Excerpt
Robert Oppenheimer was fond of proposing that physics and poetry were becoming indistinguishable. In "The Grand Design," Cambridge theorist Stephen Hawking and Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow seem to suggest that physics and metaphysics are also growing closer. They point out that the unified field theory that physicists, including Einstein, spent the better part of the 20th century trying to construct, probably can't exist. Models of the universe are changing radically. We now live in a world in which many physicists have come to believe there are not merely three dimensions (plus time) but 10 or possibly 11.
Our scientific thinking has always tended to reflect its era. Some believe this is because we need a model or an idea emerging from our social and intellectual environment before we set about seeking the appropriate evidence. Science fiction, for instance, quite frequently "seeds" a notion into the scientific community before a physicist does the math and provides the evidence, though certain ideas, if born outside their time, might wait centuries before they are recognized.
You MEAN Star Trek MAY have it right?! Beam me up Scotty.
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