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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

#141

Post by whatshisface »

Ma8ee wrote: post #140
whatshisface wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you mean "almost all PBS physics documentary budget dollars," I don't think almost all resources were bet on it.

From the money available for fundamental questions like quantum gravity and beyond standard model physics, almost all resources were bet on it. It's kind of cute how some people now are trying to rewrite history when it is more and more obvious that it was a dead end.

There has to be a couple of orders of magnitude difference between "funders thought it was the best bet for quantum gravity," and "it was all physicists did for thirty years, full stop."

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

#142

Post by SomeOldThrow »

knzhou wrote: post #95
SomeOldThrow wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is holography any more concrete than string theory? It is just as untestable.

You use it as a tool to compute what happens in real things, such as quark-gluon plasma or certain condensed matter systems.

We must not be discussing the same thing.

EDIT: yup, I am not knowledgable enough to be in this conversation.

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

#143

Post by Ma8ee »

whatshisface wrote: post #141
Ma8ee wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the money available for fundamental questions like quantum gravity and beyond standard model physics, almost all resources were bet on it. It's kind of cute how some people now are trying to rewrite history when it is more and more obvious that it was a dead end.

There has to be a couple of orders of magnitude difference between "funders thought it was the best bet for quantum gravity," and "it was all physicists did for thirty years, full stop."

I, nor anyone else I saw (I haven't read all comments), have claimed that that was what physics did for thirty years. If you read my comments you'll see that I have been quite careful to qualify my statements when it hasn't been blaringly obvious from context.

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

#144

Post by agota »

afiori wrote: post #139
mikorym wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage of being a mathematician is that the unifying theories for QM and GR just that, mathematical techniques to unify QM and GR. Unfortunatly, if you are a physicist, I assume your grants at some point will have the words "predictions" or "experiments" in them. But for someone focused on mathematics, string theory, quantum loop gravity (if that is what it's called) and all the others become tools and objects…

I recently got my hands on a book about the career of a esteemed professor and his students. One of the life lessons of one of his students was: "If you want to be called a mathematician prepare to be funded like a mathematician" Pure theoretical physicist might be in a comparable budget, but I think it is true that the lower expectations on math research is partly due to how cheap it is to fund.

What was the book?

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

#145

Post by agota »

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…

Thank you for mentioning the book, it sounds interesting!

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

#146

Post by dkrich »

Other than for fun and to donate to a good cause, I'm not sure why anyone would ever take the other side of a bet like this or the follow up one for the case of wine. The author is basically betting against an unlikely outcome and the challenger is betting on it, with no adjustment for the likelihood. This would be like offering a bet that a particular college football team won't win a national championship and getting even money that they will.

I realize this is outside the scope of the article, but I think it's worth noting because the author gets outsized credit for being correct despite not really offering an alternative. To be fair the author should have had to bet an alternate area that would win a Nobel prize before 2020, otherwise it's a push and each person's stake goes to charity.

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

#147

Post by jessriedel »

yk wrote: post #130
jessriedel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His statement can be true if you restrict it to "quantum gravity" jobs (of which string theory is one of many approaches, abeit the overwhelmingly most popular one). The other jobs you're talking about just don't try to answer the questions that string theory purports to addresses.

That is like understanding programming jobs as embedded Erlang. The thing is, that journalists really like to write about quantum gravity, but almost all theoretical physicist work on something else. (Roughly in the same sense that most lawyers don't work at the White House.)

I'm well aware of the distribution of theory jobs and what journalists like to write about. The point is that phenomenologists (and relativists, etc.) are necessary regardless of how dominant strings is. "All theory jobs" was simply a mistaken choice of category.

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

#148

Post by didibus »

sanxiyn wrote: post #104
didibus wrote: post #98

So is all this about the fact that String Theory just didn't turn out to be practically useful? Or is the theory no longer believer to hold weight given current observations?

It is not about being useful, it is about there being zero experimental evidence for string theory.

I'm really a commoner when it comes to physics, so indulge me if I don't make sense.

As I gather then, there's been no experiment showing evidence to String Theory, but all experimental result are also not contradicting it and fitting inside its models?

If so, I don't really understand how both these thing can be true at the same time. Is it that people criticize String Theory for kinda being too broad, so in a way, it allows too many things to be possible, but that also renders it useless for prediction, because it's not close enough to exactly what happens?

Like saying that the weather on any day must be between -100 and 100 celcius. It will be hard to find evidence to the contrary, but it's so broad that it's useless for any valuable predictions?

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

#149

Post by dragonwriter »

kelnos wrote: post #114
undershirt wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a matter of philosophy and opinion, not established fact.

> That's a matter of philosophy and opinion, not established fact.

If one takes “myth” to mean something that is itself believed without being falsifiable, it is true by necessity of any belief system with any content beyond statements about the subjective experience of the believer

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

#150

Post by wuliwong »

drdeca wrote: post #117
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'…

Presburger arithmetic is a decidable theory. "This means it is possible to algorithmically determine, for any sentence in the language of Presburger arithmetic, whether that sentence is provable from the axioms of Presburger arithmetic." If you don't understand what the incompleteness theorems say, be wary of citing them.

Not sure why I should be "wary." I was asking a question. If one should be wary of asking questions about something how could they ever learn?
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