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String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet

#21

Post by sampo »

Merrill wrote: post #8
scottlocklin wrote: post #2

FWIIW, Horgan is a well known science writer and author of a 1996 book called "the end of science" which pointed out that science in general and physics in particular has reached a point where there is no appreciable forward progress and is obsessed with non falsifiable woo like string theory. It's a provocative book; and people have raised the issue that Kelvin said something similar 120 years ago, but it's really w…

There seems to be lots of forward progress in physics, e.g. in condensed matter physics, quantum computing, etc. Grand unified theories are sort of irrelevant so long as there are not measurable phenomena that cannot be explained without them.

> There seems to be lots of forward progress in physics, e.g. in condensed matter physics, quantum computing

The theory of quantum computing is based on real physics, unlike string theory. But we have no idea if or when we will be able to build a quantum computer that actually calculates something useful. So far the progress has been only in theory.

Edit: To downvoters, let's make a bet: In the next 18 years, no one will have used a quantum computer to break any encryption that hasn't also been broken by traditional computers?

Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet

#22

Post by knzhou »

scottlocklin wrote: post #19
knzhou wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a super unpopular position at the time (1996); pretty much the only prominent person in agreement with him was Nobel Prize Winner Phil Warren Anderson, who disagrees with him in many other respects. Ultimately many other writers came out in agreement on this issue at least; Woit and Smolin most notably, though others agreed. Ugh, almost everything about this narrative is wrong; see my other comment. Science writers…

Thousands of grad student careers, faculty appointments, glowing documentaries and ruined lives later and "oh, we knew that all along." They sure didn't act like they knew it at the time. Horgan deserves credit for making the right call. Even more credit because he wasn't even a physicist. Credit to Glashow, and apologies for forgetting him, but Horgan deserves his victory lap.

I mean, do you think literally everybody was doing string theory? There have always been plenty of theorists focused on more concrete things -- string theorists are not and have not been the majority.

Grad students entering even in the 90s knew they had to make a choice between concrete, more easily testable physics and a long-shot approach to quantum gravity. String theorists have stories of faculty going out of their way, back in grad school, to discourage them from going into it. (It wasn't just Glashow, either, it was most of the Harvard physics department.)

To say that string theory comprises all of theoretical physics is to uncritically accept the "me vs. the establishment" narrative some pop scientists put out. I think it does real damage inside the field, too, because it distorts the perspectives people have coming in.

Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet

#23

Post by AprilArcus »

dmix wrote: post #14

Michio Kaku has long been my least favourite of the celebrity talking head scientists. And he has some good competition for that label. His pop-science books tend to read more like coming from a Hollywood screenwriter than a careful and thoughtful scientific mind.

Remember when he literally sued to block the launch of the Cassini probe?

Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet

#24

Post by knzhou »

haolez wrote: post #4
scottlocklin wrote: post #2

FWIIW, Horgan is a well known science writer and author of a 1996 book called "the end of science" which pointed out that science in general and physics in particular has reached a point where there is no appreciable forward progress and is obsessed with non falsifiable woo like string theory. It's a provocative book; and people have raised the issue that Kelvin said something similar 120 years ago, but it's really w…

What’s wrong with complexity theory? I remember seeing a talk about it a long time ago and the concepts were super interesting, but I didn’t (I don’t) have the mathematical maturity to understand it in depth.

It hasn't become concrete enough to make sharp, striking, correct predictions. It turns out the real world is extremely messy. Complexity theory can produce specific predictions ("disease spread will follow a power law with a critical exponent of...") but they won't be quantitatively correct. Or it can produce correct predictions ("airplanes increase disease spread because they increase the global network's connectivity") but they're generally obvious, and certainly don't require the full formalism of complexity theory to get.

Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet

#25

Post by scarejunba »

AprilArcus wrote: post #23
dmix wrote: post #14

Michio Kaku has long been my least favourite of the celebrity talking head scientists. And he has some good competition for that label. His pop-science books tend to read more like coming from a Hollywood screenwriter than a careful and thoughtful scientific mind.

Remember when he literally sued to block the launch of the Cassini probe?

For others reading, this appears to be because he believed that in an accident the radio-thermal isotope generator on board Cassini would spread radioactive material all over the place.

Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet

#26

Post by magicalhippo »

whatshisface wrote: post #3

> Gaining access to the infinitesimal microscales where superstrings supposedly wriggle would require an accelerator 1,000 light years around. Has anyone ever proven that there aren't any better accelerator technologies left to be discovered? What about natural accelerators like the charges that build up and produce cosmic rays?

