"I am no defender of string theory, but I must say that contrary to evolutionary theory, string theory can be cast into a precise mathematical formalism that may or may not describe nature. Witness the mathematical work of Bernhard Riemann, who posed the problem of how to define an n-dimensional space and ended up giving definition of what today is called a Riemannian space, so important to general relativity. The same may be one day with string theory. Evolutionary theory supposes species/species transitions that will forever escape experimental verification.
Moorad"
Mathematical formalism is neither necessary nor sufficient for a theory to be "scientific" in the sense of describing physical reality. "may one day be testable..." is no match for a theory with a very large number of testable observations. Rather than "...will forever escape experimental verification," I believe you really mean "past species transitions will never be repeated or observed from beginning to end." which is quite different from being testable.
Randy
Received on Tue Dec 7 22:02:57 2004
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