OT: An Existential Dilemma

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by Stormbinder:
I may be wrong here, but I think based upon what I've read, that at this moment the "string theory", as scintists understand it, is not really a single all-incorporating and explaining neat theory which is more or less universally accepted, but rather a collection of related theories based upon variations of "hyper string" concept, some of them being more admited by the scintific world than others.

Hmmm inst that true of any theory? Generally scientists have no problem with the word theory. Its only the people outside the Sci world that want to declare things too soon as "fact". Even things that have the word theory in their name.

[Tris]

Ultra strictly you can never proove a theory. Each time observations agree with the theories predictions you are more certain it is correct. As soon as one reliable observation disagrees, you know that it isn't.

[Gateway103]

Originally posted by Tris:
Hmmm...black holes radiate thermally? I hadn't heard that before. Given that black holes don't let even EM waves out from behind the event horizon, how do they do that?

I myself don't Subscribe to the Hidden Variable Theory, but I think it is a theory. The variables just have to be currently unobservable, it's perfectly possible that we will observe them in the future, with more advanced techniques.

Schroedinger's cat would make the perfect pet. Discuss :-D

My apology, I was writing the post ~2AM, wasn't thinking straight. Black holes don't thermal radiate like your conventional matter actually.

I was thinking of Hawking Radiation instead, which is the virtual particle emission mentioned above. The reason I mentioned thermal emission is that historically, it was the nagging concern that if black holes do not radiate, it would be an entropy destroyer of the cosmos, something thermodynamics do not allow. So people think black hole must radiate somehow, and then Hawking Radiation was proposed to solve this.

My apology for the misleading information. I'll edit my previous post appropriately.

And Schroedinger's Cat may or may not be the perfect pet. It depends on what the first observation reveals

-Gateway103