Princeton Noosphere Project

[daniel]

These 2 website are of great interest:

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/

The Global Consciousness Project studies deviations from 50 random number generators set up around the planet. They are finding extraordinary statistical deviation from the norm on major events such as 9/11 - which began to be registered as an event in global consciousness several hours before the planes hit the towers. At the noosphere site, you can watch the generators live.

From the noosphere site:

"
One way to think of these startling correlations is to accept the possibility that the instruments have captured the reaction of a global consciousness beginning to form. The network was built to do just that: to see whether we could gather evidence of a communal, shared mind in which we are participants even if we don't know it.

Groups of people, including the group that is the whole world, have a place in consciousness space, and under special circumstances they - or we - become a new presence. Based on evidence that both individuals and groups manifest something we can tentatively call a consciousness field, we hypothesized that there could be a global consciousness capable of the same thing. Pursuing the speculation, it would seem that the new, integrated mind is just beginning to be active, paying attention only to events that inspire strong coherence of attention and feeling. Perhaps the best image is an infant slowly developing awareness, but already capable of strong emotions in response to the comfort of cuddling or to the discomfort of pain. "

[Hair Brainman]

As a possible explaination, I wonder if there could be an additive effect from the P-300 wave, which is a brainwave pattern that shows itself 300 microseconds before a perceived stimulas? If an individual brain could react that much before the fact, a group of individuals might combine that effect on a larger basis, having advance awareness of significant events.

[daniel]

Yes, there is also the study reported in my book (taken from The Secret Life of Plants - a great read) of how plants, hooked up to EKGs, would react to danger and perceive a threat before it was actualized.

[paul]

not sure if this is the place to post this but..

maybe other bothers would be interested in the current exhibition at the museum of the american indian (nyc)-
"the edge of enchantment"..the encantos...mystical or enchanted places of mexico.. smile.gif smile.gif smile.gif

[paul]

im reminded of don juans idea of the "doing" of the universe...that we,re all born with a cirlcle of power or energy .. and at an early age unknowingly learn to connect this to the larger circle (of society/ consensual reality) and partake in the doing/ or construction of the universe.. a sorcerer gains his power by remaining aloof,,by refusing to attach himself to this arbitrary consensual reality..preferring instead his own, more flexible interpretation
smile.gif smile.gif smile.gif

[Hazz]

Paul: Yes the warrior is on his own against the predatory universe. If I understand it correctly, its a matter of slipping by that glut The Eagle, by means of intent on the part of the warrior and the indifferent Eagle. (Made easier by giving The Eagle a pseudo awarness by recapitulating your life--making a list of everyone you've ever known and going over it, thereby making your life experience unpalatable.)

[Rob P]

Concerning the Global Consciousness Project and 9/11,
I recall writing in my journal on 9/10 about feeling
a vague depression or heaviness which came out
of nowhere, and now I wonder if it was something
'in the air' globally- a forewarning...

This was a quote I wrote into my journal on that day, from
'The Fountainhead' which I was reading at the time:

'Architecture is not a business, not a career,
but a crusade and a consecration to a joy
that justifies the existence of the earth'.
(pg. 80, Ayn Rand)

[sidecross]

Again the BOTH software will not let me post a new topic. My apologies for posting this information at this particular location.

To Know What We Know

It is obvious that knowing is not always sufficient. These two articles from the NYT on the Columbia disaster demonstrate the point.

NASA's Foam Test Offered a Vivid Lesson in Kinetics

June 5, 2003
By JOHN SCHWARTZ


HOUSTON, June 4 - The recent test suggesting that falling
foam at liftoff could have caused the damage that doomed
the space shuttle Columbia was a jaw-dropping demonstration
of the destructive power of something so light, a NASA
official said today.

"I thought: `Oh, my God! This is something. This isn't just
a light bounce,' " recalled the official, G. Scott Hubbard,
the director of the Ames Research Center at NASA and also a
member of the independent board investigating the disaster.

Mr. Hubbard watched the test last Thursday at the Southwest
Research Institute in San Antonio, and described it in
detail to reporters in a briefing here this morning as a
prelude to further tests on Thursday.

Before last week's test, many engineers at NASA said they
thought lightweight foam could not harm the seemingly tough
composite panels, and privately predicted that the foam
would bounce off harmlessly, like a Nerf ball. But Mr.
Hubbard said the experiment showed that "people's intuitive
sense of physics is sometimes way off."

