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The whole String Theory affair is amusing but also a sad spectacle. These people convinced the world they were geniuses, but ended up fleecing funding agencies and universities for millions with zero accountability and scientific progress.
The whole String Theory affair is amusing but also a sad spectacle. These people convinced the world they were geniuses, but ended up fleecing funding agencies and universities for millions with zero accountability and scientific progress.
The pattern is similar: an infinitely fascinating puzzle to solve full of interesting math with potentially revolutionary implications if only… if only… but not enough people ask if it’s the right math solving the right problems in the right way or if it’s even applicable.
This phenomenon of smart people being nerd sniped to this degree reminds me of that episode of Star Trek TNG where they figured out a way to possibly destroy the Borg by giving them an infinitely fascinating unsolvable geometry problem to ponder until they lost their minds.
I also see some similarity to how people get triggered and sucked into and addicted to spirals of culture war and political rage or fear mongering or other media driven mind traps. This is less intellectual but seems similar in that you’ve got this meme that hooks us and creates a discourse around it that hooks us more and not enough people poke their heads out of the vortex and say “hey everyone is this really this big of a deal?”
We should become skeptical when we see a big idea accrete a lot of sound and fury around it but it’s not producing much and the main focus of the community circling it is self referential fascination with the idea itself.
The whole String Theory affair is amusing but also a sad spectacle. These people convinced the world they were geniuses, but ended up fleecing funding agencies and universities for millions with zero accountability and scientific progress.
I think it just goes to show how desperate we are to find a unified theory after all this time and effort.
Is part of it that we just can’t test any of this because we can’t either examine a black hole or run an accelerator the diameter of the Moon’s orbit? Maybe planet nine if it exists will turn out to be a small primordial black hole within probe range, or we will locate a micro primordial black hole within the solar system. Would building an even bigger deeper into time gazing JWST help? I’ve gone down the black hole…
You can sometimes make models which can put these under various parts of the proverbial rug and, sure, claim we just need to build the next generation of experiment, but at that point what are you really doing? I suspect this is what "worse than you think" is trying to get at.
Been following this via proxy, i.e. Sabine Hossenfelder, for a few years. The charges are very solid afaict.
It must however be daunting to be a theoretical physicist right now. It seems like the field has been in a standstill for years. The advances in the 20th century were just eye-watering. The Standard Model is a mixed bag of stunningly accurate prediction (eg electron monopole moment [1]) vs the wildly inaccurate (eg the so-called "vacuum catastrophe" [2]).
And there are so many unanswered questions, like nobody really seems to know what particle generations are or why they exist. Or that particle masses can't be derived from first principles (or that the math can't be solved, I'm honestly not sure).
It seems like we have no intuition for a lot of this stuff because there's no analog in the real world. So we give names to things (eg color, spin) that are just abstract properties. Electromagnetism is tantalizingly simple. The strong nuclear force interacts with its own carrier particles so is far from simple. The mediating particles of the weak nuclear force were, I believe, the first evidence of the Higgs field (because they have mass) but again, not my speciality.
But here's the interesting part (to me): the human systems surrounding it. When progress slows in a field, you'll find the tendency of people to coalesce around certain ideas that may border on dogma because careers are built on reputation and nobody wants to be "wrong". Likewise, string theory has a lot of investment in it. People have built careers on it. Nobody wants to throw that away.
The LHC gave experimental evidence to the Higgs boson, which was one of its goals. It's also managed to disprove a lot of theories, which is useful. But it hasn't given any hint of where to go. There's already talk of a successor but nobody really knows what to look for so it's hard to imagine that'll go anywhere.
So string theory seems to be like physics orthodoxy now.
j[1]: https://cfp.physics.northwestern.edu/documents/PhysicsToday-...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem
Been following this via proxy, i.e. Sabine Hossenfelder, for a few years. The charges are very solid afaict.
Been following this via proxy, i.e. Sabine Hossenfelder, for a few years. The charges are very solid afaict.
Would you recommend following only Sabine to be a good way to get a thoughtful and unbiased view of the issue?
The whole String Theory affair is amusing but also a sad spectacle. These people convinced the world they were geniuses, but ended up fleecing funding agencies and universities for millions with zero accountability and scientific progress.
What's the funding you're referring to with zero accountability?
The whole String Theory affair is amusing but also a sad spectacle. These people convinced the world they were geniuses, but ended up fleecing funding agencies and universities for millions with zero accountability and scientific progress.