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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

#61

Post by perl4ever »

Animats wrote: post #36

This can happen in academia. I went through Stanford CS, finishing in 1985. That was about when it was clear that "expert systems" were not going to lead to Strong AI Real Soon Now, or, indeed, much of anywhere. But many faculty were in deep denial about that. The "AI Winter" followed. There was little progress until machine learning finally took off about two decades later.

I still remember reading an article about Doug Lenat and Cyc a long time ago in some pop sci publication and thinking, surely you can't be serious...

I don't understand how people ever thought such things could become equivalent to human minds, but I don't think that's my insight, but that others' thinking was blinkered for some reason.

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

#62

Post by comicjk »

sampo wrote: post #21
Merrill wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Breaking a cryptosystem is not a good metric for whether quantum computers have become useful. Calculating energy levels of molecules, for example, is a much easier problem in the near term, and is of benefit to humanity. Breaking a cryptosystem takes vastly more and higher-quality qubits, and the end result is just that everyone upgrades to different math.

As a computational chemist, I assign 50% probability to the idea that quantum computers will be able to do useful molecular calculations cheaper than classical computers (for large batches) within 18 years. For small batches, classical computers will remain cheapest much longer because of overhead.

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

#63

Post by w0mbat »

doubleunplussed wrote: post #49
Ma8ee wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Im a physicist, and whilst Im an experimentalist, I work in the same departments as theorists and I don't know a single string theorist. I heard of one, once. A friend od a friend, but I never met them. Most high energy physicists seem to be working on supersymmetry.

I've been hearing good things about the super-asymmetry research from CalTech that was confirmed by Fermilab.

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

#64

Post by SolarNet »

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…

> 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.

Yea, but then it isn't a unifying theory it's basically just a giant case statement of "if relativistic motion, use relativistic motion equation". That isn't a unifying theory, that's more like a programming library that does everything.

A unifying theory would have to allow one to unify all of the existing equations we have as well as synthesize new ones; not just the ones we already have. It probably doesn't exist. It smacks too much of an NP-hard compression problem, where if we have enough output of the function we can find the minimal representation of it, but applied to everything in the universe.

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

#65

Post by eth0up »

sampo wrote: post #21
Merrill wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If anyone by the name of Crown Sterling takes your bet, don't trust 'em. They've got unified merrygorithms and kwuantum top hats.

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

#66

Post by namirez »

mantap wrote: post #60
wuliwong wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a lot of people also think there is a "true" theory that will perfectly explain how the universe evolves Doesn't Godel's incompleteness theorems make this doubtful? Logic was not my area of focus but I thought the basic idea was that there is always going to be some un-answerable question(s) or un-provable answers in any consistent theory[1]? I'm pretty sure there is not significant work using non-axiomatic math, I'…

No, for instance you can perfectly describe the rules of Conway's Game of Life, and if you were an artificial intelligence living in the Game of Life you could presumably figure out the rules quite easily through experimentation. You wouldn't be able to prove those are the rules though, you'd have to make some assumptions that the rules didn't change in space and time, and that they weren't a manifestation of some mo…

> you can perfectly describe the rules of Conway's Game of Life, and if you were an artificial intelligence living in the Game of Life you could presumably figure out the rules quite easily

I'm not so sure about this. It reminds me of the quote "If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't".

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

#67

Post by Koshkin »

fabiosussetto wrote: post #40

"It would culminate the ancient human quest for knowledge, which began when the first of our ancestors asked, "Why?"" I'm always baffled when I read these kind of quotes, especially coming from such smart people. Do they just forget that our theories are models of reality? I personally believe that there are no wave functions or vibrating membranes out there, as there are no "triangles". These are just names for our…

Models (mental or not) work by analogy, and analogies can be very convincing in general and in answering the question “why” in particular. That is all that is normally needed; unfortunately, some people are hard to satisfy.

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

#68

Post by empath75 »

sampo wrote: post #21
Merrill wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

String theory is 100% based on real physics, and it’s very difficult to make a theory like it which agrees with all known physics — that it doesn’t create any new falsifiable results is certainly a problem, but it could very easily be falsified by making nonsensical predictions about everyday phenomena, which it doesn’t do.

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

#69

Post by heroHACK17 »

String theory is probably the one scientific topic I spend the most of my free time learning about. It is fascinating. I have read Brian Greene's 'The Hidden Reality' over five times, I think.

I recently watched his conversation with Sam Harris and was intrigued by a point Brian made, albeit about quantum mechanics and the 'many worlds' theory.

Brian claims that he doesn't think the many worlds theory holds water because it makes an assumption about what happens before some object is measured (A) and after that same object is measured (A'): while many worlds claims that all possibilities are indeed realized, Brian claims that we just don't know for sure what happens between events (A) and (A'); he claims that a unified theory would explain what happens between those events.

In any case, that's just me rambling about it. Thanks for the post :)

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