In last week's experiment, the researchers shot a 1.7-pound
piece of foam at a mock-up shuttle wing at 531 miles per
hour, roughly the speed of the chunk of foam that hit the
Columbia wing about 81 seconds after liftoff.

Film of the experiment, released today, shows that the
impact of a piece of foam hitting the wing mock-up caused
the leading-edge panel to ripple like the surface of a
struck gong. (The video is online at caib.us
/news/press_releases.)

The foam shattered, with hunks cramming their way into the
seam between the panel and an adjoining seal. That opened a
long slit in the surface of the wing four-tenths of an inch
wide and about 22 inches long - potentially, more than
enough to let in the stream of superheated gases that
melted the wing from the inside out as the craft entered
the atmosphere on Feb. 1.

Even the researchers setting up the test were unprepared
for the sheer force of impact as a wave of energy moved
through the inner structure of the wing and sideways along
its panels - in some places, with seven times the force
that the researchers had expected. Sensors inside the wing
were knocked loose.

Bouncing a small piece of foam lightly between his hands
for emphasis, Mr. Hubbard said: "You don't feel this can do
anything. But you fire this at 500 miles an hour, and you
saw it."

He invoked the physics equation that describes the amount
of kinetic energy in a moving object, saying, "That's when
it came home to me what 1/2mv2 means." The simple equation
says that kinetic energy is one-half times an object's mass
times the object's velocity squared, so that even something
very light can carry a great deal of force if it is moving
fast enough. In fact, he said, the force was equivalent to
catching a basketball thrown at 500 miles per hour.

Later analysis of the test panels showed that the stress
from the impact shifted the struck panel to the right by
one and a half inches, and that the seal, called a T-seal
for its shape, was permanently deformed by one-tenth of an
inch even after the foam had been removed.

The exact conditions of the actual foam strike - with
extremes of vibration and temperature and near vacuum,
could not be duplicated at the test site, so the
researchers have had to improvise and try to match the
conditions as best they can, Mr. Hubbard said.

Saying that he spoke only for himself and not the
investigation board, Mr. Hubbard said that although the
experiment "moves us a lot closer to saying that foam can
do this kind of damage," it did not rule out other possible
causes of the hole in the wing, including small meteorites
and debris in space.

At Cape Canaveral, Fla., the chief of the NASA team that is
collecting and examining debris from the Columbia said
today that its analysis was consistent with that of the
independent investigation board. "We have proven, based on
the debris alone, where the breach was," said the official,
Michael D. Leinbach, who is also the shuttle launching
director.

Following the same guidelines used by the National
Transportation Safety Board in aviation accidents, he said,
the team analyzed the debris separately from any other data
gathered by recorders and other sources, and determined
that the shuttle was doomed by a breach at the bottom of
Panel 8 on the left wing's leading edge.

The next round of tests in Texas could add weight to the
growing consensus about the cause of the accident. Last
week's tests used wing panels from the Enterprise, a test
vehicle that never flew in space. That craft's leading edge
panels were made from fiberglass because the Enterprise
never had to face the heat of re-entry.

Foam testing will resume on Thursday with the first effort
to fire a chunk of foam at the actual material used on the
leading edge of the shuttle's wing. The material,
reinforced carbon-carbon taken from the shuttle Discovery,
is substantially weaker and less flexible than fiberglass.

The researchers estimate that the test will exert about 70
percent more force than necessary to shatter a composite
panel, Mr. Hubbard said. "Now, whether it actually turns
out that way or not, that's why we do the experiment," he
said. "But the analysts are saying it looks like it'll
break it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/05/national/nationalspecial/05SHUT.html?ex=1055826484&ei=1&en=2f5702826d97c6f3

Investigator Amazed by Shuttle Foam Force

June 5, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


Filed at 4:14 a.m. ET

SAN ANTONIO (AP) -- A 1 1/2-pound chunk of space shuttle
foam hurled at a fiberglass wing replica struck with
enormous force and deformed some of the pieces, to the
amazement of the Columbia accident investigator in charge
of the testing.

