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String theory had lots of success just not as a phenomenological theory. Monstorous moonshine, which was proven by Borcherds using techniques developed for Stri
by orbifold 9y ago
String theory had lots of success just not as a phenomenological theory. Monstorous moonshine, which was proven by Borcherds using techniques developed for String Theory, Witten's Contributions to Chern Simons and Donaldson Theory, and Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture come to mind.
- jackmott 9y agoBut this would amount to it being "math practice" rather than investigation into how the universe works.
- paulpauper 9y agofrom math practice arises building blocks for scientific theory. they complement each other. mathematical theories are analogous to tools that can be used later
- auntienomen 9y agoPerelman's proof of Poincare was quite independent of string theory. No need to get greedy.
- orbifold 9y agoThe Lagrangian that he used is the effective field theory of a bosonic string, in his first paper he explicitly referred to that fact.
- auntienomen 9y agoYes, I'm aware of that. I still don't count this as a string theory success. Borcherds proof of the Moonshine conjecture uses the no-ghost theorem in a way which is completely unsurprising to anyone familiar with QFT. Perelman's proof of Geometrization, in contrast, uses the string-frame Lagrangian in a manner which is by no means implicit in the string theory literature. The deep content of those papers comes after he's decided which functional to work with.
- Retric 9y agoMy impression is epicycles is to a fourier transform as string theory is to ___ . We don't quite know what that blank is yet, but it may be quite useful.