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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

#91

Post by mhh__ »

im3w1l wrote: post #44
fabiosussetto wrote: post #40

"It would culminate the ancient human quest for knowledge, which began when the first of our ancestors asked, "Why?"" I'm always baffled when I read these kind of quotes, especially coming from such smart people. Do they just forget that our theories are models of reality? I personally believe that there are no wave functions or vibrating membranes out there, as there are no "triangles". These are just names for our…

Your perspective is a popular one, but a lot of people also think there is a "true" theory that will perfectly explain how the universe evolves.

A lot of people think that but a lot of people think that at any given time in human history.

There will - let there be no doubt - be a final theory of physics (Humanity will end at some point), but determining whether that theory is truly "perfect" is probably impossible within the bounds of measurements known to us at the moment.

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

#92

Post by mhh__ »

rsj_hn wrote: post #79
m0zg wrote: post #70

Can it even win a Nobel? I thought the Nobel is not awarded for math, and string theory is just math, with no verifiable real-world side effects or consequences that I'm aware of.

Nobel prizes skew heavily towards experimental physics and theory prizes require experimental verification. That's why Higgs had to wait until 2013 even though absolutely everyone was convinced that a Higgs boson existed for decades before that. Even Einstein didn't win the Nobel for GR, but for the photoelectric effect. Back in the day when high energy physicists kept discovering new particles and there was a short…

My history of physics is probably simplified, but I think Einstein got it for (mainly) the photoelectric effect in part because relativity was still (despite having been verified to some extent already) too weird.

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

#93

Post by thanatropism »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #76
knzhou wrote: post #10

It's important to avoid conflating string theorists with all theoretical physicists. Plenty of people in particle physics either don't believe in string theory or don't think it can make useful predictions any time soon, even if it were assumed true. Furthermore, the vast majority of people called "string theorists" don't even work on traditional string theory day to day, but on more concrete ideas that have been par…

It should really be called String Hypothesis. Theories in science are generally for something that's near 100% proven.

That's a trope made up on the spot to defend Darwinism from "it's just a theory/teach the controversy".

Whether in science or police work, etc. a theory is a holistic framework, while a hypothesis is truth-valued.

We should also complicate this idea that something can be 100% proven, but baby steps.

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

#94

Post by catalogia »

anon1m0us wrote: post #33
undershirt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you might try the subtler word myths instead of lies. Reality is formless, and we reason about it through what Foucault called grids I think, where every structure that we impose on it to bring something new into view necessarily obscures something else. This is a bit like what Alan Watts talks about when saying that stories are like music, in which it wouldn’t have any form unless there were notes left o…

When you say, "... it's bigger than what you may be suggesting." What is ... "it"? My despair? I understand your point about lies vs myths. If I substitute the two words in my mind according to your explanation of myths and their purpose, then everything actually does seem to make more sense and is more acceptable in my mind. If someone tells a lie the connotation is that it's meant to harm others to their own benefi…

> "If someone tells a lie the connotation is that it's meant to harm others to their own benefit."

Who's connotation? I think that's a very myopic take on lying. Insofar as people care for others, people frequently lie to benefit those they care about. Some people believe the truth is more important than sparing the feelings of somebody you care about, and that's totally fine. But that point of view is not universal to humans and many people believe lying for the benefit of others to be reasonable or even obligatory.

I won't bore you with examples of such lies; I think you can probably imagine a few. Some are trivial, and others far more substantial. Whether or not those lies are justifiable under your personal system of ethics (or my own) is beyond the point; the point is that to some people those lies are justifiable and for those people, lying is motivated by a desire to benefit others.

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

#95

Post by knzhou »

SomeOldThrow wrote: post #84
knzhou wrote: post #10

It's important to avoid conflating string theorists with all theoretical physicists. Plenty of people in particle physics either don't believe in string theory or don't think it can make useful predictions any time soon, even if it were assumed true. Furthermore, the vast majority of people called "string theorists" don't even work on traditional string theory day to day, but on more concrete ideas that have been par…

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.

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

#96

Post by thanatropism »

namarie wrote: post #86
perl4ever wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember reading an article about Doug Lenat and Cyc a long time ago in some pop sci publication and thinking, surely you can't be serious... I don't understand how people ever thought such things could become equivalent to human minds, but I don't think that's my insight, but that others' thinking was blinkered for some reason.

Makes you think about what we think today that will be seen likewise by future people.

You're being downvoted, but we' re basically drunk on these amazing successes in Computer Vision and apply at least some magical thinking when expecting them to extend to general (e.g. reinforcement learning) domains.

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

#97

Post by selectionbias »

fabiosussetto wrote: post #40

"It would culminate the ancient human quest for knowledge, which began when the first of our ancestors asked, "Why?"" I'm always baffled when I read these kind of quotes, especially coming from such smart people. Do they just forget that our theories are models of reality? I personally believe that there are no wave functions or vibrating membranes out there, as there are no "triangles". These are just names for our…

Suppose we are able to formulate a very neat, parsimonious mathematical model and it happens to extremely accurately describe every physical phenomenon, so accurately that we cannot find even the tiniest violation. Now, that does not mean the model is 'correct', it might be that we have just not measured precisely enough to detect its failures. But there does seem to be a mysterious tendency for very neat mathematical models to very accurately describe physics, and so maybe it is not unreasonable to conclude that this model is at least probably true (i.e., that it is never violated). Would this not then tell us something pretty profound? Even if the way we understand the math (in terms of ideal shapes, in terms of symbols) is inherently human, we would still have possibly discovered a full description of the behavior of the universe, and even if that in itself doesn't tell us why the universe exists or what it is, it would surely help us to answer those questions.

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by selectionbias »

wuliwong wrote: post #54
im3w1l wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your perspective is a popular one, but a lot of people also think there is a "true" theory that will perfectly explain how the universe evolves.

>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'…

In the context of the incompleteness theorem a 'theory' consists of a formal language to describe theorems, some primitive axioms and some rules that can be used to prove theorems from the axioms. Godel's incompleteness theorem states (loosely speaking) that if a theory is rich enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers, is consistent and is 'effectively axiomatized', then there are statements that can be expressed within the theory and that are true, but that cannot be proven using the rules of deduction in the theory. In short, this is a totally different meaning of the word 'theory' to the one you are thinking of.
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