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It's very sad how so many bright physicists have made this their life's work, and yet: the problem with string theory is that, in its landscape version, it has
by PhantomGremlin 9y ago
It's very sad how so many bright physicists have made this their life's work, and yet:
the problem with string theory is that, in its landscape version, it has a hugely complicated and poorly understood high energy scale behavior, seemingly capable of producing a very wide range of possible observable effects, none of which have been seen
- coldtea 9y agoSad that many bright theoretical physicists have been doing science? Because, even if a theory doesn't pan out, it' s still science: you've researched an avenue and came to certain conclusions. And perhaps this is most of science work -- not the "found a new theory" but "checked whether this theory works" (and same for experimental science).
- kobeya 9y agoThe problem, as talked about in the article, is that it is NOT science. Science involves experimentation, which string theory so far has eschewed. It more resembles mathematics in that sense (which is ostensibly not a science either).
- coldtea 9y agoThat's just a not very well thought out definition of science, and is wrong on several counts. 1) Science does not necessarily involve experimentation. 2) String theory has attempted many times at experimental verification. 3) Math are more experimental than most people think.
- dhimes 9y agoA scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable, by definition. Some have tried unsuccessfully to argue this away, but it is still the majority opinion. And it's for this reason: once you open the "scientific" world to unfalsifiable hypotheses, you open it up to a bunch of bullshit. That is not to say, however, that all important work must be scientific. There is a certain value to exploratory work, which can guide the direction of experiments in such a way as "if we could get experiment X then we could turn hypothesis Y into a testable hypothesis." In my opinion that is important work. You can see this in fields like psychology and such where the systems are just too complex to be easily testable (even medicine to some degree). But if we don't keep pursuing we will never get there.
- yulaow 9y agoWe have this problem in general in science at this point of time, probably because of the big scope of our modern theories. EG: We already consider "Dark Energy" a sort of made-up assumption to justify a model which, after recent observations was considered falsified. So, instead of focusing on others we decided to keep using it, we created a not-falsifiable nor testable assumption (dark energy indeed) and kept going with it, even if it violates everything Popper teach us. Honestly it seems to me that, especially in physics, too many people are just too much mentally involved in their own theory that they have an hard time just dropping it when it doesn't seem to work anymore.
- dhimes 9y agoPerhaps, but science is a human endeavor like any other and thus subject to human biases. I think a great example is the discovery of the neutrino. Particle tracks showed a clear violation of energy, momentum and angular momentum, but Pauli and others believed in these fundamental properties of the universe so strongly that he (they?) proposed a particle that was virtually undetectable to keep those properties. This was a non-scientific hypothesis at the time, but it told scientists the direction they needed to pursue in order to get to the point where the hypothesis could become scientific. Most argue that the discovery of the neutrino saved the fundamental conservation laws, but we should never lose sight of the fact that we still don't detect them in a very large percentage of events we record (we say simply that they are there, but interact weakly). One important measure of whether a hypothesis is likely going to be accepted as true in the future is that as we build better and more sensitive detectors we detect more outcomes favorable to the hypothesis. This is the way smart money bets when data are still hard to come by (see 'climate change').
- posterboy 9y ago> ... believed in these fundamental properties of the universe so strongly ... > This was a non-scientific hypothesis at the time, but it told scientists the direction they needed to pursue in order to get to the point where the hypothesis could become scientific. "What is Philosophy of Physics?"
- rotorblade 9y agoIndeed. To emphasize '1)' you could mention most astro- related fields: astronomy, astrophysics, etc, which are almost purely observational.
- kobeya 9y agoObservational and experimental are not opposed attributes. For astronomers the universe is the laboratory, and that is fine. An astronomer can say "I predict binary black holes to emit gravitational waves of a certain sort" and then go and find a binary black hole system and see if it does. That is experimentation.
- rotorblade 9y agoI can possibly agree with that notion of experiment. My point, in the context of the discussion, was that just because we do not have a an idea for an experiment that would test string theory, in some definite way, does not exclude that there is some possible observation within reach.
- kobeya 9y agoSure, but it becomes troublesome when they stop bothering to look.
- reikonomusha 9y agoIf you look at string theory as a piece of mathematics, which may provide a language for physicists to use and generate hypotheses, it doesn't seem so bad. I suspect this is closer to the motivation of the theoretical physicists working on it (including folks like Ed Witten, who are really mathematicians in disguise).
- AstralStorm 9y agoHopefully to be replaced with something far less cumbersome soon. And providing testable hypotheses.
- noobermin 9y agoString theory might occupy a different space perhaps, this is kind of like changing the underlying domain so now your function is "continuous" somewhere, although String theory and HEP theory in general isn't quite rigorous enough to be considered mathematics proper.
- Animats 9y agoLike "expert systems". (Anyone remember those?) I went through Stanford CS in the mid-1980s, just as it was becoming clear that expert systems didn't do very much. But there were many faculty heavily invested in the technology. Feigenbaum was running around telling Congress that the US would "become an agrarian nation" unless they funded a big national knowledge system lab headed by him. Strong AI was supposed to work Real Soon Now. What actually happened was the "AI Winter" - for about two decades, not much happened. The AI startups from the 1980s went bust.
- zer0tonin 9y ago> Like "expert systems". (Anyone remember those?) Yes, my university still has a class were you build some using CLIPS...
- dhimes 9y agoFeigenbaum was running around telling Congress that the US would "become an agrarian nation" unless they funded a big national knowledge system lab headed by him. At about the same time somebody was running around telling people we were going to be in a whole lot of trouble if we didn't train a bunch more physicists. A few years later we entered the era of the 40 yr old post-doc.
- fusiongyro 9y agoSome of that technology is actually used today. Systems like JBoss Drools, IBM Operational Decision Manager. Government agencies sometimes use modern versions of these things to ensure that policies are followed. Eligibility for medicaid, for instance, is often decided by rules systems that are descended from systems like CLIPS. This technology isn't super-sexy compared to deep learning but there are application areas where it is still relevant.