Saiyajin mentioned reading Brian Greene's The elegant universe in the bookworm thread. It's a book describing the history of the search for the ultimate theory of everything of physics. I haven't read the book yet myself. I do know however, that Brian Greene has hosted an amazing 3 hour documentary on PBS.

And you can can watch it all online

Don't say 'physics is boring, ...'. This is some mindblowing **** right here, even and especially for the non-initiated. It really is an excellent documentary, cutting edge, cool graphics... I felt my mind buzzing afterwards.

So if you want to be up to date with relativity, electromagnetism, weak and strong force, supersymmetry, branes, m-theory etc... in short amazing physics, take a look at the program.

Peace

string theory is stupid and unprovable

I watched this show. I found it to be very flashy, in a good way, but they used too many cold, blue colours which seemed a little out of place. Also, the stuff they were saying seemed a little dumbed down and they kept going around in circles. It was ultimately unfulfilling because it did not leave me excited about the new developments in physics. I would recommend it for anyone who doesn't know anything about this stuff, though. It is an okay introduction.

Oh yeah, the way they were explaining the extra dimension was very, very weak and made them seem quite stupid.

It may not be the big theory of everything that the string theorists are really hoping it is, but it's certainly an incredible theory that has made a number of profound impacts on modern physics.. Even if it's never proven (or even if it's proven wrong), it's certainly produced some stirring insights.

As for the documentary, I've only seen a third of it, but it was indeed a well made program. Hopefully I'll have time in a few weeks to watch it all..

Educated cubeless stupid, you think stupid.
Why worship a dumb 1 day god when I
demonstrate 4 simultaneous 24 hour days
within a single 24 hour rotation of Earth?
Linear, singularity and trinity equate to
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation

I think every physicist would slap you for calling it 'stupid'. It really isn't. You're moving along the right lines though when you call it 'unprovable'.
String theory is entirely mathematical, the 10 dimensions are a necessity for integrating the formulae. String theory isn't a set of predictions, like other theories are, it's more a set of calculations and the predictions come out from that. Any documentary that even attempts to address string theory will not do it justice, as it'll rely on colourful swirly shapes and go on about all the CRAZY things that come out from string theory, without actually addressing the fundemental mathematics of it. For any other theory, you can pretty much ignore the mathematics and it'll still make for a fairly useful documentary, to a limited degree, but string theory is entirely mathematical. You probably won't study string theory in a physics course, but you might do in a mathematics or computing course. If you want to learn about string theory, you need to read a recent journal, because a documentary won't teach you anything useful about string theory.

A few years ago, string theory was more or less unfalsifiable, it offered no real predictions, nothing that could actually be 'tested'. It was interesting, but was basically meta-physics.
It's come a long way, and it has something that at least appears to be predictions. The Higgs boson is one thing string theory is adamant about, and the new particle accelerator at CERN should be able to cover this.

String theory, and M-Theory which is derived from it, are currently our best attempts at a grand unified 'theory of everything'. Both of them are very new, and still being tinkered with, so it's much too early to throw them out as being 'stupid', and there's probably been some developments that I haven't read up on yet.

yeah my physic teacher toldm e about that at the beginnin of the year.. i watch chapters here and there when i have time.. im done the first two parts i still have to watch the third...its extremely well done and very interesting

Thanks for that link Tenshu! I saw this when it aired on PBS, and found it amazingly interesting. I think I will find it even more now that I am actually starting to study physics in science class.

So's religion.

that's a pretty grim assessment.

The only grim part is the amount of truth in it.

That was seriously stupid tofu, no matter if I agree with you or not. I expect better from someone like you.

Do not let Mort-Hog's graphical prediction come true, guys.

Yes, it's a shame my comment has to ruin a thread about a really cool Nova show. I was just pointing out a fact.

Edit: I would just like to say I'm not saying religion is stupid, I was commenting on the fact it's unprovable.

Mort-Hog, I applaud thee for demonstrating originality.

This is very awesome. It is also very true. Funny though, that the position of tofu's post on the graph is still where it is a quality post, and your post, as the next post, follows within the downward spiral.

Hey, if you integrate this, would you not get the total amount of quality within this thread? Also, could you not apply this to ANY thread? My theory is, a long enough thread, no matter how low in quality, would end up having the greatest total amount of quality (given the quality is never negative, which, debatably, is an impossible value of quality).

Given this, Name That Game: Zero Hour and Wannabe Cam Hoes Apply Within are either or potentially can be the highest quality threads on Massassi.

Dr. Tonberry: I'm curious to see what forumulae you have found to support your theories. Would you like to be a guest speaker at our university?

Well, the 'prediction' was that tofu's post was going to cause this thread to implode into a chaotic mess of confused and fuzzy 'religion vs science' rambles. His post itself wasn't of low quality, but the effects of it would have caused the quality to shoot right down.


I would also like to point out that these programmes are quite out of date, and alongside M-theory, there is T Duality, S Duality and D Branes which have been worked on recently, and offer some new ideas on the future of the Universe.