Hasn't ChatGPT solved string theory yet?
Approaching 50 Years of String Theory
71–80 of 138 posts
Re: Approaching 50 Years of String Theory
#72I thought Brian Greene did a great job interviewing Edward Witten (Fields Medal winner) on the World Science Festival Youtube channel [1]. I also just really enjoy Brian Greene, his books, and the World Science Festival Youtube channel. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAbP0magTVY
The OP is about that video, though one wouldn't know it from a web page that won't download. I've put an archive.org link in the toptext now.
Re: Approaching 50 Years of String Theory
#73String theory has always seemed intuitively wrong to me. From Wikipedia:
>In theories of particle physics based on string theory, the characteristic length scale of strings is assumed to be on the order of the Planck length, or 10E−35 meters
Yet electrons repel each other over distances of many meters by I think the virtual exchange of photons. How on earth would that work? How does your photo string know to head to an electron string trillions and trillions of times it's length away?
As far as I can tell the field became popular for sociological reasons that you could get grants for it and the like rather than any connection to reality(?)
Re: Approaching 50 Years of String Theory
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the grift can continue
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.
>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.
This is just a lie though. Non-Euclidean geometry is a mathematical model of how distances behave on non-linear spaces. Nobody ever believed it to be a "fundamental mistruth", even suggesting it would look ridiculous. It would be akin to denying linear algebra, even the meaning is unclear.
That the physical reality of space is not linear was a shocking revelation, since all human experience and basically every experiment done up until that point indicated otherwise.
Re: Approaching 50 Years of String Theory
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought her rant about bullshit papers was pretty convincing and poignant.
The problem with sabine is that she's become the worst person to make a correct point for the wrong reasons If you do research it becomes pretty apparent that a high number papers are not great. There's varying issues, but a big one is that the funding model incentivises pumping out papers which are often of low quality, researching whatever happens to be in vogue at the moment Literally everyone I've ever talked to…
If I understood this, you agree with Sabine, but since she's "in bed with right wing grifters" she should not be listened to?
This is not very persuasive.
Re: Approaching 50 Years of String Theory
#76String theory has always seemed intuitively wrong to me. From Wikipedia: >In theories of particle physics based on string theory, the characteristic length scale of strings is assumed to be on the order of the Planck length, or 10E−35 meters Yet electrons repel each other over distances of many meters by I think the virtual exchange of photons. How on earth would that work? How does your photo string know to head to…
You're being somewhat unfairly voted down, it's a legitimate questions because the popular media so grossly misrepresents what string theory is, especially in their visuals.
It's hard to visualise in 3D, but if you cut down the spatial dimensions to just 1D (a line), then theories like string theory just turn the infinitely thin mathematical line into a tube. You can picture a tube that vibrates, or has waves in its cross-section. Don't think of the the "strings" as actual little loops moving around in space, they're a modification of what space is.
You can even do the same kind of line->tube extension of a space with even more extra "loop" dimensions than the number of base dimensions. AFAIK the current theories have 10 total, of which 3 are the usual "large" dimensions of space, the rest are "small" and rolled up like the tube example.
Re: Approaching 50 Years of String Theory
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> m*nority 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..
They do the same thing with the i in “doing” in another post. It seems like just a typo this person sometimes makes.
Re: Approaching 50 Years of String Theory
#78String theory has always seemed intuitively wrong to me. From Wikipedia: >In theories of particle physics based on string theory, the characteristic length scale of strings is assumed to be on the order of the Planck length, or 10E−35 meters Yet electrons repel each other over distances of many meters by I think the virtual exchange of photons. How on earth would that work? How does your photo string know to head to…
You're being somewhat unfairly voted down, it's a legitimate questions because the popular media so grossly misrepresents what string theory is, especially in their visuals. It's hard to visualise in 3D, but if you cut down the spatial dimensions to just 1D (a line), then theories like string theory just turn the infinitely thin mathematical line into a tube. You can picture a tube that vibrates, or has waves in its…
Even so I don't get how electrons a meter apart interact through that stuff, as opposed to the electrical fields which spread out through space and so interact with other electrons as featured in quantum field theory which is what physicists use to actually calculate physical results, as opposed to string theory which fails to calculate actual physical results.
"if you cut down the spatial dimensions to just 1D" doesn't sound very physical to me.
I'm maybe being downvoted fairly. I studied physics and it don't think it's a misunderstanding of popularisation or that string theory is untestable, I just think it's straight wrong and not how the physical universe works.
Re: Approaching 50 Years of String Theory
#79People 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…
I am old enough to remember when string theory was expected to explain and unify all forces and predict everything. Sadly, it failed to deliver on that promise. 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 anythi…
string boot framework
Re: Approaching 50 Years of String Theory
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're being somewhat unfairly voted down, it's a legitimate questions because the popular media so grossly misrepresents what string theory is, especially in their visuals. It's hard to visualise in 3D, but if you cut down the spatial dimensions to just 1D (a line), then theories like string theory just turn the infinitely thin mathematical line into a tube. You can picture a tube that vibrates, or has waves in its…
Even so I don't get how electrons a meter apart interact through that stuff, as opposed to the electrical fields which spread out through space and so interact with other electrons as featured in quantum field theory which is what physicists use to actually calculate physical results, as opposed to string theory which fails to calculate actual physical results. "if you cut down the spatial dimensions to just 1D" does…
> Even so I don't get how electrons a meter apart interact through that stuff
Very roughly: It's possible for point-like (or tiny looped) particles to interact as long as they take every possible path instead of just the one path that would cause a collision. How you interpret this is... up for debate. I prefer the many-world interpretation (MWI), but not everyone agrees.
> "if you cut down the spatial dimensions to just 1D" doesn't sound very physical to me
That's just a simplification to aid understanding, it's now how the theory actually works.