Hello Doug,
I'm not sure if you have been keeping up with the literature, but String Theory isn't really a physical theory, nor is M Theory. Five years ago you might have won a first place prize simply by talking about them, but after thirty years of doing nothing to advance physics, String Theory and M Theory are on their way out.
And "Symmtrey" as an oft abused notion, as Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin reminds us in A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE: "Symmetry is an important, if often abused, idea in physics. An example of symmetry is roundness. Billiard balls are round, and this allows one to make some predictions about them without knowing exactly what they are made of, for example they will roll in straight-line paths across the table when struck with a cue. But roundness does not cause them to move. The underlying laws of motion do that.. . For this reason there is a tradition in physics of ascribing to symmetries an overriding importance even though they are actually a consequence, or property, of the equations of motion."
What Moving Dimensions Theory accomplishes is to provide an underlying *physical* mechanism for time and all its arrows across all realms. MDT weaves change into the fundamental fabric of spacetime with dx4/dt=ic, where change needs to be, as change pervades every realm of physics, for without change, no measurement can be made!
MDT's simple postulate--the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at c--shows that the fixed velocity of light emerges from a deeper principle--photons are but matter that surf the fourth expanding dimension.
http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/238
Time as an Emergent Phenomenon: Traveling Back to the Heroic Age of Physics by Elliot McGucken
It is interesting that Einstein introduced relativity as a principle--as a primary law not deduced from anything else.
Well, I guess I was dumb enough to even ask, "why relativity?"
And I found the answer in a more fundamental invariance--the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions, or dx4/dt = ic. Change is fundamentally embedded in space-time. And not only can all of relativity be derived from this, but suddenly we had a *physical* model for entropy, time and its arrows and assymetries in all realms, free will, and quantum nonlocality and entanglement. MDT accounts for the the constant speed of light c--both its independence of the source and its independence of the velocity of the observer, while establishing it as the fastest, slowest, and only velocity for all entities and objects moving through space-time, as well as the maximum velocity that anything is measured to move. And suddenly we see a *physical* basis for E=mc^2. Energy and mass are the same thing--it's just that energy is mass caught upon the fourth expanding dimension, and thus it surfs along at "c."
On page 37 of "Einstein's Mistakes, The Failings of Human Genius," by Hans Ochanian, we read,
"Einstein acknowledged his debt to Newton and to Maxwell, but he was not fully aware of the extent of Galileo's fatherhood. In an introduction he wrote for Galileo's celebrated Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he faults Galileo for failing to produce a general mathematical proof. Galileo regarded relativity as an empirical, observational fact, that is, a law of nature, and Einstein's own formulation of the Principle of Relativity three hundred years later imitated Galileo's in treating this principle as a law of nature and not as a mathematical deduction from anything else."
Well, MDT provides a more fundamental law--a hitherto unsung universal invariant--with an equation: dx4/dt = ic, from which relativity is derived in my paper. And an added benefit are all the other *physical* entities dx4/dt=ic accounts for with a *physical* model, from Huygens' principle to entropy to quantum entanglement and nonlocality to time and all her arrows and assymetries.
"Rebellion to Tyrants is obedience to God"--Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin
And String Theory and M-Theory have devolved into snarky, physicless, handwaving tyrannies.
I expect MDT to bring additional boons for years to come!
It is certainly a greater theroy, with far more ranging consequences, than String Theory and LQG.
The first page of String Theory in a Nutshell states in a footnoted sentence:
THE CASE FOR STRING THEORY:
String Theory has been the leading candidate over the past two decades for a theory that consistently unifies all the fundamental forces of nature, including gravity. It gained popularity because it provides a theory that is UV finite.(1)
The footnote (1) reads: "Although there is no rigorous proff to all orders that the theory is UV finite, there are several all-orders arguments as well as rigorous results at low-loop-order. In closed string theory, amplitudes must be carefully defined via analytic continuation, standard in S-matrix theory. When open strings are present, there are diveregences. However, they are interpreted as IR divergences (due to the exchange of massless tsates) in the dual closed string channel. They are subtracted in the "Wilsonian" S-matrix elements."
So you see, String Theory is not a finite theory, but this is generally kept to the footnotes, when mentioned at all.
