From: Don Winterstein (dfwinterstein@msn.com)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 05:54:01 EDT
Glenn wrote, quoting Martin Rees:
>Other universes are not directly observable, but their conceptual status is
on no worse a footing than superstrings (or even the more familiar quarks)....
The footing for strings is indeed unsure, but quarks? No way. I did a quark search in cosmic ray air showers for my PhD thesis. Although no one any longer believes that quarks can exist in the free state, many scattering experiments have confirmed that hadrons have internal structure consistent with predicted quark constituents, so quark existence is on vastly surer empirical footing than that of either parallel universes or strings. Detailed quark properties, to be sure, have only a theoretical basis; but the theory accurately predicts or accommodates lots of real stuff.
As for the "MWH experimental test," whether or not it ever actually tests for MWs is always going to be someone's opinion. Theorists tend to be very smart but very flexible. Collectively they can explain anything in N different ways, where N can be a fairly large number. And on rare occasions they can be stumped. Nothing they say is ever worth losing sleep over unless it can be directly tested, and my gut tells me no one is ever going to figure out how to test directly for multiple worlds. So I regard discussions of MWs as a form of entertainment.
Don
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