenever the continuity of the genes we carry is threatened.

> There is no dimension of time itself, time is simply an artifact
> of the way our minds are wired, time is merely an evolved shortcut
> of calculation

... or, in other words, an internal model that allows our mind to
react to specific events with specific actions within the environmental
limits that surrounded us for the vast majority of our history.

It is only very recently (in evolutionary terms) that our perception
has extended far enough out & in (i.e., astronomically & microscopically)
that the "time" model is being stretched beyond its "natural" scope.
This means that the accuracy of the model's mapping starts to break down
and requires more & more bodges to get it to fit (cf adding epicycles to
the geocentric model that works for simplistic situations).

Interesting times ...

The math we use to describe the inner and outer edges of our perceptions grows increasingly complex and cumbersome, "epicycles" indeed!

That's why we are flumoxed by things like "spooky action at a distance" (entanglement), particle/wave duality, uncertainty, and "dark matter."

The simple model of energy, gravity, mass, and time that's hard-wired into our brains fails spectacularly at the edges of our perception.

If I could follow my own intuition about the universe a little further down the road and do the math (sadly, I haven't yet pulled anything so wonderful out of my head or my ass...) I would say that everything is traveling at the "speed of light" (even though there is no such thing as "speed" or velocity in my model... complications, complications...) and that matter and time simply don't exist beyond the very simple models in our brains.

Maybe it's a good thing we haven't figured it out. Otherwise we might have religious fanatics building anti-matter bombs and phaser rifles in their basements using common household materials and tools from Harbor Freight.

> Otherwise we might have religious fanatics building anti-matter bombs
> and phaser rifles in their basements using common household materials
> and tools from Harbor Freight.

I'm not so sure that it's a coincidence that the most enlightened people
I've either met or read about are pacifists ... maybe it's a built-in
safety feature to prevent the immature from "figuring out" how to make
those very things - i.e., objects of power far outweighing the wisdom
of their builders - although one or two have obviously come close to
that achievement whilst lacking wisdom ...

:shrug:

That our minds are wired,

But I would add "in this dimension."

When we dream we are out of time. I have precognitive dreams a lot of the time. Or even worse, simultaneous. The worst of these dreams was the day in May of 1979 when the huge airliner carrying many of the Playboy magaizne satff crashed and burned outside of Chicago. At the time of that particular event, I was asleep in Stavanger Norway, and dreaming that I was on the plane and experiencing the crash. What was really odd was that unlike every other airplane experience that I had in real life, on this plane, I could watch the takeoff on a TV monitor above my airplane seat..

The Herald Tribune confirmed that my dream was real. Later on, I read reports that that airplane had the TV screen set up so that people could watch their own takeoff. Which had to have been horrifying - as what they ended up watching was the plane crashing. So my dream was accurate down to that small detail.

Primitive cultrures allow their people to develop in such a way that they can go forward or backward in time. We train our children to be "rational" so that that ability is lost.

that happens when you want to make a measurement. Instead of getting a single answer, you use the equation to work out the probabilities of certain outcomes."

Is this about the particle/wave duality? Because if it is, I have a very strong feeling that it is implicit in the nature of space-time. It must be unvoidable. Ostensibly, there is a state of flux, and at the moment in time when its appearance it is "captured".

It's tempting to infer that its proper nature, therefore, is as a particle, but given that time and space form a continuum, well, it is also bound to be a wave. Its nature as a wave and not a particle is because time is as much a reality of the world in which it exists, as is the space that it might theoretically inhabit if time did not exist. Anyone get my drift? Our world is dynamic no matter how much we may want to put it under the microscope.

I've taken the opportunity to revise and supplement it.

"However, there is the second part of quantum mechanics—the thing that happens when you want to make a measurement. Instead of getting a single answer, you use the equation to work out the probabilities of certain outcomes." Roger Penrose.

Is this about the particle/wave duality? Because if it is, it would seem that it is implicit in the nature of space-time. What are pereceived as particles at the moment of their "capture" are in reality in a state of constant flux.

It is tempting to infer that its proper nature, therefore, is as a particle, like a football in a "Spot The Ball" photograph, but given that time and space form a continuum, well, it is also bound to be a wave. Its nature as a wave and not a particle is because matter at that level is not inert, having an energetic life, in which time is as real as the space, the other polarity of the continuum. And it is impossible to its nullify its nature as a vibrant "living" entity. Anyone get my drift? Since, at the sub-atomic level, our world is vital and dynamic, no matter how much we may want to subject it to our examination in an inert form.