``People's intuitive sense of physics is sometimes way off.
You don't feel that this (foam) can do anything,'' said
Scott Hubbard, a high-ranking NASA official who serves on
the investigation board. ``But you fire this at 500 mph and
there you saw it. I really did think,`Oh, my God, this is
really an impact. This is a significant effect.' ``

On Wednesday, Hubbard discussed in detail the results of
last week's foam-impact test at Southwest Research
Institute in San Antonio. An even more critical experiment
is on tap for Thursday, when real shuttle wing parts will
be smacked with foam.

Hubbard anticipates even more damage when foam is fired at
the actual shuttle parts, made of reinforced carbon, which
is weaker and more brittle than fiberglass. He expects the
actual pieces, removed from shuttle Discovery, to actually
break.

``This moves us a lot closer to saying that the foam can do
this kind of damage,'' Hubbard said.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board suspects a
similarly sized piece of fuel-tank foam insulation knocked
the hole in the leading edge of Columbia's left wing that,
two weeks later, let in scorching atmospheric gases and
doomed the spaceship and its seven astronauts during
re-entry.

In last week's test, a piece of foam nearly 20 inches long
was fired through a giant nitrogen-pressurized gun at more
than 530 mph at a mock-up of the wing's leading edge. The
fiberglass panels and seals were from the shuttle prototype
Enterprise, which never flew in space.

The foam deflected the panel that was the bull's-eye and
shoved and lifted an adjoining seal, Hubbard said. The foam
shattered, and pieces of it crammed into the nearly
half-inch gap created by the dislodged seal. The crevice --
about 22 inches long -- held its shape because of the foam
stuffing.

Hubbard said the stress recorded in the May 29 test was up
to seven times higher than expected and rippled across the
panels. But that peak force lasted just one-half of
one-thousandth of a second, not long enough to break
fiberglass, he noted.

It equated to a ton of force, all compressed into 60 or 70
square inches of fiberglass panels, Hubbard said. According
to predictions, that is perhaps 70 percent more force than
needed to break real leading edge pieces, which are made of
reinforced carbon.

At Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the chairman of the
Columbia reconstruction team said the wreckage there points
to the breach as having occurred probably somewhere around
the bottom of carbon panel No. 8 of the left wing's leading
edge.

``The key here is how much is not here, versus how much is
over on the right-hand side,'' Leinbach said, pointing to
what little is left of the left wing.

Columbia was 16 minutes away from a Florida touchdown when
it shattered over Texas in February.

[bordendazed]

Just read that book "The Holographic Universe" by Michael Talbot....

And synchronicity; here? - I was watching the Columbia entry live and when I heard that crackle of static, I recalled that same sound from Challenger. I thought, a bit about a flat tire, than realized that the Comm Checks were the requiem.....

Are we fragments of a plate? Do we have literal interferences with each other and other things? Can we affect these patterns and tansform our awareness to other plates of 'film'???

What can be told tangibly about an intangible?

I just wanted to speak. There are some interesting things happening here. Is it the precursor to the Winter Solstice of 2012?

BND

[sidecross]

I would post this as a new topic, but again the this sites software will not allow it.

One Cosmic Question, Too Many Answers

September 2, 2003
By DENNIS OVERBYE


Call it the theory of anything.

Einstein once wondered aloud whether "God had any choice"
in creating the universe. It was his fondest hope that the
answer was no.

He and subsequent generations of physicists have hoped that
at the end of their labors there would be one answer - a
so-called Theory of Everything - that would explain why the
details of the world are the way they are and cannot be any
other way: why there was a Big Bang, the number of
dimensions of space-time, the masses of elementary
particles.

For 20 years, physicists have lodged those hopes in string
theory, a mathematically labyrinthian effort to portray
nature as made up of tiny wriggling strings and membranes,
rather than pointlike particles or waves.

Once called a piece of 21st-century physics that had fallen
into the 20th century by accident, string theory has become
one of the hippest fields of science, celebrated in books
like the recent best seller "The Elegant Universe," by the
Columbia theorist Brian Greene, and the subject of a
miniseries on "Nova," coming this fall.

In principle, strings can unite all the forces of nature,
including gravity, in a single mathematical framework. But
the "stringiness" of nature manifests itself only at
energies and temperatures that can be generated in a
particle accelerator the size of a small galaxy.

As a result, physicists have been left at the mercy of
their mathematical imaginations or sifting cosmological
data for hints of a clue from God's own particle
accelerator, the Big Bang.

