12 ms·

Several years ago, shortly after the Higgs discovery, I sat down with a couple CERN people, and their comment was that the current problem is that we need more

Several years ago, shortly after the Higgs discovery, I sat down with a couple CERN people, and their comment was that the current problem is that we need more theoretical physicists coming up with measurable predictions. As many of the other posters state, obviously there is more to learn, but we could learn faster if we had better (and more) predictions about what we might find.

czbond 8y ago
As a layman, from your statement, what do we have now? [meaning if we don't have enough theoretical physicists]. Is it that we have enough theoretical scientist, but the predictions are not testable? Or not enough talent?
- dtech 8y ago
  > Is it that we have enough theoretical scientist, but the predictions are not testable? Yes, much research goes into string theory, but its predictions are "not even wrong", they cannot be proven false by experiment [1]. Disclaimer: I'm a layman on the topic, this is just repeating what I've heard. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Not-Even-Wrong-Failure-Physical/dp/0465092764 https://www.amazon.com/Not-Even-Wrong-Failure-Physical/dp/04...
  - Steuard 8y ago
    Disclaimer: I'm a string theorist. Please try to be at least a little bit skeptical when a handful of naysayers claim that an entire field's worth of very smart people are all spending their careers on pointless work. Those naysayers could be right, obviously! (Even as experts we have to recognize the possibility, and to the many laymen looking on from outside it's even harder to judge.) But if you read Peter Woit's dismissive rants and accept them as gospel truth, just remember that in doing that you're choosing to believe that hundreds (thousands?) of dedicated, passionate, deeply knowledgeable physicists are either painfully deluded or deliberately running some sort of collective scam. You're choosing to believe that either none of us have bothered to read Woit's objections or that we've all failed to accept them even though they're right. I'm not sure what our motivation for that is supposed to be. I promise you: people who go into fundamental physics aren't in it because it's an easy road to a steady paycheck! We do this because we're driven to understand the building blocks of the universe. If I were to become convinced that my current approach to trying to understand the universe was fundamentally a dead end, I'd be wasting my life if I continued to study it! I'd be throwing away everything I've trained for, everything in science that I care about. And I have no idea what Woit thinks I'm getting in return. So your call. Either Woit's right and we're all knowingly wasting our lives, or the situation isn't as cut and dried as Woit claims it is.
    - bsaul 8y ago
      I think you forgot one case : it’s psychologically extremely hard to abandon something you’ve been working on / believing in for a huge part of your life, and start over from scratch, no matter how smart you are ( i’d say the smartest you are, the hardest it is to believe you’re completely wrong) . So teachers could be tempted to hang on to the narrowest hope their work still has meaning and keep taking new phds and this could last for a very long time.
      - xelxebar 8y ago
        Which is probably why it's hard to convince String Theory haters to re-evaluate their opinions, i.e. non-testable explanations. One, the claim that string theory makes no testable predictions is just plain false. The predictions are just out of reach of current technology. Two, we should probably be more suspicious of explanations that rely on folk (interpretations of) psychological effects. How strong is the Sunken Cost fallacy? Is it sufficient to overcome the motivation to shift subfields? At what rate should we expect theorists transisioning out of String Theory, under the assumption that Woit is right? Three, String Theory has been very useful already. It's development has provided us with novel tools for mathematical tools for studying a plethora of applied quantum phenomena. Disclaimer: I'm not a String Theorist.
      - FuckOffNeemo 8y ago
        The sunk cost fallacy?
    - paraschopra 8y ago
      Yours is a fantastic, spot-on comment. It's easy to get swayed by controversial, non-mainstream opinions, especially when you're not knowledgable about the field. One trick that I'm forcing myself to use is to take evidence of what people do v/s what they say. String theorists may not be vocal in countering the objections raised, or they may simply consider getting into a debate a waste of time. But the fact that hundreds of smart people are choosing to spend time on something is _some_ evidence that the project is not completely misguided. Of course, the positive evidence has to be balanced with the evidence of group thinking and sunk cost fallacy.
  - czbond 8y ago
    PBS spacetime has a few great videos on the topic - Why String Theory is Wrong and Why String Theory is right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhpGdumLRqs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhpGdumLRqs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTTa9YcTe1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTTa9YcTe1k
v_lisivka 8y ago
It's harder and harder to do without well developed intuition. To develop good intuition, we need to make good mental model, but we got good (but incomplete) mathematical model instead.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  I agree and I think the main reason is the anti-realist camp in physics which has taken hold in the past 100 years. This view probably developed because the realist models of quantum mechanics were too difficult for people to accept. It was easier to say that intuitive models are outside the scope of science than to change their set of inconsistent preconceptions.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Could you expand on your comment; I thought a (small?) majority of theoreticians were, shall we say, "super-realists" such that they view the Many-Worlds Interpretation as actuality rather than merely a model? When you say "intuitive models" do you mean ones that echo somewhat Newtonian/Classical physics? Perhaps part of the problem is that schools follow a method of teaching physics where they teach what is easy to teach, knowing it's wrong, and then teach something a little more complex, knowing that's wrong too, etc.. Perhaps we need to start off teaching that the world is non-Newtonian, that it has Quantum weirdness and relativistic effects (according to our best models), and allow that to underlie our intuitions.
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      Many worlds is one of the more popular realist models, but it's quite rare for physicists to claim they think it represents reality. It's not taught in any textbooks I'm aware of and even now papers often dismiss experiments having multiple outcomes without even mentioning that they are doing so, coming to absurd conclusions as a result. The situation has certainly improved a lot since the days of Everett, who was basically dismissed as a crack-pot.
      - 8y ago

czbond 8y ago

As a layman, from your statement, what do we have now? [meaning if we don't have enough theoretical physicists]. Is it that we have enough theoretical scientist, but the predictions are not testable? Or not enough talent?

