In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A...
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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