The hope was that when all was said and done, there would
be only one solution to the theory's tangled equations, one
answer corresponding to only one possible universe. But
recent progress in string theory paradoxically seems to
leave physics further than ever from that dream of a unique
answer. Instead of a single answer, the equations of string
theory seem to have so many solutions, millions upon
millions of them, each describing a logically possible
universe, that it may be impossible to tell which one
describes our own.

In a series of conceptual and technical breakthroughs, a
group of theorists at Stanford showed this year that string
theory could describe a universe whose expansion was
accelerating - something that many experts thought
impossible.

That was no small accomplishment because cosmologists now
theorize that some puzzling and so far unidentified "dark
energy" is wrenching space apart ever more violently. This
energy seems to make up 70 percent of the cosmos, according
to astronomical observations.

The new calculations suggest that this dark energy cannot
last forever, that it will disappear sometime in the far
future, according to the researchers, Dr. Shamit Kachru,
Dr. Renata Kallosh and Dr. Andrei Linde, all of Stanford,
and Dr. Sandip P. Trivedi of the Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research in Bombay.

But the same calculations confirmed that string theory
could have a vast number of solutions, each representing a
different universe with slightly different laws of physics.
The detailed characteristics of any particular one of these
universes - the laws that describe the basic forces and
particles - might be decided by chance.

As a result, string theorists and cosmologists are
confronted with what Dr. Leonard Susskind of Stanford has
called "the cosmic landscape," a sort of metarealm of
space-times. Contrary to Einstein's hopes, it may be that
neither God nor physics chooses among these possibilities,
Dr. Susskind contends. Rather it could be life.

Only a fraction of the universes in this metarealm would
have the lucky blend of properties suitable for life, Dr.
Susskind explained. It should be no surprise that we find
ourselves in one of these.

"We live where we can live," he said.

Dr. Susskind
conceded that many colleagues who harbor the Einsteinian
dream of predicting everything are appalled by that notion
that God plays dice with the laws of physics.

Among them is Dr. David Gross, director of the Kavli
Institute of Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif.,
who said, "I'm a total Einsteinian with respect to the
ultimate goal of science."

Physicists should be able to predict all the parameters of
nature, Dr. Gross said, adding, "They're not adjustable."

But Dr. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the University of
Pennsylvania, said, "I think this grand dream is basically
dying."

Dr. Michael Douglas of Rutgers and the Institute of
Advanced Scientific Studies, near Paris, called the
plethora of string universes "the Alice's Restaurant"
problem.

"You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant," he
said. "Is this a theory of something, very many things or
nothing? That's what we're trying to establish."

The Early Hopes
Not Particles, but Strings

The question
of whether strings will provide a unique answer to the
universe has been hanging over physicists' heads ever since
the modern form of string theory made its triumphal
emergence in 1984. That year, Dr. John Schwarz of the
California Institute of Technology and Dr. Michael Green,
now of Cambridge University in England, showed that
thinking of elementary particles as little strings instead
of points eliminated troublesome mathematical anomalies
from theories that sought to combine gravity with subatomic
physics.

Even Einstein had failed to unite those disparate and
mathematically incompatible realms. But the 1984
calculation raised the hope that physicists had finally
found the key to the so-called Theory of Everything.

"There was this wild enthusiasm, unbridled enthusiasm, that
we paid for later," said Dr. Andrew Strominger, a professor
of physics at Harvard.

In 1985, Dr. Strominger, Dr. Edward Witten of the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, Dr. Gary T. Horowitz, now
at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Dr.
Philip Candelas, now at the University of Texas, published
a classic paper showing that it was possible to construct a
string theory consistent with the so-called Standard Model
that describes particles and forces in our four-dimensional
universe.

One problem is that string theory requires 10 dimensions of
space-time, whereas we appear to live in four. Dr.
Strominger remembered being excited when he found a paper
by the mathematician Dr. Shing-Tung Yau, now of Harvard and
the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It proved a conjecture
by Dr. Eugenio Calabi, now retired from the University of
Pennsylvania, that the extra dimensions could be curled up
in microscopically invisible ways like the loops in a
carpet.

The paper described only one way this folding could be
done. But Dr. Yau soon told the physicists that there were
thousands of what are now called Calabi-Yau spaces, each
one representing a different solution of the string
equations. By the time their paper was finished, "the
uniqueness of string theory was certainly already in
question," Dr. Strominger said.

