Common Criticisms part 1

A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj_Zgdr9R_8

Henry of the popular youtube channel minutephysics has recently been making comments trying to get people to stop watching my channel, and since then we've seen hundreds of negative comments suddenly being posted by his followers on my videos. Since there are a great many other YouTube channels devoted to discussion of the ways that physics and philosophy, science and spirituality might have interesting connections, it leads me to ask one simple question: why?

This is the start of a series where we will look at ten reasons that have been posted recently by Henry and his followers on my YouTube Channel:

Reason #1: Because it's wrong.
Since I've always said this is "a new way of thinking about time and space", and that "this is not the explanation for string theory", this is the easiest claim for minutephysics to make. He doesn't agree with this new way of thinking, and as the self-declared spokesman for the world of physics he feels justified in saying my ideas are not worth discussing. But what does it mean to say something put forth not as a scientific theory, but as a creative way to visualize the ten spatial or space-like dimensions theorists have told us our reality is derived from, is "wrong"? If I show you an image of a bowling ball on a rubber sheet and say "this is a way of thinking about gravity", would your response be there are no bowling balls and rubber sheets in space, so that visualization is worthless? Sometimes a picture conveys an idea quite well without requiring people to understand the calculations that make the idea correct. And if I draw you some pictures that give you a way of visualizing ten spatial dimensions, each one orthogonal to the next, then I've introduced you to an idea you might want to learn more about. Isn't that a good thing?

Next: Reason #2: Because it's dangerous.

The World Ends in Two Weeks

The world ends in two weeks - in some part of Everett's Many Worlds multiverse. But will it be the part that you and I are observing? That's what my song The End of the World is all about. Enjoy!



A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY

Poll 94 - Shadows and Symmetry

Poll 94 - "Rob Bryanton says 'the brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Our universe arises from a breaking of an underlying symmetry." Do you agree with him?"  Poll ended June 25 2012.  81.3% agreed, and 18.7% did not.

Well, well, it would be interesting to run this poll again now and see if people are changing their opinion on this one yet. Here's a link to a Scientific American article published a few days ago, with the title Supersymmetry Fails Test, Forcing Physics to Seek New Ideas. It discusses the latest revelations from the Large Hadron Collider, which appear to rule out an idea which was has dominated science for decades, because particles predicted by Supersymmetry are simply not appearing at energy levels predicted by "SUSY" (as Supersymmetry is affectionately known).

Here are a few paragraphs from the article:

Supersymmetry has dominated the particle physics landscape for decades, to the exclusion of all but a few alternative theories of physics beyond the Standard Model.

“It's hard to overstate just how much particle physicists of the past 20 to 30 years have invested in SUSY as a hypothesis, so the failure of the idea is going to have major implications for the field,” said Peter Woit, a particle theorist and mathematician at Columbia University.

The theory is alluring for three primary reasons: It predicts the existence of particles that could constitute "dark matter", an invisible substance that permeates the outskirts of galaxies. It unifies three of the fundamental forces at high energies. And — by far the biggest motivation for studying supersymmetry — it solves a conundrum in physics known as the hierarchy problem.

Please follow the link to read the whole article, which was written by Natalie Wolchover and Simons Science News.

Where does this leave my poll question? The fact remains that science believes equal quantities of matter and antimatter should have been created at the beginning of the universe, and supersymmetry was just one possible explanation for the actual imbalance that we observe. Does this strengthen the argument for extra dimensions? Is, as I've suggested with this project, the underlying symmetry state not a function of space-time, but rather a function of an underlying ultimate ensemble which is very much "outside" of space-time? That is what I continue to propose.

So. Even with Supersymmetry now falling off the table for likely theories of reality (and make no mistake about it, this is big news!), the symmetry state that I'm describing doesn't require supersymmetry, but it does require extra dimensions. As science marches on to deeper and deeper understanding of the world around us,  those extra dimensions appear more inviting than ever as the real explanation for the mysteries that remain.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton