string theory--the theory of everything

[Jeff V]

I've been doing some reading on string theory, and came across this show that was on Nova. I think the program was well done, and made it easy to get a beginning grasp of the theory. It's a 3 hr show divided into 3 parts w/ 8 chapters each. You can watch it on your computer here. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/ Jeff
Quantum mechanics, and 11 dimensions. Whoa.

[Gamblor]

[daryn]

chaos the leading candidate for TOE? i don't think so, pretty sure it's string. do you have any evidence?

[Gamblor]

Chaos, as we all know, is the study of systems and how they interact and "intra-act" with each other.

Instead of breaking pieces down, it examines the system as a whole complex organism in and of itself.

Have read Gleick's "Chaos: Making a new Science", and "Complexity", by Mitchell Waldrop

As well as Jurassic Park /images/graemlins/grin.gif

Basically says complexity theory will describe the universe not as a sum of elementary particles but rather as a sum of systems of elementary particles, but I think I'm underestimating your knowledge of the science.

[daryn]

i am very familiar with chaos, but i wouldn't call it a theory of everything, that's all.

i'm watching the movies.. i love this stuff. i guess i could just go to class for it though /images/graemlins/grin.gif

[Gamblor]

LOL I'd like to see those movies.

The fractals appearing on the screen would be incredible with a little... "stimulation of the senses"... or is that "inhalation for the senses"?

Regardless, the point of chaos is that a Grand Unified Theory is no longer needed, as the world does not consist of independent entities, but rather systems of entities and thus one can only examine the world through a "system of systems" approach.

Thus, knowledge of elementary particles is relatively useless, according to complexity theorists.

[daryn]

what are you talking about exactly in your first couple sentences? i am just missing it i guess..

secondly, i disagree with you. the fact that chaos theory exists doesn't mean that a GUT is no longer needed.. not at all actually.

what i think you're trying to say is basically, due to chaos theory, we can never really know anything, so why bother? this is false. if that's not what you're trying to say, ok then.

[Gamblor]

The fractals appearing on the screen would be incredible with a little... "stimulation of the senses"... or is that "inhalation for the senses"?

You mentioned a Chaos movie (which I now realize was in reference to Jurassic Park). One of the fundamental principles of chaos is that the part retains many characteristics of the whole. This is graphically described through fractal images, Google images of fractals and you'll see why being really high makes the idea of fractals on a movie screen exciting.

Another fundament principle of chaos is called the butterfly effect: also known as "sensitivity to initial conditions" - the end result is highly dependent on the initial conditions. Basically, a butterfly flaps its wings in Peking, and small air turbulence pockets grow and grow until the weather in NYC is rain, instead of sun.

Implications of this: no matter how exact we can measure any elementary particle, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle suggests we can not measure it infinitely exact - i.e. we will have to round off a decimal place here or there (given that it is moving in some direction).

Thus, as close as we can measure photons and electrons, and quarks and all that fantastic stuff, the real world is made of of combinations of all that, so we can explain how things happen, which is the first requirement of a scientific model.

But we can never predict exactly all behaviour of systems, as those small rounding errors will eventually accumulate and the system will deviate greatly from the prediction. Prediction is the second requirement for a model.

Yet Chaos suggests that there is a pattern to the seeming random behaviour of complex systems - from population patterns, to clouds, to the stock market, to hockey standings.

This is the same reason we can't predict weather more than a week in advance, but Chaos suggests that the randomness of the weather is an organized randomness.

[daryn]

i guess this is kinda funny.. i was talking about the movies from the original post in this thread. i did not reference jurassic park.

quantum mechanics does quite a good job in predicting probabilistic outcomes, i'm not sure it needs any help. the problem comes in unifying the physics of the small with the physics of the large.