dtech 8y ago
> Is it that we have enough theoretical scientist, but the predictions are not testable? Yes, much research goes into string theory, but its predictions are "not even wrong", they cannot be proven false by experiment [1]. Disclaimer: I'm a layman on the topic, this is just repeating what I've heard. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Not-Even-Wrong-Failure-Physical/dp/0465092764 https://www.amazon.com/Not-Even-Wrong-Failure-Physical/dp/04...
- Steuard 8y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm a string theorist. Please try to be at least a little bit skeptical when a handful of naysayers claim that an entire field's worth of very smart people are all spending their careers on pointless work. Those naysayers could be right, obviously! (Even as experts we have to recognize the possibility, and to the many laymen looking on from outside it's even harder to judge.) But if you read Peter Woit's dismissive rants and accept them as gospel truth, just remember that in doing that you're choosing to believe that hundreds (thousands?) of dedicated, passionate, deeply knowledgeable physicists are either painfully deluded or deliberately running some sort of collective scam. You're choosing to believe that either none of us have bothered to read Woit's objections or that we've all failed to accept them even though they're right. I'm not sure what our motivation for that is supposed to be. I promise you: people who go into fundamental physics aren't in it because it's an easy road to a steady paycheck! We do this because we're driven to understand the building blocks of the universe. If I were to become convinced that my current approach to trying to understand the universe was fundamentally a dead end, I'd be wasting my life if I continued to study it! I'd be throwing away everything I've trained for, everything in science that I care about. And I have no idea what Woit thinks I'm getting in return. So your call. Either Woit's right and we're all knowingly wasting our lives, or the situation isn't as cut and dried as Woit claims it is.
  - bsaul 8y ago
    I think you forgot one case : it’s psychologically extremely hard to abandon something you’ve been working on / believing in for a huge part of your life, and start over from scratch, no matter how smart you are ( i’d say the smartest you are, the hardest it is to believe you’re completely wrong) . So teachers could be tempted to hang on to the narrowest hope their work still has meaning and keep taking new phds and this could last for a very long time.
    - xelxebar 8y ago
      Which is probably why it's hard to convince String Theory haters to re-evaluate their opinions, i.e. non-testable explanations. One, the claim that string theory makes no testable predictions is just plain false. The predictions are just out of reach of current technology. Two, we should probably be more suspicious of explanations that rely on folk (interpretations of) psychological effects. How strong is the Sunken Cost fallacy? Is it sufficient to overcome the motivation to shift subfields? At what rate should we expect theorists transisioning out of String Theory, under the assumption that Woit is right? Three, String Theory has been very useful already. It's development has provided us with novel tools for mathematical tools for studying a plethora of applied quantum phenomena. Disclaimer: I'm not a String Theorist.
    - FuckOffNeemo 8y ago
      The sunk cost fallacy?
  - paraschopra 8y ago
    Yours is a fantastic, spot-on comment. It's easy to get swayed by controversial, non-mainstream opinions, especially when you're not knowledgable about the field. One trick that I'm forcing myself to use is to take evidence of what people do v/s what they say. String theorists may not be vocal in countering the objections raised, or they may simply consider getting into a debate a waste of time. But the fact that hundreds of smart people are choosing to spend time on something is _some_ evidence that the project is not completely misguided. Of course, the positive evidence has to be balanced with the evidence of group thinking and sunk cost fallacy.
- czbond 8y ago
  PBS spacetime has a few great videos on the topic - Why String Theory is Wrong and Why String Theory is right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhpGdumLRqs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhpGdumLRqs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTTa9YcTe1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTTa9YcTe1k

v_lisivka 8y ago

It's harder and harder to do without well developed intuition. To develop good intuition, we need to make good mental model, but we got good (but incomplete) mathematical model instead.

akvadrako 8y ago
I agree and I think the main reason is the anti-realist camp in physics which has taken hold in the past 100 years. This view probably developed because the realist models of quantum mechanics were too difficult for people to accept. It was easier to say that intuitive models are outside the scope of science than to change their set of inconsistent preconceptions.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Could you expand on your comment; I thought a (small?) majority of theoreticians were, shall we say, "super-realists" such that they view the Many-Worlds Interpretation as actuality rather than merely a model? When you say "intuitive models" do you mean ones that echo somewhat Newtonian/Classical physics? Perhaps part of the problem is that schools follow a method of teaching physics where they teach what is easy to teach, knowing it's wrong, and then teach something a little more complex, knowing that's wrong too, etc.. Perhaps we need to start off teaching that the world is non-Newtonian, that it has Quantum weirdness and relativistic effects (according to our best models), and allow that to underlie our intuitions.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    Many worlds is one of the more popular realist models, but it's quite rare for physicists to claim they think it represents reality. It's not taught in any textbooks I'm aware of and even now papers often dismiss experiments having multiple outcomes without even mentioning that they are doing so, coming to absurd conclusions as a result. The situation has certainly improved a lot since the days of Everett, who was basically dismissed as a crack-pot.
    - 8y ago