Natural Science Forum / Physics / General Physics / March 2008

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A05EED81E3EF932A35752C0A9629C8B63
Brian Greene: "A hundred years ago today, the discovery of special
relativity was still 18 months away, and science still embraced the
Newtonian description of time. Now, however, modern physics' notion of
time is clearly at odds with the one most of us have internalized.
Einstein greeted the failure of science to confirm the familiar
experience of time with ''painful but inevitable resignation.'' The
developments since his era have only widened the disparity between
common experience and scientific knowledge. Most physicists cope with
this disparity by compartmentalizing: there's time as understood
scientifically, and then there's time as experienced intuitively. For
decades, I've struggled to bring my experience closer to my
understanding. In my everyday routines, I delight in what I know is
the individual's power, however imperceptible, to affect time's
passage. In my mind's eye, I often conjure a kaleidoscopic image of
time in which, with every step, I further fracture Newton's pristine
and uniform conception. And in moments of loss I've taken comfort from
the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space
and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a
useful but subjective organization."

http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695265340,00.html
"Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University,
New York City, and author of best-selling books on string theory,
spoke Tuesday at Brigham Young University's Marriott Center. His book,
"The Elegant Universe," was developed into a three-part series
broadcast by PBS. "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the
Texture of Reality," the title of his latest book, also was the name
of the lecture. "Space and time are the most familiar and yet most
enigmatic concepts in science today," Greene said, but they are not
what our senses would lead us to believe. "We are learning that
reality is not what we think it is. The very basis of existence is not
what we think it is," he said......But if string theory is correct,
"it says something really wild," Greene said. It fails when restricted
to our three spacial dimensions -- up and down, left and right, front
and back. "If that's all there is in space," he said, "this thing
doesn't work." Not until 10 spacial dimensions are used in the
calculations do the equations work. But we perceive only three. Where
are the others? They could be curled up within the normal dimensions,
he said."

http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/ George Orwell "1984":
"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and
you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make
that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.
Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of
external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy
of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that
they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be
right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or
that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If
both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if
the mind itself is controllable what then?"

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com