"Gene Ward Smith" wrote in message
ups.com...

Azaliah wrote:
On 24 Oct 2006 10:54:25 -0700, while bungee jumping, "Gene
Ward Smith" shouted thusly:

Card thinking he knows enough string theory to criticize it is kind of
funny.

String Theory is not even close to being proved a fact.

And the relevance of this remark is what, exactly? It doesn't show that
string theory will collapse in ten years, as Card claims. It doesn't
show it has been useless--in fact it can't, because if nothing else it
has been useful to mathematics. It doesn't even show string theory is
wrong; that's just a pure assumption on Card's part.



String theory cannot be falsified, that makes it a religion.

And until it makes predictions that can be tested, it
will remain a religion. Being self consistant is not enough
to consider, say, philosophy to represent reality correctly.
So why should it be any different for string theory?

What I find most interesting, is how those that are the
first to smirk at religion, show just as much blind
faith in their own beliefs.

But there has been another path in mathematically
describing nature during the last twenty years
that does predict all kinds of things quite
well.

Dynamics of Complex Systems
http://necsi.org/publications/dcs/index.html

For instance, a teaser, I used this math today
to predict stock ticker lbix would bounce
10-15% today. And I predict that tomorrow
ticker siga will do much the same probably by
lunchtime.

Stock charts represent the real live world of
naturally evolving complex adaptive systems.
If a theory is useless to predict such systems
it's useless for understanding and predicting
reality.



s











Therefore, to try to use it as some kind of proof that
it all happened by itself, is disingenuous, at best.

This sentence seems to have no relationship to Card's essay.