9 ms·

Fundamental physical theory is being replaced with a pseudo-science

49 points by chmaynard 5y ago

mgamache 5y ago
It feels like string theory will be a cautionary tail of being too myopic on a single promising thread of inquiry. We've probably wasted 20+ years after we should have jumped tracks (or at least stared changing course). Religions of belief tend to pop up around attractive academic ideas that can't be falsified but also have great explanatory power.
- bernulli 5y ago
  It's a really tough question of when to pull the plug. Marvin Minsky wrote a whole book in 1969 'proving' that neural nets cannot, fundamentally, do anything interesting - yet, here we are.
  - otabdeveloper4 5y ago
    He was mostly right. Neural nets are mostly an artistic tool for creating awesome generative art. They don't give any scientific or mathematical answers.
    - civilized 5y ago
      > They don't give any scientific or mathematical answers. Dead wrong. Predicting protein folding has been a scientific holy grail for decades, and neural network-based AlphaFold is the leader. No non-neural approach comes within a country mile of its performance. They created a fold database of unprecedented coverage which is being used in research.
    - bernulli 5y ago
      He was decidedly not right. His claim was that neural networks are fundamentally not able to perform an XOR step, limiting any relevant computational capabilities. That claim was easily remedied later by slightly changing network architectures later on.
- RandomWorker 5y ago
  It’s like imaginary numbers are fake and don’t exist, but many calculations for electric circuits are easily done using these numbers. Sting theory is that to the nth degree. And, when done well it allows you describe the largest distances and the smallest particles using one mathematical principle. It’s useful in a sense that we can explain the existing observations. Though the predictions will be (currently) impossible to verity because where we have working theories in easy domain, planet scale -1g -1atm, nothings gets disproven. It’s that larger scale at insane conditions we may conclude something interesting. Though testing it will take another possibly larger hydrogen collider, or gravity wave measurement device. The quote They fight you and call you crazy, until your not them you are a genius — has never been more true. I say let the ideas be worked out, and the market place of ideas will solve if it’s relevant. The authors assumption that particle theoretical physics is dead is imo completely wrong, there are still many great people working on it.
  - mgamache 5y ago
    Eventually it will sort out yes. There's a cost to beating a dead horse in time and resources. We've been stuck for 40 years: Physicists today can happily make career by writing papers about things no one has ever observed, and never will observe. This continues to go on because there is nothing and no one that can stop it. https://iai.tv/articles/why-physics-has-made-no-progress-in-50-years-auid-1292 https://iai.tv/articles/why-physics-has-made-no-progress-in-...
    - throwaway81523 5y ago
      Nobody has ever observed the interior of a black hole and reported the results to the outside, and nobody ever will (unless GR is drastically wrong). And yet we consider our theory of BH interiors to be basically valid except at the center, where it breaks down. That's perfectly good physics, so deal with it.
  - sorokod 5y ago
    > imaginary numbers are fake and don’t exist, In what relevant sense do imagenary numbers differ from real numbers? Being a mathematical abstraction they are in no way required to help approximate phisical reality. That they do is a source of wonder to many, but that is beside the point.
- tim333 5y ago
  "Science progresses one funeral at a time" I think the string theory guys will stick with it while they can.
someguydave 5y ago
Sabine Hossenfelder comments near the bottom and makes things clear as she usually does.
- Ancalagon 5y ago
  I couldnt find the comment your were mentioning, but I read most of the user comments on the article and... lets just say they werent much better than what Id expect to find in the comment section of a youtube video.
  - raincom 5y ago
    Sabine's comment: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12604#comment-239808 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12604#comme...
Jason_Protell 5y ago
Loop quantum cosmology is more compelling than string theory.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Either it makes predictions, or it doesn't. Either they are borne out, or they aren't.
unixbeard1337 5y ago
I find it difficult to believe that most theoretical physicists are wrong and one guy in the math department at Columbia + the comments section of a venture capital link aggregator are right. It could be; it just doesn't seem very likely.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Yet, it is true. It is theoretically possible that the "string theory landscape" explorers are onto something. But so long as they are not predicting results of experiments, they are not doing science. Nobody is obliged to be a scientist; they could move over to the philosophy department, if it would take them. Or the mathematics department. Likewise, nobody is morally obliged to pay people claiming to be scientists to do something that is not science. But our institutions don't have an "in case of emergency break glass" red button, so these scientists no longer doing science still get to teach classes, attend conferences, and publish vacuous papers, and appear to be doing their job. They also get to award (or not award) doctorates, gatekeep journals and conferences, and control tenure-track appointments. A similar process is going on among Alzheimer Syndrome researchers. They still publish papers on amyloids and taus and stuff to block making them, despite it having been demonstrated to anybody's satisfaction that this is a dead end. They still approve those papers, and still teach and award doctorates. They even, somehow, got the FDA to approve an extraordinarily expensive drug that does nothing, but that Medicare will be obliged to subsidize. (At worst it's harmless? Must we go there?) In academia we are disinclined to nip apparent dead ends in the bud, because so often what some thought unpromising lines of work turned out to lead somewhere important. But when nobody is even trying anymore to get to anywhere important, it eventually comes time to pull the plug. The alternative is to end up with a department writing commentaries on commentaries on the writings of figures who were close to the Prophet.
  - pa7x1 5y ago
    Quantum Gravity is relevant at an energy scale that is completely out of our current technical capabilities. That's hardly the fault of string theory or any other theory of quantum gravity. It's just a consequence of the fundamental constants of our universe and our technical capabilities at this point in time. String theory makes testable predictions, it is falsifiable. It's just not something we can falsify with our current technical means. That doesn't make the theory unscientific. Would Quantum Field Theory be unscientific if it had fallen in the hands of the ancient Greeks? The theory falsifiability is an intrinsic property of the theory, irrespective of our technical ability.
joelbondurant0 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

