Zen Mind, Empty Mind
Introduction:
A mathematician hopes for more exciting vulgarizations of his subject–
“I would hope that clever writers might point out how mathematics is altering our lifestyles and do it in a manner that would not lead Garfield the Cat to say ‘ho hum.'”
— Philip J. Davis, “The Media and Mathematics Look at Each Other” (pdf), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, March 2006
Part I:
“Our mathematical skills are assumed to derive from a special ‘mental vacuum state,’ whose origin is explained on the basis of anthropic and biological arguments, taking into account the need for the informational processes associated with such a state to be of a life-supporting character. ESP is then explained in terms of shared ‘thought bubbles’ generated by the participants out of the mental vacuum state.”
— Nobel laureate Brian D. Josephson, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge, “String Theory, Universal Mind, and the Paranormal” (Dec. 2003)
Part II:
It is very interesting that Professor Josephson is allowed to publish non-predictive speculative string theory and ESP unification work on the arXiv, despite the failure of string theory to say anything checkable about “gravitons”, “supersymmetric partners”, “10 or 11 dimensions” (M-theory says that out universe has 10 dimensions for supersymmetry – ie, unification at the uncheckable Planck scale – and 11 dimensions for supergravity, with the 10 dimensional supersymmetry universe being a mem-brane on the 11 dimensional supergravity, just like an N-1 dimensional surface of a bubble exists on an N dimensional bubble; 3 dimensional bubbles have 2 dimensional soapy surfaces).
Also check out the fact that a more physical unification scheme by Lunsford, which was published in the Int. J. Theoretical Physics, v 43 (2004), No. 1, pp.161-177, and is on the CERN document server, was censored off arXiv because it does not fit mainstream M-theory prejudices:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=128#comment-1932
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/688763
Comment by JCarruthers — Saturday, February 17, 2007 @ 2:06 pm