That was just the beginning. For each of the thousands of
ways of curling the extra dimensions into Calabi-Yau
spaces, there were hundreds of variations in details like
the sizes of the loops and the way electrical and magnetic
fields thread through them. When the variations are taken
into account, the number of solutions and the number of
possible universes can easily exceed 10100.

The Challenge
A Universe Unfit for Life or Physics?

This
bounty of possibilities makes it extremely daunting for
scientists who want to test string theory by comparing its
predictions to the real world. One telltale clue to the
right answer, as well as a huge challenge, developed five
years ago when astronomers discovered that the expansion of
the universe was apparently accelerating. But until
recently, many theorists doubted that strings could produce
even one example of an accelerating universe.

The reason is that the leading explanation for this
behavior is a cosmic repulsion, known as the cosmological
constant, that results from the properties of empty space
itself.

It was first invented by Einstein in 1917 as a fudge factor
to stabilize the universe and then abandoned by him when
astronomers found out that the universe was not static, but
expanding.

If Einstein's fudge factor is real after all, the universe
will continue to expand faster and faster as space grows
bigger and bigger, producing more and more repulsion.

String theorists did not know how to deal with the
cosmological constant. According to quantum mechanics, the
weird laws that govern subatomic physics, empty space
should be foaming with energy and particles that wink in
and out of existence, and their collective effect could
produce a repulsive force like Einstein's constant. But the
calculations also suggest that this force should be some
1060 times what astronomers have measured; it would have
blown the universe apart in its first millisecond, long
before atoms, galaxies or humans could form.

Moreover, a permanently accelerating universe would present
deep conceptual problems, several physicists pointed out,
including Dr. Thomas Banks of Rutgers and the University of
California at Santa Cruz, Dr. Willy Fischler of the
University of Texas, Dr. Susskind and Dr. Witten.

Such a universe would slowly empty itself of energy and
information because most of the galaxies would eventually
be flying away so fast that humans could not see them. The
observable universe would actually shrink, as if surrounded
by a black hole. Life would become impossible, and the
usual methods of formulating physics might not apply.

As a result of such arguments, it was widely presumed that
a universe that accelerated forever - that is, one with a
cosmological constant - was incompatible with string
theory, Dr. Kachru of Stanford said.

It was partly to counter such claims, he added, that he and
his colleagues were motivated to look for the cosmological
constant in the gazillions of possible string universes.

The Hitch
A Breakthrough, but a Bleak One

Last winter,
Dr. Kachru and his colleagues succeeded in using string
theory to construct universes that accelerated, but with a
surprising twist.

The hitch, in each case, was that the acceleration would be
only temporary. It might last an extremely long time, but
eventually the dark energy of the cosmological constant
would melt away, decaying just in time to avoid the
problems of permanent acceleration that string theorists
have worried about. The universe would then coast for the
rest of eternity.

The work followed on previous work by Dr. Kachru with Dr.
Joseph Polchinski of the Santa Barbara Institute and Dr.
Steven Giddings of the University of California at Santa
Barbara, and by Dr. Polchinski and Dr. Raphael Bousso of
the University of California at Berkeley.

Part of the reason dark energy decays, explained Dr. Linde
of Stanford, is that these solutions describe the
four-dimensional universe we observe around us - three
dimensions of space and one of time - with the other six
curled up so tightly that they cannot provide closet space.
But it takes energy to keep the extra dimensions confined.

"In the long run," he said, "the universe doesn't want to
be four-dimensional. It wants to be 10 dimensions."

So sooner or later, the loops will unravel like a tangle of
rubber bands, passing through a succession of
configurations that take less and less energy to maintain,
until finally the other dimensions expand and the
cosmological constant is gone.

The decay of the cosmological constant will be fatal,
astronomers agree. At that moment a bubble of
10-dimensional space will sweep out at the speed of light,
rearranging physics and the prospects of atoms and planets,
not to mention biological creatures.

"What it leaves behind," Dr. Susskind said, "it's hard to
say. Almost certainly not a livable universe."

The Role of Luck
A Controversial Idea
Returns to Stage

The universe is certainly livable now, but why has long
been a vexing and polarizing issue. Life as We Know It
seems to require an almost miraculous juggling of a few
atomic and astronomical parameters.

Was the universe designed for us? Or did we just get lucky?

