Physics at a crossroads....

[Brian Ellis]

As somebody else has quoted the Immortal Bard, I'll do the same:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

[Marshmallowman]

Newtonian is accurate at small velocities, eg much less than the speed of light...whats macroscopic got to do with it?

Classical(ala newtonian ) mechanics is only used in physics to save computational power when you can guarentee the velocities involved are much less than the speed of light.

String theory is the evolution and I guess superseding of various GUT's (grand unified theory), it is work of some very good mathematicians create general solutions in 9 dimensional spaces(the currently acepted number of dimiension's)

With the mathmatical theories they actually do create solutions to pulling these various aspects of reality together, it just you don't get a single solution...you get lots and how many they get and how they differ is the real gist of it.

So in a way they have actually pulled all these theories together, it just that they have opened up another problem. We have our reality, but by the very theory that works with ours we have a shit load of other realities that are solutions to the same problem...hence equivalent to ours but totaly different, do these other realities exist even they we can never find or experince those other realities...that is the faith bit

So our reality is a single(exact) solution from a general solution, a general solution out of X amount of other perfectly acceptable other possibilties reality that have no reason not to exist, in fact all them should actually exist.

This is the same mathmatical stuff, that has proven that matter can spontaineously come into existance from a complete vacuum, eg the genisis of the universe, do you still want to use as a reference in discussing christian "intellgent design".

[Marshmallowman]

And don't get me wrong Susskind knows his shit, and knows how to sell a esoteric maths to the general populace. Its just that throwing in a few statments about "faith" gets some people going on a tangent, but it will sell the book well