"Nullius in Verba.
(Take nobody's word for it.)" -Royal Society Motto
You know the drill. New ideas come out all the time. Sometimes they're new theories, sometimes they're old theories with a new twist, but regardless, we need to ask the question: How good is your theory?
For whatever it's worth, I came up with a scale for this.
The best ideas are beyond validated. They are confirmed over and over, predict new phenomena that gets verified, and don't have any self-inconsistencies.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, a new twist on an old idea was proposed by Roger Penrose.
A little background first. Roger Penrose is a really bright guy, and -- among physicists and mathematicians -- is incredibly well-respected. His specialty is in the physics and mathematics of spacetime, including tilings and tessellations (below).
Penrose diagrams -- mathematical ways to map infinite spacetimes onto a simple sheet of paper -- are named after him. He also has a bit of fame from his work on singularities with Stephen Hawking.
Penrose has also been unafraid to put speculative ideas out there. He has been unafraid to speculate about the origins of consciousness, but at least some of his ideas were demonstrably wrong. One of his favorite speculative ideas is that of a cyclic Universe, which he's been touting (and speaking about) for as long as I can remember.
To read the rest of the article, click here."I sat in on Roger's twistor seminar at Birkbeck College University of London 1971 - the man is a mathematical genius. However I think his current physics guess is wrong. In any case it conflicts with mine. So we both can't be right and we may both even be wrong." -- Jack Sarfatti