Friday, February 01, 2008

Eleven Dimensions to Hide In

While I somewhat worried when Bob Park says he's going to take a break, I can console myself with this one from the current "What's New":
2. OTHER DIMENSIONS: THE GOVERNMENT'S UFO COVERUP.

I was invited this week to join a panel of "experts" on "It's Your Call with Lynn Doyle," an Emmy Award-winning, viewer-interactive news talk show on the Comcast Cable Television Network. The subject was "Are we alone?" The object was to increase advertising revenue by pandering to a public that lives in a mythical world. I was the token scientist; Ted Schick, a philosophy professor from Muhlenberg, was the other rationalist. Then there was a delusional M.D. who saw lights she couldn't explain over Phoenix, and the delusional head of the Paradigm Research Group, devoted to exposing the imaginary UFO cover-up. But the "experts" hardly mattered; the stars were the callers, with tales of strange lights and space aliens who can walk through walls. Is that really possible? "Of course it is," a caller explained, "quantum physics has proven it." The aliens, another cautioned, may be in another dimension - "there are eleven you know." What have we done?
There's an upside and a downside to, um, interesting ideas.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Eleven? That's nothing. Brian Greene says there may be an infinite number of parallel worlds all around us. In answer to Bob Park's sigh of "what have we done?", the answer is: What you've done, Bob, is fail. Failed to appreciate contemporary theoretical physics, and completely failed to imagine their implications. The public may not be as well versed in the language to accurately state their case, but at least unlike you they stay current in regards to the concepts.

Unknown said...

Why would Park even go on a show like that? I don't understand why scientists keep making themselves available to be used as marketing tools.

Any panel that invites a person who saw lights and can't come up with a more reasonable explanation than "aliens" is obviously not going to help spread useful information.

As for the previous post: a "dimension" is not the same as a "parallel world". You can rest assured that Bob understands much more of what Greene says than you do, and he stays perfectly current with modern concepts.

Anonymous said...

"The public may not be as well versed in the language to accurately state their case" I said, specifically referring to how the general public does not use the proper language.

There is a division between people like Greene who see the implications of modern physics, and people like Park. Either Park is playing it extremely safe, or he simply doesn't see. Either way, why indeed would he appear on a show that requires informed speculation, when he is unwilling to speculate?

Anonymous said...

i love ur calabi spin ^.^

Steven said...

Carl Jung probably would have found any such discussions of "aliens" to be useful, no matter how subjective the account. He would not be doing so to calculate the distribution of neuroses in a population, either...

Anonymous said...

It might be right you know. I've just read the very maths heavy introduction to non-commutative geometry, by Alain Connes, and it seems that as well as the useual four, there is one descrete chiral dimension, with L and R ends, and the L end has 4D and the R end has 2D, if I understnd this interperetation correctly.

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