I found the interview with Susskind more enjoyable for its historical perspective than for its string content.

The responses were much more informative on the current plight of strings. I had seen discussions of this sort on the Physics Forum. But it seemed that LQG would save the day. But now it seems that Witten has proven (perhaps too strong a word) that quantum gravity can derive strings.

Now perhaps a unique string solution will result. But from the responses to Susskind's interview, that seems unlikely. And so we are left with only the anthropic principle to justify research on strings and not much hope for real physics.

Do you think that is the case, or am I being too pessimistic? Are you aware of Bojowald's work using LQG to derive the big bang, and also Smolin's work to derive quantum mechanics? I'll post the links below.

By the way, I have followed your posts on WEDconsciousness. Turns out I never responded to any, but then you never responded to any of mine. It does seem that you are interested in the aware asoects of consciousness though from those posts. Tarvo who is posting onb consciousness on the G&S forum, seems to not be interested in the awareness, but only in his computer program which he thinks is the mechanism of consciousness other than awareness.

Richard


Perturbative Gauge Theory As A String Theory In Twistor Space
Authors: Edward Witten
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0312171

Quantum Theory from Quantum Gravity
Authors: Fotini Markopoulou, Lee Smolin
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0311059

Quantum Gravity and the Big Bang
Authors: Martin Bojowald
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0309478

• Not much to say - wandaqueen - December 24, 2003 - 13:10 UTC