Evidently, the more solid the form that matter assumes, the more inert and pliable to our analytical purposes it becomes. Oddly, enough, in a similar vein, Origen, the great Church Father and theologian of the first and second centuries A.D., speculated that human-beings were angels (pure spirits) which had cooled down.

While matter assumes a particle/wave duality at the quantum level, if what we perceive is a paradox involving penumbral meanings, the ultimate resolution of the apparent conflict would obviously seem destined to emerge in the recognition of a new pristine meaning, subsuming both. But it is likely to elude physics, since it looks as if it is at the interface between the measurable and the non-measurable (the spirit).

Light is evidently anomalous to our universe of space-time, but it is surely not anomalous to the stream of sub-atomic particles emanating from the Singularity at the Big Bang. And since light manifests in our world of space-time in many ways, including when generated by ourselves, is it possible that it is a kind of matrix in which our universe of space-time exists and has done since the creation of time, accompanying it as it unfolds? If so we would seemingly exist within the Singularity as well as a projection from it. I believe that would, at least, correlate with perhaps the central belief of most of the major religions?

may be like going back all those aeons to the "foothills" of the Big Bang; approaching the "stem-cells" of the cosmos and their source, the Singularity.

ignoramus as regards anything approaching the nitty-gritty of scientific knowledge.

I've just browsed through part of a pretty scary artice entitled, Soviet Scalar Weapons. "Browsed", because due to my technical ignorance, paying close attention the the technical jargon would prevent my gathering a sense of what it was about in terms of its effects - which seems much simpler: a plane glowing yellow and an absence of flames, as it mysteriously crashed, for example - though just one. There seemed to be a reference to some kind of remote, highly destructive action on an object (weapon), without the traversing of any kind of projectile from the object "firing" it. I've read of Einstein's spooky effect at a distance.

Perhaps, you'll tell me what you had in mind - in the grossest layman's terms re this scalar energy business...? My mind seems so obsessed with the etiology of things that it won't seem to allow me to just accept what works, and move on. I was singularly ill-equipped to study medicine, but I began a course in it at Wellington University in NZ many years ago. Very soon, I was apprised of the fact that a symbol for infinity was used in mathematics. That, for me, was the last straw. How can you manipulate infinity, even in a mathematical equation? I mean its definition is comprehensively negative - an absence of boundaries... The cypher to end all cyphers! A truly scalar energetic cypher, even.

Anyway, further to my earlier musings, it seems as if the closer we get to the source of the vibrancy, the source of life in fact, the more continuous the polarities of the space-time continuum become, and the more paradoxical and elusive they and the continuum subsuming them become to our understanding. Its corollary, that the more distinct the polarities of the continuum to our senses (or perhaps "sense"), the more easy it is for us to calibrate space and time, independently of each other, at least for our mechanistic purposes, is more self-evident, I suppose.

It is Tom Bearden's contention that the Maxwell equations were the end product of shaving off the real (and more numerous) equations and putting together a cohesive set of standards regarding the electricities and their functioning. This was done in the mid nineteenth century.

So in a sense, the Maxwell Equations helped the entire science of radio and radio waves. But there is so much more to science than just those energetics. The sections of Maxwell's equations that delved into other matters was deemed as "junk knowledge" - after all in the mid nineteenth century, we didn't know about atomic energy. Nor did we understand much about the micro wave realm.

not empty, but a great ocean of seething energy!

Col. Bearden refers to this ocean of energy as being of the "time domain." Energy out of time? It seems like something from Star Trek but this is the point which the new science of scalar electromagnetics has reached. And where it is going may be beyond anything Star Trek could have dreamed of.

We live in a 3-dimensional world, which physics calls "3-space." But there is also spacetime, or 4-space, or the "4th dimension." Then suddenly comes this amazing new knowledge that time itself is actually compressed energy. And it is energy which is compressed by exactly the same factor by which matter is considered compressed energy: the speed-of-light-squared!"

Wow, truedelphi. Just wow. To quote Stan Freeburg, who was perhaps before your time. Pretty eerie.

I have friends who really get it, and can add their own theories into the discussion.

I am in awe of people whose level of physics is such that they can conceive of things that most of us can't quite get a handle on. But I do enjoy playing around with trying to understand these things, and it is endlessly fascinating.

postulations. Well, more than a dollar and more than a day, but I don't seem to have been too far out in terms of the big picture. Thanks again for the Google tip.

