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Is there anything that would cause adherents to accept that it is a failed theory? All of the false predictions so far apparently haven't moved the needle much.

Is there anything that would cause adherents to accept that it is a failed theory? All of the false predictions so far apparently haven't moved the needle much. After a while it starts to seem more like Aristotelian natural philosophy rather than modern empirical science. It would be different if this belief was pushed by a few isolated theorists, but it's the major focus of the field and they will likely ask for billions of dollars of new public investment for accelerators to continue the goose chase, with no promising leads from any of the previous experiments.

kurthr 7y ago
It seems more like Copernican epicycles in complexity and accuracy to me. Hopefully, the mathematical complexity will lead somewhere interesting even if it’s not GUT. There are so many possible solutions (and data so difficult to get) that it’s more like a game than a theory.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
I think it's going to come down to the new grad students. Eventually, they're going to look at the lack of results in string theory and decide to work on something else for their career. And then, eventually, the ones working on it will die off. Science progressing one funeral at a time, as the saying goes.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  But can't the theory be interesting in its own right, say, as a mathematical construct, at least?
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Of course it can. But all the physics people aren't pursuing it in order to find an interesting mathematical construct. (That's what math people are for.)
  - sebastialonso 7y ago
    This feels very much like the situation when a person's job is really no longer necessary but either way they come up with ridiculous scenarios just not to be fired.
whatshisface 7y ago
It is not possible for an un-falsified theory to be a failed theory. Instead, among theories there is only more interesting and less interesting. It is up to each researcher to individually decide which theory they think is the most interesting, on the basis of what is the most promising. There is no scientific basis for doing that, because by definition we are talking about trying to guess which theories future evidence will support. Some people argue that since so much of the supersymmetric theory parameter space has been ruled out, that this reflects negatively on supersymmetry as a whole. However you must understand that this is exactly the kind of non-empirical argument that some stringers get so much flak for deploying. Nobody knows what the prior distribution should be over parameter space and it is not possible to do something like applying a uniform distribution, because if you do something as simple as algebraically re-arrange the parameters the uniform distribution over the new parameters will not be equal to the uniform distribution over the old parameters. I can give you a concrete example to illustrate the fallacy of trying to measure the "volume" of the ruled-out parameter space. Suppose there is a grain of rice somewhere on a chessboard, and you are trying to find it by asking a person who can see the board whether the grain is in zone 1, zone 2, and so on. You count all the way up to zone 63, and the person who can see the board says "no" to every query. You conclude that if the grain is not on 63/64ths of the board it is unlikely to be on the board at all. Later, you happen to walk in to the room with the chessboard, only to discover that the man in the room had drawn a weird grid that mapped zones 1 through 63 to different parts of square A1, and mapped 64 to the entire rest of the board.
- cwzwarich 7y ago
  [deleted, since reading it would waste your time]
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    >Even if you think the parameter space is "uniform" in some sense as a probability distribution Quite to the contrary, I was arguing that a uniform distribution over parameter space was impossible to define.
woodandsteel 7y ago
>Is there anything that would cause adherents to accept that it is a failed theory? The way it is supposed to work is adherents of a theory give it up if it can't make empirical predictions and another theory comes along that can. However at present we don't have a alternative theory that is doing that, so string theorists are free to hang onto their theory, in spite of the lack of empirical proof. Of course, many string theorists nowadays say that empirical proof is not necessary for proving a theory. That would seem to imply that if an alternative theory made a number of correct predictions that string theory can't, that would not be a reason for abandoning string theory.

kurthr 7y ago

It seems more like Copernican epicycles in complexity and accuracy to me. Hopefully, the mathematical complexity will lead somewhere interesting even if it’s not GUT. There are so many possible solutions (and data so difficult to get) that it’s more like a game than a theory.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

I think it's going to come down to the new grad students. Eventually, they're going to look at the lack of results in string theory and decide to work on something else for their career. And then, eventually, the ones working on it will die off. Science progressing one funeral at a time, as the saying goes.

Koshkin 7y ago
But can't the theory be interesting in its own right, say, as a mathematical construct, at least?
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Of course it can. But all the physics people aren't pursuing it in order to find an interesting mathematical construct. (That's what math people are for.)
- sebastialonso 7y ago
  This feels very much like the situation when a person's job is really no longer necessary but either way they come up with ridiculous scenarios just not to be fired.

whatshisface 7y ago

It is not possible for an un-falsified theory to be a failed theory. Instead, among theories there is only more interesting and less interesting. It is up to each researcher to individually decide which theory they think is the most interesting, on the basis of what is the most promising. There is no scientific basis for doing that, because by definition we are talking about trying to guess which theories future evidence will support. Some people argue that since so much of the supersymmetric theory parameter space has been ruled out, that this reflects negatively on supersymmetry as a whole. However you must understand that this is exactly the kind of non-empirical argument that some stringers get so much flak for deploying. Nobody knows what the prior distribution should be over parameter space and it is not possible to do something like applying a uniform distribution, because if you do something as simple as algebraically re-arrange the parameters the uniform distribution over the new parameters will not be equal to the uniform distribution over the old parameters. I can give you a concrete example to illustrate the fallacy of trying to measure the "volume" of the ruled-out parameter space. Suppose there is a grain of rice somewhere on a chessboard, and you are trying to find it by asking a person who can see the board whether the grain is in zone 1, zone 2, and so on. You count all the way up to zone 63, and the person who can see the board says "no" to every query. You conclude that if the grain is not on 63/64ths of the board it is unlikely to be on the board at all. Later, you happen to walk in to the room with the chessboard, only to discover that the man in the room had drawn a weird grid that mapped zones 1 through 63 to different parts of square A1, and mapped 64 to the entire rest of the board.

cwzwarich 7y ago
[deleted, since reading it would waste your time]
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >Even if you think the parameter space is "uniform" in some sense as a probability distribution Quite to the contrary, I was arguing that a uniform distribution over parameter space was impossible to define.

woodandsteel 7y ago

>Is there anything that would cause adherents to accept that it is a failed theory? The way it is supposed to work is adherents of a theory give it up if it can't make empirical predictions and another theory comes along that can. However at present we don't have a alternative theory that is doing that, so string theorists are free to hang onto their theory, in spite of the lack of empirical proof. Of course, many string theorists nowadays say that empirical proof is not necessary for proving a theory. That would seem to imply that if an alternative theory made a number of correct predictions that string theory can't, that would not be a reason for abandoning string theory.