> What about natural accelerators like the charges that build up and produce cosmic rays?

As mentioned the benefit of artificial accelerators are that you can make the collisions happen right in the middle of the detectors, which is quite nice. You can also generate a lot of collisions, which is good because statistics require it.

That said, there are projects, such as this[1], utilizing natural accelerators. There's a technical talk about their results here[2]. The first part explains the system in more detail.

[1]: https://www.auger.org/index.php/cosmic-rays/detection

[2]: http://pirsa.org/17120007

Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet

#27

Post by beloch »

"The Nobel prize judges have always been sticklers for experimental proof."

One of the big challenges of devising a grand-unifying theory of everything is that, if it doesn't make different predictions than existing theories do in any context, it's experimentally unverifiable. We can hope for a unifying theory that makes everything simpler, but it's far more likely that a theory that deals with all things at once will makes dealing with special cases harder. If such a theory is harder to work with and does not differ from special case theories that are easier to apply, why bother?

Of course, a unifying theory probably will differ from existing theories in at least some contexts. They may be extremely high energy, gravity, etc. contexts that are beyond our current technology to test. String theory likely falls into this category. The question is, how much resources should we pour into developing a theory before demanding that its differences with currently accepted theories become testable?

Quite frankly, answering this question is above my pay-grade. Scientific history is full of both dead-ends and things that were initially thought to be useless that have since become the foundations of entire fields. How do we know which string theory is? If we cut funding to string theory development, are we cutting off a field that will one day be essential? By continuing to pour funds into string theory, are we funding a dead end and starving several other things that might have been revelations?

Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet

#28

Post by undershirt »

anon1m0us wrote: post #20
scottlocklin wrote: post #2

FWIIW, Horgan is a well known science writer and author of a 1996 book called "the end of science" which pointed out that science in general and physics in particular has reached a point where there is no appreciable forward progress and is obsessed with non falsifiable woo like string theory. It's a provocative book; and people have raised the issue that Kelvin said something similar 120 years ago, but it's really w…

oh, I wonder if this is fitting with my current obsession with truth and lies. Not only are we increasing the number of lies in the world, using lies to get what we want has become more and more acceptable through social media, politics, capitalism, etc... But we are increasing the number of things you can't prove are lies. You can't falsify me, therefore I am right. OMG , this is very religious . This is all because…

I wonder if you might try the subtler word myths instead of lies.

Reality is formless, and we reason about it through what Foucault called grids I think, where every structure that we impose on it to bring something new into view necessarily obscures something else.

This is a bit like what Alan Watts talks about when saying that stories are like music, in which it wouldn’t have any form unless there were notes left out.

I think of a fact as a compressed statement of experience in service to some story. This is like the surprising observation that bits of information seem to always have some color that cannot be captured[1].

And there is the type of myth I like to call Fruith, as opposed to Truth. Most myths comprising culture might be these—in that we pretend things are true in the belief that it brings something more important to fruition, and that is the truth which overrides the seminal “lie”.

I see your despair, but I think it’s bigger than what you may be suggesting.

[1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet

#29

Post by JumpCrisscross »

beloch wrote: post #27

"The Nobel prize judges have always been sticklers for experimental proof." One of the big challenges of devising a grand-unifying theory of everything is that, if it doesn't make different predictions than existing theories do in any context, it's experimentally unverifiable. We can hope for a unifying theory that makes everything simpler, but it's far more likely that a theory that deals with all things at once wil…

> if it doesn't make different predictions than existing theories do in any context, it's experimentally unverifiable

Given the number of holes in and between our theories, this seems unlikely. And there are still a lot of experiments yielding surprising results in fundamental physics.

Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet

#30

Post by Ma8ee »

knzhou wrote: post #10

It's important to avoid conflating string theorists with all theoretical physicists. Plenty of people in particle physics either don't believe in string theory or don't think it can make useful predictions any time soon, even if it were assumed true. Furthermore, the vast majority of people called "string theorists" don't even work on traditional string theory day to day, but on more concrete ideas that have been par…

String theory has completely dominated the field of theoretical high energy physics for decades. There have been some notable contrarians, e.g., Smolin and Woit with their books. But those haven't changed the fact that it has been very hard to get a faculty position in theoretical hep for decades without being a string theorist. It is only the last few years that has changed. In other words, it's not a biased view that string theory has completely dominated the field for more than 30 years.

Btw, the reason we aren't reading Feynman's take is that he died in 1988, not that he's too busy doing physics. He was very successful in doing both high quality physics and expanding his popular reach.

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