Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

question and questions

ah there is somethink abot the Spring Theory

from Albert Einstein

only for Info, the Spring Theory are so heavy, that only a handfull People will understand this :)

Greetings from Germany NRW
Ulli S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club m7 ©

Myself, I don't 'believe' string theory.

just because people came up with an equation to describe something, doesn't necessarily prove that that's the mechanics of how something works.
I could come up with the "The speed of light slowed down a bit over 20 billion years, resulting in large red shifts in far away galaxies" theory, but I haven't come up with any data to prove it.

Same goes with string theory. If you don't have any new data, then it's just a cute theory. Until they come up with predictions about how they may have missed a subatomic particle which they have yet to discover, or if they can prove their theory by converting electricity to a gravity wave, then 'believing' in string theory will just be a philosophical exercise.

Your right. I believe Neptune was discovered on paper before an actual observation was made as one example. I think the theory of relativity has only recently shown direct evidence to support it. The program Elegant Universe on PBS was quite interesting in its dealings with srting theory. But you are right about not being able to test it. Yet.

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Multiple dimensions of time.

I was about five or six when I first saw Back to the Future, and it was that film what sparked the idea. I remember a scene in the sequel in which Christopher Llyod (Dr. Emmett Brown) draws the divergences of the visited timelines on a blackboard (actually, it was a green blackboard). After that point, it was as if the concept was solidified.

It seemed to make sense: the 4th dimension was a point in time, much as the 0th dimension is a point in space. Two points are known in absolute terms: The Big Bang (Time 0) and the present. As the present advances into the future, the temporal distance between now and time 0 increases - much like drawing a ray in which one point is stationary while the other moves further and further away. That defined the time-line (5th dimension), and the line/ray was composed of all the past "now"s, much as a line is an infinite sequence of points.

But because the intersection of lines are possible, there had to be time-plane (6th dimension) much as there is a planar dimension (2nd). It soon followed that a time-volume (7th) also had to exist because volume (3rd) existed spatially.

Unfortunately, the concept of hyperspace got in the way. To this day, I still think that I'm right on the 4th and 5th dimensions being temporal ones, but I've gone off of the idea of temporal planes and volumes.

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I believe that we, as a sentient self-aware species, are completely alone in the universe and unique. Not only can I not prove this, but it is "by definition" as a negative statement - an unproveable assertion.

All anyone can ever do is assert an increasing probablility of this belief. However, A good case can be made on the basis of:

The Fermi Pardox/Principle : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Peter Ward's book "Rare Earth": http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387952896/102-0943411-6835302

The absence of evidence, after 40 years of diligently searching with SETI.

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- Skeptic - "... and there is no intelligent life in Washington D.C. either."

This isn't really a belief for me so much as an (incorrect) picture. I often imagine being able to look at time as a spatial dimension like the "visible three". Along this axis, all matter and energy would appear as long threads impossibly interwoven, stemming all the way back to the beginning of time. This picture puts me in mind of ancient mythology about fate weaving a tapestry of life, only in my visualization it isn't just life and no thread is ever cut (conservation of matter/energy).

This picture is why certain tenets of string theory are so appealing to my imagination.

I know this visualization is an impossible one because of, if nothing else, quantum uncertainty (all threads would have a definite course), and I'm way off-base. Still, in my mind's eye the flow is visually appealing.

The answer is easy: Extraterrestial live! What do you think we are doing with the SETI project?

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<a href="http://boinc.blogspot.com">Boinc y Astronomia</a>
<br>
<img src="http://150.214.190.154/BOINCStatistics/Signature/XnXnX/jgh/x.png" />

You brought up something: Matter and energy.

If matter can't be created or destryoed, and energy can't be created or destryoed, but the two can be exchanged, then isn't there a finite amount of matter and energy?

And if that's so, wouldn't it follow that the universe, too, is finite?

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I think most physicists would agree that the amount of matter/energy in the universe is indeed finite. But most would regard space itself as infinite.

Lol - I'm sure there's a proof in there somewhere that actually nothing exists then - a finite number divided by an infinite one is zero - I'm sure Douglas Adams had much to say on the subject ;)

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<img border="0" src="http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats.php?userID=268&amp;prj=1&amp;trans=off" /><img border="0" src="http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats.php?userID=268&amp;prj=4&amp;trans=off" />

I think there is a school of thought suggesting that virtual particles and their antiparticle counterparts are constantly and everywhere coming into existence for the briefest instants, then colliding in mutual annihilation, thus avoiding violation of the Law of Conservation of Energy. But that, here and there, a virtual pair gets separated, escaping annihilation.
And didn't Stephen Hawking recently publish a similar idea, solving the problem of black holes apparently violating Conservation of Energy by, as was previously thought by Dr. Hawking, destroying everything that crossed the event horizon?

