The guiding principle of the universe is symmetry, in the sense that all natural laws are symmetry laws. Another guiding principle is simplicity. That does however not imply that Nature itself is "simple" at a fundamental scale, on the contrary: More degrees of liberty conduces to complication to such extreme that it is ... random. Random means complicated. This is the punch line of Random Dynamics, a theory developed by Holger Bech Nielsen at the Bohr Institute. 
Unlike the Grand Unification scheme, in the Random Dynamics approach the natural laws are expected to get more complicated at higher energy. It is only by the formulation "the fundamental world machinery is essentially random" that the Random Dynamics model is simple. If one would formulate the details of the "laws", it would be exceedingly complicated! The ambition of Random Dynamics is to "derive" all the known physical laws as an unavoidable consequence of a random fundamental "world machinery". The latest idea is that the future "tries" to change the present in order to avoid the creation of a new - unnatural - particle. Interesting.
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I touched on this in my rant about Obama winning the Nobel, but Kanazawa is wrong. Here is a quote from the NYT article:
Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.
Kanazawa hints in one of his footnotes that Oriental creativity may be stunted by the use of ideographic script instead of a phonetic script, and I am willing to believe that that may be true. But I don't believe that the East Asians have a genetic deficit when it comes to creating things. Like the Ukrainians I think they have several cultural hangups that hold them back.
South Korea uses a phonetic script called Hangul in conjunction with Chinese Characters. If I remember wiki correctly the Chinese characters are almost dead in everyday use, so most of the population uses Hangul exclusively. If any deficit in creativity is caused by the use of ideographic characters then such deficit should be erased in SK first since it is the one NE Asian country to have a phonetic script. I think we will know the answer in ten years, if not sooner for SK.
But considering that Arafat, Obama and Jimmy Carter have all won Nobels we will have to find a different measure of creativity.
Perhaps we can use Fields medals.
Does this prove intelligent design?
A theory does not prove anything.
I have only a bluffer's understanding of advanced physics but I must put in my two cents.
A theory claiming to be scientific must be falsifiable within human limits. This is the famous criteria advocated by Karl Popper. The claims of string theory however can only be tested in conditions simulating the Big Bang, which is very convenient for the theorists as it effectively rules out any conceivable experiment. Unfettered from the boring constraints of proof the theorists are then free to makes all kinds of outlandish claims; including speculations on 13 or 15 dimensions rolled up into into invisibility, baby universes, a potential choice of millions of universes for the Creation due to the manner in which the initial conditions can be set. Its a metaphorical kick in the groin for the likes of Albert Einstien who spent his time wondering whether God had any choice in creating the Universe whenever he was not chasing women.
Recall that rationalists such as Bertrand Russell mocked St Thomas Aquinas for wondering how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, how the positivists laughed at this stupidity! The irony now is that as Sheldon Glashow points out this most advanced of physics speculations stripped of the mathematical verbiage, sound very much like the argument of the medieval scholastics. The larger lesson that I draw is that while God can be approached through science, one shouldn't try to understand Him solely through it. As the psalmist intimates:
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts ...
Many have noted that current speculation on the nature of the universe is basically like medieval church debates. The same arguments expressed in different form. Even reversing the direction of flow of time is a very old idea. There are no new ideas, only new generations that haven't heard them yet.
Considering symmetry, and looking at the picture of Nielsen, it seems that his shirt collar is even too complicated for him to cope with.
Perhaps, on the other hand, he is a walking metaphor of how Random Dynamics can affect fundamental world machinery.
Anon.
Maybe a hidden hand from the future is sabotaging his shirt. I also have experienced that something there "hates" neat shirts.
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