61–70 of 138 posts
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Might as well fund someone researching whether quantum theory run on little gnomes, if there is no serious path to verification after 50 years, why not quantum gnomes?
Ideally, one should explore all possibilities. It is remarkable how far "merely" predicting the next word has taken us.
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i dont think it has anything to do with threats to way of life. It has everything to do with public subsidy of physics that has pushed peripherary mathematics forward without much to show for actual physics advancements. New observations cause changes to string theory not validation of string theory. String theorists can keep do*ng their string theory but its time to subsidize something(so else and see if that leads…
Theoretical physics is subsidizing a handful of people sitting at white boards. Even accepting the premise that string theory is wrong I can list hundreds of ways the US budget spews money down black holes orders of magnitude bigger. The spending on string theory isn’t even a rounding error compared to the way my tax dollars are allocated to special interest pork. But only string theory impinges on a generation of cr…
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Theoretical physics is subsidizing a handful of people sitting at white boards. Even accepting the premise that string theory is wrong I can list hundreds of ways the US budget spews money down black holes orders of magnitude bigger. The spending on string theory isn’t even a rounding error compared to the way my tax dollars are allocated to special interest pork. But only string theory impinges on a generation of cr…
No, its subsidizing a handful of people sitting at whiteboards at the expense of different camps of people sitting at whiteboards and the result is nefarious because you dont see what could have been if we minimized string theory funding after a decade or two of poor performance instead of going all in on it for five decades. We gave up decades of potentially actually figuring something new out by going harder on str…
Let me try to rephrase where I am coming from. I'm going to accept there is a good argument that some science funding should be redirected towards theoretical physicists pursuing alternate approaches.
1. The focus towards this matter in online media circles is vastly disproportionate to the relative impact this has on anyone's life compared to the multitude of other intra-silo disputes across the federal budget. It's not irrelevant to the conversation or at least my subsection of the conversation. It is interesting to me what debates burst through the noise and get traction outside of their own little world. Maybe 1% of the people debating string theory online actually understand a micro-fraction of this stuff. To be clear, I don't claim to be in that 1%. I'm interested in how that happened and the cultural+platform reasons for it. I'm interested in why alongside those genuinely interested in alternative approaches to theoretical physics this topic attracts tons of people who just lump it in with their "they are all lying to you" worldview. Nothing this obscure, incomprehensible, and yes irrelevant to most peoples lives should have organically reached such breakout status. I can ask some of the 22 year old bros at my jiu jitsu gym what they think of string theory and they will tell me it's all part of the omni-conspiracy. It's literally the only science thing they know. It's not like they understand a word of the debate or know of/care about a single other intra-discipline debate about the allocation of resources. 2. No small part of this is the unfortunate emergence of the online narcissist huckster and nothing plays better in online circles than "they" don't want you to know the truth that "I" have the true answer but "Big X" won't admit it. This clown show distracts from the real merits of the relative positions. But it does get the charismatic narcissist a slot on general interest "they are all always lying to you" podcasts. 3. Obviously this doesn't apply to legit physicists and good faith normies who simply disagree with the existing dogma. That's not who I'm talking about. That said, theoretical physics is bargain basement cheap. I don't need to build a supercollider the size of Mars. I don't need to sequence a trillion genomes. I need a laptop, a whiteboard, some time to think, and a bit of ancillary budget. Surely there are enough allied tech/crypto heterodox rich dudes at this point to fund a Center for Heterodox ToEs and staff it with 50 bright people to prove they have something to add. I can't pretend to have the chops to analyze Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity vs String Theory. I do know if I really thought I had the answer to the universe and his bankroll/connections I'd just fund a real research effort to prove it vs. doing the podcast circuit ad infinitum.
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Theoretical physics is subsidizing a handful of people sitting at white boards. Even accepting the premise that string theory is wrong I can list hundreds of ways the US budget spews money down black holes orders of magnitude bigger. The spending on string theory isn’t even a rounding error compared to the way my tax dollars are allocated to special interest pork. But only string theory impinges on a generation of cr…
I know absolutely nothing about string theory, or the culture of high-energy physics, but I don't buy the pecuniary argument you are making. You aren't considering the downwind effects of allowing academic rot. The Bourbaki—and their acolytes—also sponged up only a tiny amount of academic funding, but a fever in the pulpit can spread out into the pews; we've seen the "New Math" paradigm damage a generation of primary…
People often say that the problem with string theory is that it doesn't make any prediction, but that's not quite right: the problem is that it can make almost any prediction you want it to make. It is really less of a "theory" in its own right and more of a mathematical framework for constructing theories. One day some unusual observation will come along from somewhere, and that will be the loose end that allows som…
And there is no known single real world experiment that can rule out string theory while keeping general relativity and quantum mechanics intact.
More accurately, string theory is not wrong (because it just cannot be wrong). Because it does not predict anything and cannot invalidate anything, it does not help to advance our understanding of how to integrate general relativity and quantum mechanics.
It should not be called theory - maybe set of mathematical tools or whatever.
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Theoretical physics is subsidizing a handful of people sitting at white boards. Even accepting the premise that string theory is wrong I can list hundreds of ways the US budget spews money down black holes orders of magnitude bigger. The spending on string theory isn’t even a rounding error compared to the way my tax dollars are allocated to special interest pork. But only string theory impinges on a generation of cr…
No, its subsidizing a handful of people sitting at whiteboards at the expense of different camps of people sitting at whiteboards and the result is nefarious because you dont see what could have been if we minimized string theory funding after a decade or two of poor performance instead of going all in on it for five decades. We gave up decades of potentially actually figuring something new out by going harder on str…
As a society we can't place excess faith in the orthodox positions of institutions. We all know they can be rigid, wrong, and lock out dissenting views. But society today seems to embrace heterodoxy for its own sake the way perhaps in the past orthodoxy was just accepted on pure faith and there is a vast media ecosystem happy to promote (ie monetize) this worldview. Just because something is heterodox doesn't make it right.
Have a wonderful weekend all.
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Hossenfelder is not really comparable to Collier. Collier's video is critical of string theory as a testable framework but she ultimately still supports people who do research in string theory. Most of her criticism is with media coverage of string theory, not the research or the researchers. Hossenfelder has gone off the "the physics establishment is all idiots and they are suppressing the real physics" deep end and…
I'm not a fan of Hossenfelder, especially for casting quacks like Weinstein, but AFAICT she isn't about "suppressing the real physics" but more of a "establishment physics is wasting money and time, and a lot is equally bad/good as some alternative physics."
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Non-Euclidean geometry (geometric axioms in which one postulate is rejected such that the 3 angles of a triangle are not exactly 180 degrees) was considered a meaningless word game and fundamental mistruth. Later, non-Euclidean geometry was actually essential to modern physics. It's intellectually sketchy to judge future value by the present.
you are mixing up gambling spend vs whole industry spend. If string theory was a small handful of people making up a small m*nority of physics departments like non-euclidea geometry research was that would be fine. Its huge swaths of most physics departments and a huge suck on research funding. For that kind of spend you better show results because you are in production phase at that point not lotto ticket moonshit p…
There's maybe a couple or few hundred-ish in the whole world that focus on it. And they don't need much money because it's pretty much all math.
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Non-Euclidean geometry (geometric axioms in which one postulate is rejected such that the 3 angles of a triangle are not exactly 180 degrees) was considered a meaningless word game and fundamental mistruth. Later, non-Euclidean geometry was actually essential to modern physics. It's intellectually sketchy to judge future value by the present.
Might as well fund someone researching whether quantum theory run on little gnomes, if there is no serious path to verification after 50 years, why not quantum gnomes?
I imagine this is what you would have sounded like 100 years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non-Euclidean geometry (geometric axioms in which one postulate is rejected such that the 3 angles of a triangle are not exactly 180 degrees) was considered a meaningless word game and fundamental mistruth. Later, non-Euclidean geometry was actually essential to modern physics. It's intellectually sketchy to judge future value by the present.
you are mixing up gambling spend vs whole industry spend. If string theory was a small handful of people making up a small m*nority of physics departments like non-euclidea geometry research was that would be fine. Its huge swaths of most physics departments and a huge suck on research funding. For that kind of spend you better show results because you are in production phase at that point not lotto ticket moonshit p…
Is this a typo? I see a lot of words being censored these days and I assumed it's because of some algorithms and visibility. That shouldn't be the case here tho..