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He does an OK job. Some of his analogies are a bit much though. I feel I have a decent, yet layman grasp of the standard model, yet know nothing of string the

by snarfy 8y ago

He does an OK job. Some of his analogies are a bit much though. I feel I have a decent, yet layman grasp of the standard model, yet know nothing of string theory. There is a real lack of solid information in this regard (string theory for the layman), and a lot of hand waviness.

jcranmer 8y ago
As I understand it, string theory is not really a coherent theory as much as it is a framework for plugging in theories (consider the difference between quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics). The real goal of string theory is to give a description of quantum gravity that can be unified with electromagnetism, strong, and weak forces, and (again, as I understand it), we still don't have such a description that actually works correctly with our universe. Hence Woit's criticism (or one of them, at least), which boils down to "it's been 30 years (20 years when he first made this argument), and string theory has yet to produce any sort of concrete, testable theory of quantum gravity. Maybe we should consider alternatives."
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  To my understanding, string theory/M-Theory is quite coherent mathematically, the issue that prevents a good lay description, other than the theory being a somewhat moving target as more of the math gets solved, is a "naming an abstraction" problem just as one has all the time in programming. The mathematicians have a good idea of the abstractions in terms of the math itself and its own internally consistent/coherent jargon, but haven't made a solid, coherent leap together to what those systems mean in a way they can sell to lay people. For example, the difference between working in Haskell and knowing the Monad abstraction, versus using the descendants of that work such as async/await in a language like JS, C#, or Python and no longer needing to know/worry about the Monad abstraction because that's now a compiler/interpreter concern. (An interesting edge to that analogy too is that reminder that Haskell's use of the abstraction provides more opportunity, as do-notation works with all Monads, but for now async/await is specialized to just one Monad. This is useful to the string theory/M-Theory question as well, as some users of string theory/M-Theory seems interested in mathematically exploring all possible worlds under the theory, not just necessarily the practical ones that align with the world we live in, in case the overall abstraction or do-notation equivalent is useful in other situations.)

by snarfy 8y ago

jcranmer 8y ago

As I understand it, string theory is not really a coherent theory as much as it is a framework for plugging in theories (consider the difference between quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics). The real goal of string theory is to give a description of quantum gravity that can be unified with electromagnetism, strong, and weak forces, and (again, as I understand it), we still don't have such a description that actually works correctly with our universe. Hence Woit's criticism (or one of them, at least), which boils down to "it's been 30 years (20 years when he first made this argument), and string theory has yet to produce any sort of concrete, testable theory of quantum gravity. Maybe we should consider alternatives."

WorldMaker 8y ago
To my understanding, string theory/M-Theory is quite coherent mathematically, the issue that prevents a good lay description, other than the theory being a somewhat moving target as more of the math gets solved, is a "naming an abstraction" problem just as one has all the time in programming. The mathematicians have a good idea of the abstractions in terms of the math itself and its own internally consistent/coherent jargon, but haven't made a solid, coherent leap together to what those systems mean in a way they can sell to lay people. For example, the difference between working in Haskell and knowing the Monad abstraction, versus using the descendants of that work such as async/await in a language like JS, C#, or Python and no longer needing to know/worry about the Monad abstraction because that's now a compiler/interpreter concern. (An interesting edge to that analogy too is that reminder that Haskell's use of the abstraction provides more opportunity, as do-notation works with all Monads, but for now async/await is specialized to just one Monad. This is useful to the string theory/M-Theory question as well, as some users of string theory/M-Theory seems interested in mathematically exploring all possible worlds under the theory, not just necessarily the practical ones that align with the world we live in, in case the overall abstraction or do-notation equivalent is useful in other situations.)