I believe in letting an invader in and then setting a good example. That is the reply Benjamin Britten gave to a tribunal for the registration of conscientious objectors in 1942 when asked "What would you do if Britain was invaded?" I was reminded of it when researching my recent article on Marco Pallis , who was an authority on both Tibetan Buddhism and early music, and, together with Britten, a champion of Purcell . In his best-selling book Peaks and Lamas , which was written in 1939, Pallis tells this story about the Sakyas , the ethnic group of which Gautama Buddha was a member which inhabited the foothills of the Himalayas. News was brought to them of an impending attack by a hostile tribe and it was debated anxiously whether resistance should be offered or not. Eventually they decided that, as followers of [Buddhist] Doctrine, they were debarred from offering armed resistance, but must welcome the invaders as friends, so they threw down their arms... The Tibetans, how...
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http://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/publications/catalogues/index.html
It would be just dandy if string theory merely predicted those extra dimensions. The problem is that string theory depends on those extra dimensions (a total of 11 at last count) for its very existence. Absent those extra dimensions, string theory collapses as a viable theory of anything, much less everything.
ACD
Hi, I enjoy your blog. Your post on string theory made me wonder whether you've bumped into the connection between higher dimensional geometry and music, but there are some interesting connections.
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2006/07/07/950.aspx
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1582330,00.html
Am actually writing about one of the "On an Overgrown Path" pieces, which makes a very interesting use of scales ...
Dmitri Tymoczko
Assistant Professor of Music
Princeton
http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri