Dragaera

Double Helixes and Double Crosses (was: Favorite NON-fiction)

chris cunningham chrislee at neo.rr.com
Wed Jan 29 17:46:11 PST 2003

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Philip Hart" <philiph at SLAC.Stanford.EDU>

On Wed, 29 Jan 2003 Gaertk at aol.com wrote:
>> Calling something a "theory" when you have NO data to support
>> it is, to me, presumptious and unscientific.

>It may be presumptuous (in the eyes of God, say) but plenty of theorists
>do it and damn it if they're not right sometimes. I don't know what you'd
>have called The Theory of General Relativity before there was any data to
>back it up, for example, or string theory, the main argument for which is
>that the math is beautiful and it doesn't contradict any experimental
>results or a variety of other theories (almost nothing anybody's come up
>with has these features), even if it's not currently (i.e. anytime I can
>imagine) verifiable.

which leads me to mention the best non-fiction book i've read in a while:
_the elegant universe_ by brian greene.
all about string theory; very entertaining and informing to this layman.

chris cunningham