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I think my favorite one of these is … Robert Heinlein wrote in an essay ("Paul Dirac, Antimatter, And You") that he believes that Paul Dirac believed until his
by mherdeg 5y ago
I think my favorite one of these is …
Robert Heinlein wrote in an essay ("Paul Dirac, Antimatter, And You") that he believes that Paul Dirac believed until his death that the gravitational constant G is decreasing slightly over time, and that he thinks Dirac was right. Is there evidence for or against this proposition?
Also, whatever happened to Garrett Lisi's unified theory of everything based on the E8 Lie group? was that important? how is that going?
- wrnr 5y agoLisi has said that E8 is not gonna work in the way he initially proposed, he is still trying to apply the idea in other ways, for example cosmology.
- uniqueid 5y agoDid Paul Dirac address the matter directly? The Robert Heinlein essay sounds interesting; I'm just confused about why he had to speculate about Dirac's belief. It's not a topic about which I know much.
- mherdeg 5y agoYeah I guess this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_large_numbers_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_large_numbers_hypothesis and it has a Wikipedia page and stuff; the encyclopedia cites a 1973 Dirac journal article on the topic, https://www.jstor.org/stable/78591 https://www.jstor.org/stable/78591 for example. None of my introductory university physics education mentioned this stuff so I' not really clear on whether it's well-known, unimportant, or something else. I just happened to be reading a big collection of this science fiction author's nonfiction work and that one claim stood out to me as kind of bizarre (G is going ... down?!) and always wondered what the deal was.
- bee_rider 5y ago> G is going ... down?! Well, it makes sense, that is the direction it points in after all.