who else can understand string theory and general relativivt

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To be honest, I sometimes feel that certain physicists lose touch with reality by being buried in the math too far. Chemists are susceptible to this as well, especially the computational chemists that simulate matter reactions that likely could never exist on their computers. (I had a few friends in grad school that fell within the second group.) Now, that does not mean that their work is bad, just that it does not explain real world occurrences. Maybe way out in the deep universe their calculated situation may exist, but not here on Earth. Crunching numbers is fine, but it must have a correlation with something that really exists before it becomes valuable information to me. I am a visual thinker/learner, so that translates into how I approach my research topics. I have to "see" what I am after or the whole thing is pointless from the start.

Yes, the best way to measure how well you understand a difficult topic is to be able to teach someone the topic in their words, not yours. Pictures and diagrams are sometimes a good way of doing this without needing complicated mathematics. However, there are times where the math is unavoidable.

Everyone is making good points. If math falls short as a descriptive or explanatory tool, I submit it has as much to do with the persons fluency with the math as it does the math itself. Some people seem to have a deep immediate grasp of functions and other constructs. Math really speaks to them. I cannot imagine they got that way without looking a lot of graphics and diagrams. But who can visualize more than 3 dimensions (or 4, by imagining movement)? No one, I think. Because of this, I think explanations verbal or graphical must necessarily fall short for a topic like string theory. Not that they are useless, just incomplete.

The description of dimensions 5 through 11 being "compacted" or "curled up" in our 4D world has always irked me. It seems to be a way of placating a reader/listener, like the way humans invented creation myths where a simple "No one knows and you should be suspicious of anyone who says they know" would have done nicely. The only way I expect an 11 dimensional system can be adequately described is with math. I do like those animated gifs like the one on this tesseract entry. I bet those things are generated by formulas before any human actually imagines them.

I can readily visualize up to 12-D in my mind, but that is because I understand point group symmetry relationships in matter and how that is applied over space dimensions. Each one has a particular functionality associated with it. Some are rotational, some are translational, etc. These functions can be represented by mathematical equations that you hinted on above.

Wow! So are dimensions 5-12 "curled up" in 1-4? Can your visualizations be reproduced faithfully in any media? There's all kinds of images in a search for PGS.

Also, is ARTICLE: There exists a classical model of the photon after all related directly to String Theory?

Researchers at MIT have already found striking similarities to the de Broglie-Bohm theory.

No, they do not curl up in the ones that I can visualize. (I have seen the curled 10-D brane depictions and those are not what I perceive to be of that dimensionality.) Higher dimensionalities coexist in ways that do not seem to make sense to us (being on a lower dimension). For example, we tend to think that you cannot have two things at the same exact place and at the exact time. But, with higher dimensionality interacting within our own dimensionality, it can and does happen at those intersection places.

I can give you a visual example using a 3-D object onto a 2-D ultra-thin plane. Take an empty soda can (3-D object), squash it with your foot. It is now looking much like it would on a 2-D plane, except that the can would be only as thin as the plane. This would mean that both the top, middle and bottom of the can would have to exist within the same space within the plane. Now put that image into a 1-D thin line, even more would have to coexist. The net effect is we lose some information about the object when transferring it into another lower dimension due to the way it can coexist, which we perceive is a violation of the laws of physics, yet it is not. (I think this is why we cannot understand dark matter/energy at this point in time, as it has a much higher dimensionality than we think it does.)

No, I have no way of translating what I see over to a media, they are too complex. I have not seen anything on the internet that is close to what I "see". My artistic abilities are not very good to begin with. My sister got all of that talent in my family and I got the rest.

Thank you. Nicely put. I never thought of our 3 spatial dimensions as co-existing on a 1D line. Though my conception of dimensions > 4 definitely did involve co-existence. I'm especially glad to know you cannot draw and have not seen an adequate graphic. I'd be surprised if it were possible to draw it in a way that would satisfy me. Now please telepathically convey your visualization, lol.

Interesting. I have seen some articles recently about droplets behaving like photons in the double-slit exp.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... 53637/?all

This article, published last month, by Brian Greene is very user friendly/easy to read and maximally accessible.
I am really looking forward to the next experiment with the LHC this Northern Spring.

Nice article and video.