I have a feeling I know what beardfen would say about this.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1219425/Pictured-The-luminous-halo-shaped-cloud-captured-hovering-Moscow.html

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHOPxVM6oIw

shot out of the right edge of the cloud and disappeared seemed to be travelling much too fast for any aeroplane of our construction. Like many other people, however, I very much doubt if any advanced people would want to get to know us from too close! But, who knows as to the existence or otherwise of UFOs? It's not a subject that I'm particularly interested in, but as Jesus once remarked, "In my father's house there are many mansions."

It puts me in mind of mystical experiences, including "near death" experiences.

This is an NDE that fascinated and tickled me.

http://www.mindspring.com/~scottr/nde/tommy.html

I should add that, while I love the drop-out, "slacker" subculture of, say, The Big Lebowski, in reaction to our increasingly materialistic and corporatised world, I believe our brains are extraordinarly delicate instruments, and I would like to see all of the recreational drugs, known to be very addictive and injurious to be banned. Not much chance with alcohol though. And it seems we've already gone way too far with the "Health and Safety" craziness in the UK. It's quite criminal now.

On the other hand, I think the availability of hallucinogenic drugs under laboratory conditions, and after warnings and maybe tests, could be very beneficial. Apparently, in a negative frame of mind, they lead to a living nightmare, while their effects last.

I do believe that it is better to try to get our heads into heaven than heaven into our heads, generally speaking, but it seems as if LSD could be of considerable benefit as an aid to theistic belief and an understanding of the limitations of the phenomenal world.

dimensional vantage point to the next takes us much further, or is not implicit in a more general way, but the "handle" it puts on the phenomenal dimensions in a kind of graduated "retro-perspective", with each new dimensional progression, I found intriguing.

One of the major factors which brought me back to my Christian faith was Aldous Huxley's beautiful essay on comparative religion, The Perennial Philosophy. He himself became a Vedantist, as I expect you know.

...and this led to a notion of separating mind(ego-less consciousness) from mere brain activity(ego based doership). The link to Wei Wu Wei (born Terence Gray) can keep one busy for years with the Perennial Philosophy.

Peace...Rags

Edit- spelling

and we'll talk

Trying to explain four dimensional reality with a three dimensional brain.

The model of time as some sort of fourth dimension happens to be useful for any number of things humans do, but there's no reason to believe four dimensions "explain" anything. The patterns of "explanation" and "meaning" in our brains might not be any more significant or relevant in the greater scheme of things than any other regular natural pattern. Maybe, and most likely, we ain't anything more special than anything else. For all we know the universe could be as simple as waves running along a single wire, or it could be the impossibly complex and multi-dimensional hairball the string theory gurus suggest.

I'm sort of a steady state universe person. I speculate (wildly!) that the singularity, the "Big Bang," is entirely a matter of perspective. I think if you could go back in time say 12 billion years (and you can't, because time as we see it is not reality, there is no "past" as we perceive it, and no future) but if you could, you could look around and the universe might still look pretty much the same as it does now. There'd be a different scattering of stars and galaxies, but the singularity would still be 13.73 billion years or so further down the road, and the predicted future of the universe would look about the same as it does to us now.

Jump back 12 billion years again, a total of 24 billion years from our current position, and the singularity might still be, frustratingly, 13.73 billion years back. Jump, jump, jump, and you might ascertain an endlessly receding horizon... You ain't never going to get to the "Big Bang." You ain't never going to be a witness to "The Creation." So you'd scream AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH and you'd go shooting back the other way to the present (which would not be your present sad to say since you lost that thread damn those quantum effects!) to 12 billion years from now, to 24 billion years, maybe a million billion years from now, and NOOOOOOOoooooooo......... you are still confined within the same general picture of a universe.

It may be that the universe is entirely stateless and maintaining continuity with the "past" is nearly the same phenomena as maintaining continuity with the "future" and it is only the slightest feature of this universe, as subtle as the physical difference between right and left handedness, maybe exactly the same feature as that, that keeps us ass backwards into an imaginary wind, the only reason we ascertain some difference between prediction and memory, of "future" and "past."

I had the ODDEST thought come to me out of the blue: the human brain is SO complex that the human mind cannot EVER fully understand it.

I am 52 and still shaking my head over where in hell that thought came from. Very weird for a kid to come up with, especially because I wasn't even thinking about brains at the time. It was one of the oddest experiences of my life, but when I read stuff like this, it almost seems like I tapped into some time-warp with a conduit to Roger Penrose's mind.

