Thursday, May 26, 2005

Is it possible to predict the occurrence of super string revolutions?

As I mentioned in my previous posting there will be a panel discussion about the next superstring revolution in Strings 05 conference to be held in the University of Toronto July 11-16. It seems that these revolutions occur more or less periodically, roughly once in decade. I would bet eleven year period since it would suggest a correlation with sunspot maxima causing intense magnetic storms known to have strong effect on sensitive people as the statistics from mental hospitals demonstrates. The strictly periodical occurrence would certainly diminish the media value of these events since people soon just nod and say something like "God grief, I am again one string revolution older, only two and half revolutions and I will have my 70th birth day, so the time goes!". An unpredictability of say plus minus 2 years would be much better. People could make bets about the precise moment of the event in a world lottery. No doubt, a new branch of science called string-ology would emerge tending to predict the precise occurrence of revolutions by identifying some precursors including foreshocks in physics oriented web blogs, weird behavior of young researchers in physics departments, and increase in the number and propagation speed of rumours about what Witten is doing just now. Predictability would be highly desirable since university people could receive a warning about what is to be expected so that panic behavior could be avoided and the number of academic victims minimized. Matti Pitkänen

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