Why not string theory? Because enough is enough • Hacker News Board

Re: Why not string theory? Because enough is enough

#21

Post by tamana » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 5:12 AM UTC

Steuard wrote: post #8

Speaking as a professor specializing in string theory, I'd say, "More power to her." I have no idea whether string theory gets too much attention relative to its actual value in modeling the real world, but I think one essential part of finding the right amount of attention for any physical theory is for theorists to make their best judgement about what's worth their time to study. In fact, it's quite comforting to m…

So you feel strong theory connects to reality, and is falsifiable and avoids "piling on epicycles"?

Will string theory be more parsimonious than the the more concrete model of physics it tries to model?

Re: Why not string theory? Because enough is enough

#22

Post by spectrum1234 » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 5:15 AM UTC

This ties in with my thinking that there is just too much funding to do research for the sake of research. Let the private sector work on moonshots if they want but more realistically no one should be researching super far out problems. Instead the agile "just in time" approach needs to be used in academia as well as private companies.

A good analogy is no one was trying to build electric cars fifty years ago but now they are. But they only are because progress has been made indirectly in other fields to make it worth it now.

Re: Why not string theory? Because enough is enough

#23

Post by spectrum1234 » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 5:15 AM UTC

This ties in with my thinking that there is just too much funding to do research for the sake of research. Let the private sector work on moonshots if they want but more realistically no one should be researching super far out problems. Instead the agile "just in time" approach needs to be used in academia as well as private companies.

A good analogy is no one was trying to build electric cars fifty years ago but now they are. But they only are because progress has been made indirectly in other fields to make it worth it now.

Re: Why not string theory? Because enough is enough

#24

Post by Retra » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 5:21 AM UTC

tamana wrote: post #20

Retra wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Particles themselves are just models of localized field quantizations. It's a bit analogous to how a person is just a quantification of the molecules they comprise. You can gain and lose new molecules by the millions, but you're still the same person -- like the crest of a wave. Anyway, particles repel because that is the nature of the fields they exist in. Electrons don't have to do anything 'to' each other to repel…

Quantification or quantization? (Autocorrect?)

Quantization. I don't use autocorrect, so it was probably my brain's auto-typing.

Re: Why not string theory? Because enough is enough

#25

Post by oska » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 5:30 AM UTC

spectrum1234 wrote: post #22

This ties in with my thinking that there is just too much funding to do research for the sake of research. Let the private sector work on moonshots if they want but more realistically no one should be researching super far out problems. Instead the agile "just in time" approach needs to be used in academia as well as private companies. A good analogy is no one was trying to build electric cars fifty years ago but now…

> A good analogy is no one was trying to build electric cars fifty years ago but now they are.

People were trying to make electric cars 120 years ago and succeeding. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#History

Re: Why not string theory? Because enough is enough

#26

Post by cygnus_a » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 5:31 AM UTC

i vote we change the name. "generalized quantum mechanical phenomena maybe" ... and we can rename quantum gravity to "generalized macroscopic versions of quantum phenomena maybe"

then we can add the "maybe" suffix to all the rest of our theories

Re: Why not string theory? Because enough is enough

#27

Post by MawNicker » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 5:31 AM UTC

spectrum1234 wrote: post #22

This ties in with my thinking that there is just too much funding to do research for the sake of research. Let the private sector work on moonshots if they want but more realistically no one should be researching super far out problems. Instead the agile "just in time" approach needs to be used in academia as well as private companies. A good analogy is no one was trying to build electric cars fifty years ago but now…

Babbage designed a computer almost 200 years ago. We need people to be working on moonshots. A lot of them will fail. When one finally succeeds it pierces the veil of "just in time" capitalistic motivation. The financial incentive is certainly perverse in this case. Everyone sells their ideas up front in a frenzied competition to exist. We need a lot more research for the sake of research. More varied and more useless. We need to find a way for people like Babbage to exist, at scale, while seeking whatever intrinsic motivations drive them. We likely won't be able to know if they're doing anything useful until they're done. Academia needs the ivory tower.

Re: Why not string theory? Because enough is enough

#28

Post by oaktowner » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 6:14 AM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #16

The author says that he "became more convinced [string theorists] are merely building a mathematical toy universe." The explanation for his conclusion was that they kept revising string theory in order to fit observations. I know little of string theory, so I am probably misreading his meaning, but isn't that how all science works? Create a model, then revise it when you get more data.

The author is a she.

Re: Why not string theory? Because enough is enough

#29

Post by lalalandland » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 6:50 AM UTC

stan_rogers wrote: post #19

Steuard wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a theory that string theory is more of a sociological phenomena than real science. I've got to say, that comes across as awfully dismissive toward a whole lot of very thoughtful people. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by it. Certainly all of the string theorists I've known (it's my profession) have talked as if they believed their work was involved in a "genuine attempt" to model reality. Maybe a physici…

And that, to put it succinctly, is the problem. In the pursuit of a Theory of Everything, you wind up with a Theory of Anything. If there's no particular reason why things are the way they are in this universe, then you're reduced to the simpler observationally-verifiable model anyway since the elegant overarching framework is essentially useless. It becomes a philosophy of the ought rather than a description of the…

The reality sting theory try to describe is more general than the reality we can observe. It's like finding the primes for what is possible. The meaning of the primes on the next level up is moot.

Re: Why not string theory? Because enough is enough

#30

Post by visarga » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 6:52 AM UTC

This is probably a naive question: can we input a bunch of particle interactions into a deep learning system and train it to predict the probability of future interactions? It would be like a "black box version" of physics. If we can predict, then we can find a more elegant mathematical notation and a more intuitive physical interpretation.

Machine learning can observe and learn patterns that are more complex than humans can grasp. What if the perfect Physics theory is more complex than humans can understand and possibly quite unintuitive in meaning? Then we won't like it and steer away from it, and that would be a bad thing in the end.