Biographies, history, personal accounts

[sbrothy]

Occasionally I can understand the dislike STEM educated people harbors towards philosophy. Especially if it touches on the subject matter they themselves are educated in, and the "so-called" philosopher hasn't taken the time and effort to understand the grisly details of the aforementioned matter. It's a little like if I wrote a long treatise on the interpretation of QM (and likely had it accepted only on viXra :) ).

Sometimes though, someone burns through and you can see they actually did their homework. Even if I can't follow the mathematics all the way I appreciate these papers more. It's somewhat like appreciating a fine piece of art even if, according to creators and reviewers, I don't have the necessary qualifications for doing so.

Another, more loose, analogy is that sometimes a piece of music will mean more to me if I hear it in a lossless format like WAV/FLAC as opposed to a 256 kbit/s mp3. Or even if I hear my little sister singing Händel's Messiah as opposed to hearing it somewhere randomly. I can then find the exact version that *really* talks to me from all the versions out there.

This one is almost there but I suspect it's a few steps short:

Is time one-dimensional?

It's a tough (and possible unfair) question to put to you, but is my suspicion right?

 

[sbrothy]

It all suddenly came back to me. Regarding that torsion thing that was connected to Einstein-Cartan theory (wiki link intentionally left out, I'm getting the hang of it! :) )

Here's a relatively easy read which fits nicely in the Sci-Fi corner of the site and touches upon Einstein and torsion:

Lectures on Faster-than-Light Travel and Time Travel

That was were Smolin's "fecund universe" / "Cosmological Natural Selection" idea came from. That every black hole leads to another universe with (potentionally?) different constants.

Old papers (On cosmic natural selection., The status of cosmological natural selection), and if I remember correctly it never really flew, although I think the idea was poetically beautiful.

But again with the intuition and beauty not being good guidelines. Why would the universe want to be beautiful? Nature certainly isn't. (After having seen a nature program and read about the Fig Wasp I'm never eating a fig again!)

And regarding Woit he's running with Penrose's Twistor theory I think. More info at his blog. Probably buried beneath a deep disregard for string theory. :)