4 ms·
> a super unpopular position at the time (1996); pretty much the only prominent person in agreement with him was Nobel Prize Winner Phil Warren Anderson, who di
by knzhou 7y ago
> a super unpopular position at the time (1996); pretty much the only prominent person in agreement with him was Nobel Prize Winner Phil Warren Anderson, who disagrees with him in many other respects. Ultimately many other writers came out in agreement on this issue at least; Woit and Smolin most notably, though others agreed.
Ugh, almost everything about this narrative is wrong; see my other comment. Science writers didn't invent skepticism of string theory, that was in good supply among physicists even 50 years ago. You only think they did because, well, you rely on them to tell you what happened, and they puff up their own roles. They turn it into "me vs. the establishment" while cribbing off conversations that are already happening within the field.
For example, Glashow, one of the architects of the Standard Model, tried to bar string theorists from ever being hired at Harvard, but you never hear about that.
- scottlocklin 7y agoThousands of grad student careers, faculty appointments, glowing documentaries and ruined lives later and "oh, we knew that all along." They sure didn't act like they knew it at the time. Horgan deserves credit for making the right call. Even more credit because he wasn't even a physicist. Credit to Glashow, and apologies for forgetting him, but Horgan deserves his victory lap.
- knzhou 7y agoI mean, do you think literally everybody was doing string theory? There have always been plenty of theorists focused on more concrete things -- string theorists are not and have not been the majority. Grad students entering even in the 90s knew they had to make a choice between concrete, more easily testable physics and a long-shot approach to quantum gravity. String theorists have stories of faculty going out of their way, back in grad school, to discourage them from going into it. (It wasn't just Glashow, either, it was most of the Harvard physics department.) To say that string theory comprises all of theoretical physics is to uncritically accept the "me vs. the establishment" narrative some pop scientists put out. I think it does real damage inside the field, too, because it distorts the perspectives people have coming in.
- Ma8ee 7y agoThey weren't discouraged to do string theory in particular, they were discouraged from getting into the whole "trying to find something better than the standard model." If they anyway went into th hep, they would have slim chances of having any career if they didn't do string theory. They were encouraged to do things like condensed matter physics, not trying to find some alternative to string theory.
- bjornsing 7y agoSo as long as there is one physicist on the right side of the fence the “field” is somehow in the know...? Would you be willing to extend that kind of reasoning to the “pop scientists”? I often wish Feynman (or anyone of his kind really) was still here. Science nowadays seems more and more like one big appeal to authority...
- madhadron 7y agoSomething that most people don't understand is that most physicists won't talk to the public. What you hear as a layman is usually the few people who have a public axe to grind and bears no resemblance to the majority of the field. When I was in physics in the early 2000's, the general feeling was that it's a probably nonsense, but having someone out at the far end of the mathematical spectrum like that in your theory group was a good investment. And even if they were doing string theory, there's a good chance they were using it as a vehicle, a kind of generalized, more flexible version of field theory, to poke at some mathematical rabbit hole. The majority of physicists are not in HEP. The majority of HEP physicists are experimentalists. The majority of HEP theorists are phenomenologists. But phenomenologists aren't generally good fodder for science journalists because statements like, "I'm calculating scattering cross sections in the kaon sector for CP violation measurements" isn't going to get clicks. And the experimentalists are even worse: "I've been working eight hour night shifts for the past two years. I'll probably go back to my home university and spend another couple years processing data to get an estimate for this parameter in this scattering calculation. It might be a fraction of a percent off what we expected!" Faced with that, "I'm playing with a high dimensional extension of quantum field theory to see if I can generate a spin 2 field in an expanding spacetime" sounds really sexy.
- 2muchcoffeeman 7y agoIt’s difficult to know what kind of politicking led to this though. It preposterous to think that all the physicists were on board with string theory. Do you really think the experts in the field didn’t have doubts and it took an non physicist to work it out?
- bllguo 7y agoWhy does he get more credit for not being a physicist?? So he made an uninformed conjecture that turned out to be true? (whether it is true also seems up in the air right now?) I don't understand why that deserves kudos. I would very much prefer top scientists to listen to people who know what they're talking about, instead of paying heed to the less informed on the off chance their wild speculation bears fruit.
- wolco 7y agoThat's biased. I will only accept the correct answer from people I choose. Experts in the field should provide the most insight overtime but don't ignore non-experts. That's foolish and limiting.