http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71828-0.html?tw=wn_technology_1
"Moving Beyond String Theory" by Mark Anderson
"If all scientific disciplines maintained such fluffy and forgiving
standards, Woit argues, science would devolve into little more than
medieval disputations about angels and heads of pins."
"If string theory evaporated tomorrow, something called Loop Quantum
Gravity (LQG) would probably be the odds-on favorite to take its place.
LQG, and a related approach called Spin Foam theory, posits that
Einstein's theories of space and time break down at very small scales
(called the Planck scale, one-billion-billionth the size of an atomic
nucleus) and in its place are entities described by another
mathematical tool Penrose invented, called spin networks."
"Here we encounter one of a couple ideas that, if its profile ever
increases, will probably need a catchier title. CDT breaks down tiny
units of volume and area -- the crucial stuff that makes up any
spacetime -- into tiny tetrahedra, a little like a computer graphics
chip renders complex surfaces by decomposing them into many itsy bitsy
squares and triangles."
"Some holdouts maintain that the universe may simply have two sets of
operators' manuals -- the Einsteinian for the massive and cosmic and
the quantum mechanical for the tiny and energetic."
No reasonable reaction is possible. The standard "ha ha ha" would be
too masochistic.
Pentcho Valev
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