A lot of Nobel Laureates have problems with String Theory:
""WE DON'T know what we are talking about." That was Nobel laureate David Gross at the 23rd Solvay Conference in Physics in Brussels, Belgium, during his concluding remarks on Saturday. He was referring to string theory. . ." --http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18825293.700
It is anomalous to replace the four-dimensional continuum by a five-dimensional one and then subsequently to tie up artificially one of those five dimensions in order to account for the fact that it does not manifest itself." -Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest
String theorists don't make predictions, they make excuses. -Richard Feynman, Noble Laureate
String theory is like a 50 year old woman wearing too much lipstick. -Robert Laughlin, Nobel Laureate
Actually, I would not even be prepared to call string theory a "theory" rather a "model" or not even that: just a hunch. After all, a theory should come together with instructions on how to deal with it to identify the things one wishes to describe, in our case the elementary particles, and one should, at least in principle, be able to formulate the rules for calculating the properties of these particles, and how to make new predictions for them. Imagine that I give you a chair, while explaining that the legs are still missing, and that the seat, back and armrest will perhaps be delivered soon; whatever I did give you, can I still call it a chair? -Gerard `t Hooft, Nobel Laureate in String Theory
"It is tragic, but now, we have the string theorists, thousands of them, that also dream of explaining all the features of nature. They just celebrated the 20th anniversary of superstring theory. So when one person spends 30 years, it's a waste, but when thousands waste 20 years in modern day, they celebrate with champagne. I find that curious." -Sheldon Glashow, Nobel Laureate
"I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with a n experiment, they cook up an explanation-a fix-up to say, "Well, it might be true." For example, the theory requires ten dimensions. Well, maybe there's a way of wrapping up six of the dimensions. Yes, that's all possible mathematically, but why not seven? When they write their equation, the equation should decide how many of these things get wrapped up, not the desire to agree with experiment. In other words, there's no reason whatsoever in superstring theory that it isn't eight out of the ten dimensions that get wrapped up and that the result is only two dimensions, which would be completely in disagreement with experience. So the fact that it might disagree with experience is very tenuous, it doesn't produce anything; it has to be excused most of the time. It doesn't look right." -Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics
"But superstring physicists have not yet shown that theory really works. They cannot demonstrate that the standard theory is a logical outcome of string theory. They cannot even be sure that their formalism includes a description of such things as protons and electrons. And they have not yet made even one teeny-tiny experimental prediction. Worst of all, superstring theory does not follow as a logical consequence of some appealing set of hypotheses about nature. Why, you may ask, do the string theorists insist space is none-dimensional? Simply because string theory doesn't make sense in any other kind of space." --Sheldon Glashow, Nobel Laureate in Physics
Even String Theory's founder, Michio Kaku, has problems with the theory: "The great irony of string theory, however, is that the theory itself is not unified. To someone learning the theory for the first time, it is often a frustrating collection of folklore, rules of thumb, and intuition. (IN OTHER WORDS IT IS NOT PHYSICS!!!) At times, there seems to be no rhyme or reason for many of the conventions of the model. For a theory that makes the claim of providing a unifying framework for all physical laws, it is the supreme irony that the theory itself appears so disunited!!"
Chapter 1. Path Integrals and Point Particles: Why Strings?
" --"Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory," page 5. -Michio Kaku
"If Einstein were alive today, he would be horrified at this state of affairs. He would upbraid the profession for allowing this mess to develop and fly into a blind rage over the transformation of his beautiful creations into ideologies and the resulting proliferation of logical inconsistencies. Einstein was an artist and a scholar but above all he was a revolutionary. His approach to physics might be summarized as hypothesizing minimally. Never arguing with experiment, demanding total logical consistency, and mistrusting unsubstantiated beliefs. The unsubstantial belief of his day was ether, or more precisely the naïve version of ether that preceded relativity. The unsubstantiated belief of our day is relativity itself. It would be perfectly in character for him to reexamine the facts, toss them over in his mind, and conclude that his beloved principle of relativity was not fundamental at all but emergent-a collective property of the matter constituting space-time that becomes increasingly exact at long length scales but fails at short ones. This is a different idea from his original one but something fully compatible with it logically, and even more exciting and potentially important. It would mean that the fabric of space-time was not simply the stage on which life played out but an organizational phenomenon, and that there might be something beyond." -A Different Universe, Reinventing Physics From The Bottom Down, Robert B. Laughlin, Winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the fractional quantum Hall effect.
"[String Theory] has no practical utility, however, other than to sustain the myth of the ultimate theory. There is no experimental evidence for the existence of strings in nature, nor does the special mathematics of string theory enable known experimental behavior to be calculated or predicted more easily. Moreover, the complex spectroscopic properties of space accessible with today's mighty accelerators are accountable in only as "low-energy phenomenology"-a pejorative term for transcendent emergent properties of matter impossible to calculate from first principles. String theory is, in fact, a textbook case of Deceitful Turkey, a beautiful set of ideas that will always remain just barely out of reach. Far from a wonderful technological hope for a greater tomorrow, it is instead the tragic consequence of an obsolete belief system-in which emergence plays no role and dark law does not exist."
-A Different Universe, Reinventing Physics From The Bottom Down, Robert B. Laughlin, Winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the fractional quantum Hall effect.
MDT delivers an ultimate theory, whereas Loop Quantum Gravity and Sring Theory only sustain a myth of an ultimate theory. And thus we are commanded from on high--from the pinnacles of the ani-theory regimes--to ignore MDT and Nobel Laureates such as Robert Laughlin, F.A. Hayek, Feynman, Einstein, Planck, and others I quote above. Welcome to the dark ages.
I apologize for the length of this post, but I am working on a book: HERO'S JOURNEY PHYSICS: FROM BRUNO, TO GALILEO, TO EINSTEIN--AND YET IT MOVES!
Best,
Dr. E (The Real McCoy)
