If you have a citation or more information on that, I'd be curious. Numerical relativity is outside my area of expertise. It doesn't seem likely to me, but I couldn't rule it out...
I believe this is what I was thinking of : https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07508 The author is Jonathan Gorard, who is one of the people associated with “The Wolfram Physics Project”, and checking the references, it does cite at least one document/paper that is part of the “wolfram physics project”, But I don’t know for sure whether it exactly uses the central framework of the project.
There are exactly zero free parameters in string theory [0]. The details of why string phenomenology is hard is a difficult subject, but the characterization you've given of it is not correct. If you have a proof that string theory is not self-consistent, you should publish it, because there is no such proof in the scientific literature today. (Source: my PhD in physics.) Unfortunately, there is a ton of misinformati…
I thought lots of variants of string theory do predict things inside human means. But they've all failed, leaving only variants that predict things outside of it.
If you have something specific in mind, I’m happy to address it! But I’m not quite sure what you’re referencing.
Is it just because it hasn't gotten as far as making physical predictions yet? To put it charitably it's very abstract, but I wonder exactly where the holes are that real physicists see.
A "theory" without predictions is just a bunch of words and numbers hanging out together.
> A "theory" without predictions is just a bunch of words and numbers hanging out together.
A famous example in Physics is String Theory. It has been around since at least 1980s and still no definitive way to prove or disprove it.
To whom? To other branches of physics? Look up AdS/CFT. To the general public? Dunno, I guess the pursuit of understanding the universe is its own reward for some.
How is it understanding the universe if it’s not applicable/useful in the general case?
Far more interesting, novel, and deserving of more attention is Mills classical model of the atom as electrons in spinning fluid shell orbitspheres. Lots of predictions first made in the 1990s like accelerating expansion of the universe, dark matter, and energy from hydrogen that is 200 times the energy of burning it.
I thought lots of variants of string theory do predict things inside human means. But they've all failed, leaving only variants that predict things outside of it.
If you have something specific in mind, I’m happy to address it! But I’m not quite sure what you’re referencing.
Isn't SUSY one of them? That's the first thing I can remember
To whom? To other branches of physics? Look up AdS/CFT. To the general public? Dunno, I guess the pursuit of understanding the universe is its own reward for some.
How is it understanding the universe if it’s not applicable/useful in the general case?
You mean, if string theory does not turn out to describe the universe, how could it be useful? Well, by giving extraordinarily powerful tools for understanding things that are well established to be useful, like quantum field theory. AdS/CFT gives us the only tool we have to analytically understand quantum field theories in the so-called “strong coupling regime”. This is useful for discovering new properties of quantum matter in systems where you would otherwise need simulations. You can think of it intuitively as string theory providing a glue between two descriptions of the quantum matter, like a “type cast” in programming where you start with one kind of object but reinterpret it as another. The thing that is incomprehensible in one representation is simple in the other. This was discovered by studying limits of string theory in interesting geometries.
If you have something specific in mind, I’m happy to address it! But I’m not quite sure what you’re referencing.
Isn't SUSY one of them? That's the first thing I can remember
You would probably learn more by listening to Cumrun Vafa [0] than anything I could say. It’s hard to say much about string theory without space time supersymmetry not because it doesn’t exist (we know it does) but because it’s so hard to calculate anything…physicists are very reliant on a few tools, supersymmetry is a big one, and without it it’s really hard to say anything concrete, yet.
> The consensus was that there is nothing of substance to engage with. The safety boat of scientific consensus is pulled out a lot in today's environment. One should remember that many of our great scientific discoveries had a scientific consensus that it replaced. That boat won't always steer you in the right direction, sometimes you have to read the paper and come to your own conclusion.
What reason do you have to believe that your own conclusion will be better? The causal set folks are already outsiders that go against the broad consensus of HEP-Th. I grew up scientifically in an environment that was actively challenging mainstream consensus. Sometimes correctly (e.g. low energy susy), sometimes not. If those folk can't find something redeeming in what you do you should stop and listen. Also, yes sc…
Scientific consensus rarely has a large body of people who truly dived into the research. Most are very busy with their own research and lives. At worst they just repeat views they hear from colleagues they respect, and at best they will do a minor survey. Therefore it's questionable if more than a handful of people truly have any valuable input to that consensus. What you end up with is truth by authority which is antithetical to the scientific method and ethos of scientific inquiry.
What reason do you have to believe that your own conclusion will be better? The causal set folks are already outsiders that go against the broad consensus of HEP-Th. I grew up scientifically in an environment that was actively challenging mainstream consensus. Sometimes correctly (e.g. low energy susy), sometimes not. If those folk can't find something redeeming in what you do you should stop and listen. Also, yes sc…
Scientific consensus rarely has a large body of people who truly dived into the research. Most are very busy with their own research and lives. At worst they just repeat views they hear from colleagues they respect, and at best they will do a minor survey. Therefore it's questionable if more than a handful of people truly have any valuable input to that consensus. What you end up with is truth by authority which is a…