The Accidental Astrophysicists 97
An anonymous reader recommends a ScienceNews story that begins: "Dmitry Khavinson and Genevra Neumann didn't know anything about astrophysics. They were just doing mathematics, like they always do, following their curiosity. But five days after they posted one of their results on a preprint server, they got an email that said 'Congratulations! You've proven Sun Hong Rhie's astrophysics conjecture on gravitational lensing!'... Turns out that when gravity causes light rays to bend, it can make one star look like many. But until Khavinson and Nuemann's work, astrophysicists weren't sure just how many. Their proof in mathematics settled the question."
Re:Suprise! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps I am missing something... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Suprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Suprise! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Suprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Further proof ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Further proof ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I really want to agree with you, but people keep finding ways that obscure, useless little pieces of purely abstract math suddenly explain something interesting about the real world. Sometimes it takes a century or two, sure. But, if you told the first people to work on imaginary numbers how useful their math would be for expressing many engineering things, and how it would be a major tool for engineering students learning to build very real things, well they'd just call you a moron. Likewise, boolean algebra, or any number of other mathematical concepts that make our current world possible and relatively comprehensible.
Re:Suprise! (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean Einstein & Born get all the credit but most of the time great physicists are just applying the maths of great mathematicians 50+ years before them
Re:Suprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
What String Theorists have been doing is building descriptive models of actual theories. It's a valuable exercise, but they shouldn't feel that String Theory is going to provide anything other than another modeling and analysis tool. Specifically, because String Theory is so expressive, it is impossible to make a falsifiable assertion in pure String Theory. You always need an outside theory, and it's the outside theory that provides the falsifiable assertion.
String Theory can describe just about any system, so it's impossible to prove right, and more importantly for this discussion, impossible to prove wrong. Which means that it is not science. Knowledge of this reality is gradually percolating through the physics establishment. Give it time.
Re:Further proof ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some might, but I wouldn't.
Mathematics has its own ontology - namely the axioms that it is based upon.
It has no need for a separate epistemology - it is what it is, and that's that.
Propositional calculus, on which Russell, Frege and Wittgenstein based their mathematical philosophy (which I see as applicable to all rational thought) is itself the root of mathematics - thus mathematics (or logic, however you wish to phrase it) is fundamental to philosophy, rather than philosophy being fundamental to mathematics.
You can't have an ontology without maths - epistemologies are more equal, but essentialy the whole of philosophy is based on the propositional calculus, which is only one of many possible formulations of mathematics.
Re:Suprise! (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a problem. (Score:1, Insightful)
But many of its professional adherents (ie, actual, paid-to-be-Cosmologists Cosmologists) would feel a tad miffed. They often get quite grumpy when the "conjecture" word is waved in front of them. And yet some of them are perfectly okay with it all, because they know as well as anybody that String Conjecture is just a bunch of really fascinating What Iffing.
The big problem is going to be the immense Holy war triggered when the amateur Cosmologists - the lay-astrophysicists-cum-security guards or bookstore clerks who read Omni and New Scientist - hear that their fad-du-jour has been relegated to the scientific cheap seats where it belongs.
Between them and the offended professional Cosmologists, astronomy forums throughout 73h 1n7a4rw3bz will become unbearable.
Well, more unbearable.
There's no Theory in String Conjecture, just as there's no room in Science for faith.
Damn! That last remark just blew away my hopes for a (Score:+5, Insightful). Me and my big mouth...
Re:Suprise! (Score:3, Insightful)
1) It's already had about 40 years, and
2) It's very fundamental basis is problematic when considering it for force unification. You see, it's based on particle physics which is frame dependant, where as GR is frame independent. There are other *far* more likely theories, e.g. quantum loop gravity, that are frame independent as well.
So, even if there is even just a hint of reality to string "theory", it'll prove *very* problematic in the long run for other very *very* necessary things. You know, like consistency.