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> I think there is a school of thought suggesting that virtual particles and
> their antiparticle counterparts are constantly and everywhere coming into
> existence for the briefest instants, then colliding in mutual annihilation,
> thus avoiding violation of the Law of Conservation of Energy. But that, here
> and there, a virtual pair gets separated, escaping annihilation.
> And didn't Stephen Hawking recently publish a similar idea, solving the
> problem of black holes apparently violating Conservation of Energy by, as was
> previously thought by Dr. Hawking, destroying everything that crossed the
> event horizon?

Am i wrong in thinking that a large part of the LHC project, the CERN super collider, is designed to prove this very theory? Ultimately learning much about the makeup of the universe.

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Kolch - Crunching for the BOINC@Australia team since July 2004.
Search for your own intelligence...

Possibly... I know that the gravitron is supposed to be on CERN's to-do list.

Still, I do think that there is something fundamentally wrong about the universe... just ask the mice!

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> Am i wrong in thinking that a large part of the LHC project, the CERN super
> collider, is designed to prove this very theory? Ultimately learning much
> about the makeup of the universe.
>

I think string theory predicts very massive particles that, so far, have not been observed in collider experiments. (Although I suspect Jimi Hendrix saw them all the time.) Hopefully, the next generation of colliders will create a Big Enough Bang to bring them briefly into existence. And wouldn't it be a trip if the supercollider experiment went whoosh, bang! and out popped Jimi?

I think I need more sleep.

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LOL! Just pass me the bong instead of hogging it, and all will be better... :-D

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> LOL! Just pass me the bong instead of hogging it, and all will be
> better... :-D
>

fwutt fwutt fwutt snarkk snarkk...here.

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I don't believe in "singularities" as the engines of black holes. I think that's kinda bullshit. When a start explodes/implodes you can come up with a neutron star. Damn heavy and compressed. What if it was compressed even further down the atomic scale per se, to an object even smaller and denser? Something the size of the Sun compressed to the size of the basketball? Why not? Theorists of singularities say things can be compressed even further. Well, that thing would have enough gravity to not let light escape etc, hence becoming a black hole. It would also explain how blackholes can become 'larger' and 'heavier'. The object has size and mass. Not this infinite point of density crap. As the object sucked more and more stuff to it, slamming it into itself and becoming just as compressed it would gain more mass/weight, thus becoming more powerfull.

If a black hole destroys matter, it can hardly become friggin bigger, can it?

Just my 2 cents worth.

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<img src="http://www.setisynergy.com/images/stats/comb-556.jpg">

[puff] [puff] Ohhh.... yea.... mmm... fooood...

The refrigerator light. I believe that when the door's closed - It turns into a strobe light for the veggies' disco... [puff]

Look at that cheese! It's sooo.... greeeen...

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I beleive it is time NeoAmsterdam passed the bong on, tho i cannot prove it...

I also believe that there is some sort of black hole in some corner of my wallet...eats all my money when i least expect it.

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Kolch - Crunching for the BOINC@Australia team since July 2004.
Search for your own intelligence...

I see dead people
And I know when th phone's going to ring

> I don't believe in "singularities" as the engines of black holes. I think
(snip)

I can't remember what it was, but I read something that indicates you're not alone believing that a singularity per se cannot actually exist. I can't for the life of me remember where I read that or what the reasoning behind it was, but it sounded like a rational argument to me, admittedly a layman.

Speaking of singularities, someone once pointed out to me that if kinetic energy essentially adds mass to an object, and to accelerate an object with mass to lightspeed requires infinite energy, then there's a point where the mass of any object would exceed the limits at which the object must collapse to a "neutron star" and eventually, if the acceleration continues, a singularity.

[EDIT: I have no idea how this would reconcile that, from its own point of reference, the object has gained no mass]

Combine this with the easier to prove idea that radiation striking the front of an object accelerating towards lightspeed will be blue-shifted eventually to the point where even the microwave background radiation will strike the object with the energy of an X-ray or gamma ray. Accelerating humans to even a significant fraction of lightspeed for an interstellar journey becomes a depressingly improbable event.