String Theory

Sapien

democrates wrote:

Bear in mind I'm not asserting there is a God, I have no proof, I'm not pretending it's logical, just that in my experience it feels good so why not.

Ah. The old fridge-sized-diamond-buried-in-my-back-yard approach. That's not the done thing these days.

Zillah

Really?!

/goes digging

Theres no diamond here, just endless heaps of dirt.

Zombrex

democrates wrote:

Does the phrase 'written down' mean widely accepted, or simply that the theory is not backed by adequate mathematics?

No written down means written down.

No one has yet worked out what the m-theory actually is. It is a theoretical ..erm .. theory, the relationship between a number of different models of string theory.

Son Goku

Never written down?
From Google:
Results 1 - 20 of about 1,340,000 English pages for m-theory.

I'm assuming I'm picking up your figure of speech wrong (given I thought of Ghostbusters when I saw Ekpyrotic), is it that M-theory is the pop-science description whereas ekpyrotic is the academic one?

Wicknight has pretty much given an explanation of what I meant.

M-Theory is a mathematical construct which is conjecture to exist.
It is the name for the, as yet, undiscovered foundational theory of which each String Theory is only a special case.

Several areas of mathematics are not advanced to the point where the theory can be put together.

Although this is no surprise as even each of the five String Theories cannot be fully written down.

democrates

Son Goku wrote:

Wicknight has pretty much given an explanation of what I meant.

M-Theory is a mathematical construct which is conjecture to exist.
It is the name for the, as yet, undiscovered foundational theory of which each String Theory is only a special case.

Several areas of mathematics are not advanced to the point where the theory can be put together.

Although this is no surprise as even each of the five String Theories cannot be fully written down.

I can't imagine how complex the maths must be, but the effort to prove theory gave us calculus in the past and might yet bring some nice new simple equation to boost t-shirt sales.

The way I understand it five string theory camps using 10D had been in opposition to the 11D supergravity cosmologists, but now a lot are racing toward 11D maths to support M-theory in the hope this explains all known phenomena. That's gotta take time, but I like the story of the three guys on a train free-associating and coming up with m-theory, I guess they were brane-storming.