Saturday, December 20, 2003

Failure of nerve

The site Sci Tech pointed me to this article at the Ayn Rand Institute in which David Harriman combines a legitimate skepticism about 26-dimensional string theory with a spectacular ignorance of fairly elementary experiments in the field. Sorry, Mr. Harriman, but the sub-atomic world is rather weird, and if you assume that a photon takes only one path through the two slits you wind up with the wrong answer. I hold no brief for the multiple universe stuff, but the case for dark matter is getting quite strong--go look up what's happening with Einstein lensing of remote galaxies.

I originally followed the link without checking where it lead. Somehow it seems fitting that it turned out to be the Ayn Rand Institute. Rand seems to be popular in blogland, but I find her theories marvelously simple, untainted by reference to messy reality.

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