Searching for answers, some theorists have invoked the
so-called anthropic principle, which states that our
universe has to have laws suitable for life. Otherwise we
would not be here to see it. The apparent "fine-tuning" of
this universe is simply an artifact of our own existence
here as observers, Dr. Brandon Carter, now at the Paris
Observatory in Meudon, argued in 1974.

The principle fits well with recent theories of the Big
Bang that suggest that the universe seen through telescopes
is just one in an endless chain of bubble universes that
sprout from one another.

If there is just one universe, the fact that it suits us
would seem suspiciously lucky. But if there are many
universes to choose from, our existence is less miraculous.

It might be the diversity of string-theory universes that
gives this metacosmos a chance at harboring life, Dr.
Susskind says.

He likes to portray it as a mountain range, the "cosmic
landscape," in which the height of the peaks represents the
energy or the cosmological constant of that configuration.
The universe is like water rolling around the hills, always
seeking a lower state. There are valleys and basins and
plateaus where it can rest. But it can spread, plopping
like a wave sloshing over the hills from valley to valley,
from one configuration of dimensions and fields to another.

As a result, he said, in whatever form it starts, the
universe will branch out into other forms. If it keeps
sloshing, it will eventually land in a valley with the
lucky mix of cosmic constants that allows for galaxies and
carbon-based chemistry somewhere. If a small fraction of
the subuniverses can support life, then there is a good
chance that life will arise somewhere, Dr. Susskind
explained.

Others caution, however, that it has not been proved that
different classes of universes would be so interconnected.
"It could be that there are many disconnected landscapes,"
explained Dr. Douglas of Rutgers.

Dr. Susskind said that "whether we like it or not," the new
findings gave further credence to the anthropic principle
and a mathematical framework for how it might work.

But such "anthropic thinking" is defeatist to many
physicists. "We see this kind of thing happen over and over
again as a reaction to difficult problems," Dr. Gross said.
"Come up with a grand principle that explains why you're
unable to solve the problem."

The notion that some problems are unsolvable is
discouraging to the younger generation, he said, pointing
out that nobody even knows what the final form of string
theory will be.

Dr. Witten said he also disliked the anthropic principle.
"I continue to hope that we are overlooking or
misunderstanding something and that there is ultimately a
more unique answer," he wrote by e-mail.

Dr. Susskind conceded that he had once been on the other
side of the question.

"I've had myself jerked around by this theory," he said.
"When you have to give up your fondest dream for what the
theory would do" - a reference to the quest for a unique
answer - "that's a hard thing to swallow."

The Future
Still Listening for Orderly Music

Dr. Strominger of
Harvard said the debate on anthropic principle was
indicative of the "all-or-nothing psychology" of string
theory.

"It's not enough to solve some problems," he said. "It has
to solve every problem."

Theorists have long hoped that all but one of these
solutions will eliminate themselves through some
mathematical inconsistency or failure to reproduce an
essential feature of the universe like the cosmological
constant. Dr. Douglas of Rutgers has challenged that hope,
saying string theory may have so many solutions that
physical measurements can not distinguish among them.

Indeed, he pointed out in a recent paper, it has not been
proved that string theory does not have an infinite number
of solutions. So far, anything seems possible.

Rather than sifting myriad solutions for the one that fits
our universe, Dr. Douglas has developed statistical methods
to analyze the set of string solutions as a whole to find
patterns that will not show up when the solutions are
examined one by one.

The results could help ascertain which features of this
"zoo of possibilities" are more common and which are more
rare, and how many solutions really are too many.

"My own philosophy," Dr. Douglas said in an interview, "is
that we should do our best to listen to what string theory
is trying to tell us. It is smarter than we are."

Dr. Kachru suggested that it might be wishful thinking to
expect that a "smoking gun" confirmation of string theory
could be found from comparing it to today's universe. The
full glories of string theory, he said, manifest themselves
only at energies trillions of times what earthbound
particle accelerators can produce.

Perhaps, he said, theorists should be looking for the
smoking gun in the Big Bang.

Asked what the smoking-gun question might be, Dr. Kachru
laughed and said, "If I knew, I would be working in that
field."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/02/science/space/02STRI.html?ex=1063466277&ei=1&en=b1d6868eea617c46

[Agent Smith]

hey lookee here!

BUMP!!