Well, I think the "string wars" are settling down (at least on the blogosphere). I was getting a bit tired of it. Sean over at CosmicVariance is giving advice on what to take in college and which college you might want to attend. I don't really agree with most of it, but I've forgotten the particular points...let's see if I can remember any of them. Well, for starters I think lab is important. Not that I liked it, nor that I didn't try my darndest to get out of it. But I certainly learned important stuff (if nothing else, that I shouldn't try to make a career in the lab). I'm probably stretching the analogy, but you don't coach football having never played...you may not have to be a good player, but it seems you should have played it. And core curricula? Ugghh, I was on our core curriculum committee once. Biggest waste of time ever. Sure there are lots of immature students out there for whom it makes sense to dictate what they take. But for the likely intended audience of his blog, who wants to have these selections crammed down their throats. Foreign language? Certainly if you're gonna say no required physics lab, you don't want to force this...some people suck at foreign languages and hate it.
Anyone watching Lost? Lot's of hokey, physicsy (kind of like "truthiness") stuff? Have some time to waste? Check out what people way too into it have to say.
Even more time to waste? Check out your tax dollars in action on this Mach 10 scramjet.
1 comment:
Science is an empirical endeavor. No labs, no science. String theory is self-consistent mathematics, as were Newton and Euclid. Newton's infinite lightpeed (instantaneous knowledge of a system) and Euclid's Fifth Postulate failed. New terms appeared when approximations were made exact.
Isotropic vacuum and the Equivalence Principle are postulated. 420+ years of experiments allow a chiral pseudoscalar vacuum background only acting upon opposite parity mass distributions with ~10^(-12) relative amplitude. A parity Eotvos experiment loading enantiomorphic crystallographic space groups quartz is one test. A parity calorimetry experiment comparing enthalpies of fusion of benzil under Eotvos rules is another.
String theory is experimentally vulnerable. Stop the whining! Somebody should look.
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