Mandatory string theory introduction for the novice https://xkcd.com/171/
String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet
71–80 of 162 posts
Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet
#72the whole time I just kept thinking, "but... when they put up their money in 2002 it was invested right?? The charity got something more like $2880? why aren't they telling us!?"
Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet
#73As a long-time antagonist of Kaku and string theory / supersymmetry, Peter Woit naturally has a blog entry[1] on this that's worth a look.
He points out Prof Gordon Kane upped[2] the ante:
> By 2020 there will be a Nobel Prize for a string- or unification- or supersymmetry-based theory or explanation or experimental discovery.
And goes on to give us some insight into Kaku's current point of view. Spoiler: he thinks string theory will give us the "God Equation" when it reaches its final form!
Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why does he get more credit for not being a physicist?? So he made an uninformed conjecture that turned out to be true? (whether it is true also seems up in the air right now?) I don't understand why that deserves kudos. I would very much prefer top scientists to listen to people who know what they're talking about, instead of paying heed to the less informed on the off chance their wild speculation bears fruit.
That's biased.
I will only accept the correct answer from people I choose. Experts in the field should provide the most insight overtime but don't ignore non-experts. That's foolish and limiting.
Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you say, "... it's bigger than what you may be suggesting." What is ... "it"? My despair? I understand your point about lies vs myths. If I substitute the two words in my mind according to your explanation of myths and their purpose, then everything actually does seem to make more sense and is more acceptable in my mind. If someone tells a lie the connotation is that it's meant to harm others to their own benefi…
The problem is that strongly-held myths can still cause a lot of harm to others. While it may be understandable for people to cling to some myths, we should still work to stamp them out, but compassionately.
Not sure if you got it, but it’s myths all the way down. It’s only by the values of one myth that another should be “stamped out.”
The book Sapiens covers this well, that you cannot escape the prison of a myth without being contained by one larger.
Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet
#76It'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…
It should really be called String Hypothesis. Theories in science are generally for something that's near 100% proven.
Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
When you say, "... it's bigger than what you may be suggesting." What is ... "it"? My despair? I understand your point about lies vs myths. If I substitute the two words in my mind according to your explanation of myths and their purpose, then everything actually does seem to make more sense and is more acceptable in my mind. If someone tells a lie the connotation is that it's meant to harm others to their own benefi…
“It” being what I understand about your philosophy of truth and what you mean by “accurate”. It’s hard to describe directly, since I’ve thought about this from a bunch of different sources that I struggle to synthesize, but I recommend this short story by Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling[1], which I think does a great job of capturing that ineffable, paradoxical nature of truth.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...
Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A good rule of thumb is that if you hear ”confirmed” and ”symmetry” together, the conversation isn’t about supersymmetry.
Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet
#79Can it even win a Nobel? I thought the Nobel is not awarded for math, and string theory is just math, with no verifiable real-world side effects or consequences that I'm aware of.
Nobel prizes skew heavily towards experimental physics and theory prizes require experimental verification. That's why Higgs had to wait until 2013 even though absolutely everyone was convinced that a Higgs boson existed for decades before that.
Even Einstein didn't win the Nobel for GR, but for the photoelectric effect. Back in the day when high energy physicists kept discovering new particles and there was a short delay between theory and experiment, there were more Nobels awarded to theorists for this, and I think that golden age of grand unification progress created a false impression that theory work is expected to win Nobel prizes just for being good theory work.
But if you look at the last dozen or so Nobels, they are all for describing observable phenomena or conducting novel experiments: (lasers, discovering exoplanets, detecting gravity waves, theoretical descriptions of phase transitions of matter, LEDs, mass of the Neutrino, etc.) It would take very convincing experimental confirmation before String theory wins a Nobel, but there are lots of other prizes awarded to string theorists, and Witten even won a Fields medal, which is more prestigious than a Nobel to the math community.
Re: String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet
#80> characteristic radiation from black holes and Creation
Wait, did the author just refer to the Big Bang as "Creation" with a capital 'C'? Since when did Judeo-Christian mythology (or whatever mythology you think "Creation with a capital 'C'" means in the author's culture, inferring some creative agent in the "beginnings" of the known universe) become relevant in this article's context?