Quantum physics is the least confusing part of this thread...

Don't worry Antheus, you're in good company. My wife is still in total denial too, in spite of the fact that she knows full-well that I am capable of sending "spikes of thought" to other peoples' brains just to watch them jump out of their skin.

Don't worry Antheus, you're in good company. My wife is still in total denial too, in spite of the fact that she knows full-well that I am capable of sending "spikes of thought" to other peoples' brains just to watch them jump out of their skin.

haha. I'm willing to put that on trial before someones suspends you for acting boundless.

The proof is in the extensive brain imaging done by Bem.

The proof is in the extensive brain imaging done by Bem.

This guy may have done experiments involving brain imaging, and he obviously is best-known (at least lately) for the ESP thing, but I don't think that particular study actually involved brain imaging, unless I didn't read it closely enough*. It also can hardly have been said to involve [url="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=extrasensory-pornception"]proof[/url], either, but that's another topic.

Let me just point out that predicting the future can sometimes be exactly the same as misinterpreting the past, so don't rule out what may turn out to be the less interesting explanation.

*by which I mean barely at all.

Whoa nelly! I didn't say anything about brain imaging being used in that paper, or any of his past papers.

This thread has broken my Poe's Law meter. Oh god.

It's perfectly acceptable to think that I'm full of shit. Don't stress about Poe's law, this isn't a joke.

Patience.

I most certainly did object to your statement of "The fact we cannot unify general relativity and quantum mechanics yet means that there is some theory missing" by saying:

[size="7"]SUPERSYMMETRIC STRING THEORY

Does it help when I bump the font size up a few notches?

No, it helps when it's a theory which has been proved or at least makes testable predictions which are not supported by competing theories. Not to mention, isn't M-theory the viable candidate rather than string-theory? There are many theories which combine both relativity and quantum but that doesn't mean a thing.

No, it helps when it's a theory which has been proved or at least makes testable predictions which are not supported by competing theories. Not to mention, isn't M-theory the viable candidate rather than string-theory? There are many theories which combine both relativity and quantum but that doesn't mean a thing.

I think the links he pointed to in the form of superfluid blackhole prediction and evidence is an example of a testable prediction unique to superstring theory that was proven to be correct, and this is no doubt a big victory for it. EDIT: I apologise for using the word testable rather than falsifiable and not using the word unqiue in my previous post, I was not specific and clear enough in my criticism. However in my understanding there still remain at least a few important criticisms of superstring theory which follow:

1 - There isn't just one " "superstring" "theory" ". There seem to be lots and lots (an infinite number of them?) and researchers have not been able to find a way of narrowing them down to one that corresponds to our universe. Which is a fundamental problem if it wants to establish itself as a theory.

2 - Superstring theory hasn't made a unique prediction that if proved to be false would invalidate it. This is a requirement of any theory.

3 - It suffers from Occam's Razor. The following is an illustrative quote from Newton. "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances". All of these theories postulate extra dimensions, if I'm not mistaken at least 10 of them... Dimensions that are compacted to such a level that we can't forsee being able to detect/falsify them...

It is a physically interesting and useful mathematical construct. It is not however a theory of physics.