Re: In Physics Forum - String Theory

Posted by paultrr on September 20, 2003 at 10:22:55:

In Reply to: Re: In Physics Forum - String Theory posted by DickT on September 20, 2003 at 08:01:10:

Meat and desert approach. In one you get the meal in the other you tend to get the desert where alternative explorations can be explored. Like Kip Thorne has mentioned before sometimes those of us in Physics are a bit too conservative in the questions we ask. Interesting insight has often come by some questions that could be termed wild, like the one Carl Sagan asked him if an infinitly advanced race could perfect a method of time travel.

God knows I tend myself to be on the conservative side an normally reject some of the many odd proposed theories I encounter in research. But every once in a while I have encountered some odd proposals that at least have somewhat a grain of salt to them. Then one trys to formulate a question that allows you to restate the idea into something you could exmaine via more conventional paths. I've encountered a couple of times questions like those proposed to Kip Thorne by Carl Sagan that we can speculate on. However, most require a deeper knowledge of quantum gravity than we have at the present which was exactly Thonre's problem also. Once had a simular approached question from an Engineer at NASA on an idea about Spin states with particles that in reality his point was both correct and incorrect from what we know today. So not everyone out there with more speculative ideas is totally wrong.

Homes, the character of fiction, had an interesting approach to research of a different type that sometimes applies to physics, "If one examines all the possibilities or evidence and eliminates everything that is not possible, what's left, no matter how imporbable must in fact be the truth."

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