Now we return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Many would argue that you observed the thought from what You truly are.....Consciousness.

randomly in my head. It was sort of like wisdom from on high, lol, without the majestic voice.

Like I said, a very odd, remarkable experience, and one which has never repeated itself.

The interview is embarrassing in places and makes me wish Feynman were still around to set Penrose straight, as he often did. Penrose is off base and sounds foolish, and this is coming from someone who has a lot of problems with string theory and much of the current thinking in cosmology.

It's more of a mathematical / theoretical physics toy that gets more coverage than it deserves.

to suggest - with no experimental evidence to support it - that he should replace a normal integral with a discrete sum to make the "UV catastrophe" go away in the Rayleigh-Jeans law.

What was that guy's name?

I forget...

...oh yeah, Max Planck.

Planck, by the way, regarded his own work as a "mathematical trick" at first, and thought it merely amusing.

It involved an assumption for which there was no experimental evidence. None. Zip. Zero.

In fact, the same applied, more or less, to both special and general relativity until 1919.

In fact, the Nobel Prize award to Einstein didn't involve them much. His award for mainly for the photoelectric effect, which, ironically was the first indication that Planck's theory was something other than a mathematical trick.

It might be time to look into the history of science...

Likewise, Einstein built upon empirical evidence. Granted, Relativity was not proven until years later (the famous solar eclipse experiment), yet therein lies the crutch. It was disprovable. When a theory cannot be held up to the tests of scientific inquiry, like String Theory, it is relegated to toy status in my mind. You can delude yourself that the Rayleigh–Jeans derivation is a toy, but it actually had empirical evidence to back it.

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. - Albert Einstein

even though I am a critic, I can recognize the possibility that M-theory or string theory may be a correct description of the universe (multiverse). Is it good science? I'm not sure, but I wouldn't put my own intellect up against the likes of Edward Witten. He's certainly no crackpot.

I was always more of a loop quantum gravity girl, even as an undergrad, but maybe we will end up with something very different than any current models with a surprising result from LHC or even one of the recent shockers out of CERN. Many of the theoretical physicists I worked with ended up moving into experimental physics because that's where the real action has been. I see frustration from the older guys like Penrose, who may be realizing that unification probably won't happen in their lifetime and want some kind of radical shift. String theory has become an easy target of late. I'm aware of the issues, being a longtime supporter of Peter Woit and banned from all communication with Lubos Motl, but I don't think it can simply be discarded.

If String Theory wants to achieve that, then it must have falsifiability. Most versions don't (or at least not without moving the goalposts so far away as to render them useless). Some String Theorists have claimed LHC could verify their beliefs.

The Standard Model, however, I believe, is not going anywhere any time soon, and I do believe some variant of LQG will come around and unify the fields once and for all, eventually.

I liked the math cheat sheet noted previously here by BlooInBloo, most especially the J. von Neumann quote:

... in mathematics you don't understand things, you just get used to them.

It applies to pretty much to everything, physics included. That's the way humans are. Science and math are new to us, our brains are not wired that way. We get used to things, we impose patterns upon our thinking. These patterns may or may not reflect some more general pattern of the universe.

Anyone can speculate, and it can be very entertaining, but at the end of the day you've got to make the math match the evidence before you can call it science.

That's precisely where string theory excels, but I would still hesitate to call it good science because it fails at the more essential scientific task of making quantitative experimental predictions.

The numbers will work but we won't be able to do anything more with them.

:(

I thought all the variations on string theory shared the defect that none of them give universes that look like ours. There's reasonable cause for optimism that, if you pick the right geometry, you wind up with strings that wiggle in just the right ways to give us the Standard Model in the appropriate limits, but as far as I know nobody has worked through the details of any particular incarnation of string theory and come close.

I wish somebody had told me that when I was outraged at infinity being chucked around like a rotten pork pie. All right, like pi! Which had already come very close to breaching my threshold of tolerance, anyway. Well, there is the thang about the recurring digit, isn't there?

It's all madness, I tell you, all madness! Now Sarah had six apples in her basket, and Johnny had four, how many.... Now that's the kind of stuff that makes sense.

... the secrets she was hiding belonged to the number five.

Five? That very common number, as in five fingers, five toes. One, two, three, four, five?

So many, so long, sifting through pi, looking for a message, all for nothing...

http://pi.nersc.gov

to the power of pi, and he just looked at me vacantly, so I always try not to be too judgmental .....

Ah, Ferguson's PSLQ algorithm. All the old familiar names flooding back.