49 points by chmaynard 5y ago

It feels like string theory will be a cautionary tail of being too myopic on a single promising thread of inquiry. We've probably wasted 20+ years after we should have jumped tracks (or at least stared changing course). Religions of belief tend to pop up around attractive academic ideas that can't be falsified but also have great explanatory power.

bernulli 5y ago
It's a really tough question of when to pull the plug. Marvin Minsky wrote a whole book in 1969 'proving' that neural nets cannot, fundamentally, do anything interesting - yet, here we are.
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  He was mostly right. Neural nets are mostly an artistic tool for creating awesome generative art. They don't give any scientific or mathematical answers.
  - civilized 5y ago
    > They don't give any scientific or mathematical answers. Dead wrong. Predicting protein folding has been a scientific holy grail for decades, and neural network-based AlphaFold is the leader. No non-neural approach comes within a country mile of its performance. They created a fold database of unprecedented coverage which is being used in research.
  - bernulli 5y ago
    He was decidedly not right. His claim was that neural networks are fundamentally not able to perform an XOR step, limiting any relevant computational capabilities. That claim was easily remedied later by slightly changing network architectures later on.
RandomWorker 5y ago
It’s like imaginary numbers are fake and don’t exist, but many calculations for electric circuits are easily done using these numbers. Sting theory is that to the nth degree. And, when done well it allows you describe the largest distances and the smallest particles using one mathematical principle. It’s useful in a sense that we can explain the existing observations. Though the predictions will be (currently) impossible to verity because where we have working theories in easy domain, planet scale -1g -1atm, nothings gets disproven. It’s that larger scale at insane conditions we may conclude something interesting. Though testing it will take another possibly larger hydrogen collider, or gravity wave measurement device. The quote They fight you and call you crazy, until your not them you are a genius — has never been more true. I say let the ideas be worked out, and the market place of ideas will solve if it’s relevant. The authors assumption that particle theoretical physics is dead is imo completely wrong, there are still many great people working on it.
- mgamache 5y ago
  Eventually it will sort out yes. There's a cost to beating a dead horse in time and resources. We've been stuck for 40 years: Physicists today can happily make career by writing papers about things no one has ever observed, and never will observe. This continues to go on because there is nothing and no one that can stop it. https://iai.tv/articles/why-physics-has-made-no-progress-in-50-years-auid-1292 https://iai.tv/articles/why-physics-has-made-no-progress-in-...
  - throwaway81523 5y ago
    Nobody has ever observed the interior of a black hole and reported the results to the outside, and nobody ever will (unless GR is drastically wrong). And yet we consider our theory of BH interiors to be basically valid except at the center, where it breaks down. That's perfectly good physics, so deal with it.
- sorokod 5y ago
  > imaginary numbers are fake and don’t exist, In what relevant sense do imagenary numbers differ from real numbers? Being a mathematical abstraction they are in no way required to help approximate phisical reality. That they do is a source of wonder to many, but that is beside the point.
tim333 5y ago
"Science progresses one funeral at a time" I think the string theory guys will stick with it while they can.

someguydave 5y ago

Sabine Hossenfelder comments near the bottom and makes things clear as she usually does.

Ancalagon 5y ago
I couldnt find the comment your were mentioning, but I read most of the user comments on the article and... lets just say they werent much better than what Id expect to find in the comment section of a youtube video.
- raincom 5y ago
  Sabine's comment: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12604#comment-239808 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=12604#comme...

Jason_Protell 5y ago

Loop quantum cosmology is more compelling than string theory.

ncmncm 5y ago
Either it makes predictions, or it doesn't. Either they are borne out, or they aren't.

unixbeard1337 5y ago

I find it difficult to believe that most theoretical physicists are wrong and one guy in the math department at Columbia + the comments section of a venture capital link aggregator are right. It could be; it just doesn't seem very likely.

ncmncm 5y ago
Yet, it is true. It is theoretically possible that the "string theory landscape" explorers are onto something. But so long as they are not predicting results of experiments, they are not doing science. Nobody is obliged to be a scientist; they could move over to the philosophy department, if it would take them. Or the mathematics department. Likewise, nobody is morally obliged to pay people claiming to be scientists to do something that is not science. But our institutions don't have an "in case of emergency break glass" red button, so these scientists no longer doing science still get to teach classes, attend conferences, and publish vacuous papers, and appear to be doing their job. They also get to award (or not award) doctorates, gatekeep journals and conferences, and control tenure-track appointments. A similar process is going on among Alzheimer Syndrome researchers. They still publish papers on amyloids and taus and stuff to block making them, despite it having been demonstrated to anybody's satisfaction that this is a dead end. They still approve those papers, and still teach and award doctorates. They even, somehow, got the FDA to approve an extraordinarily expensive drug that does nothing, but that Medicare will be obliged to subsidize. (At worst it's harmless? Must we go there?) In academia we are disinclined to nip apparent dead ends in the bud, because so often what some thought unpromising lines of work turned out to lead somewhere important. But when nobody is even trying anymore to get to anywhere important, it eventually comes time to pull the plug. The alternative is to end up with a department writing commentaries on commentaries on the writings of figures who were close to the Prophet.
- pa7x1 5y ago
  Quantum Gravity is relevant at an energy scale that is completely out of our current technical capabilities. That's hardly the fault of string theory or any other theory of quantum gravity. It's just a consequence of the fundamental constants of our universe and our technical capabilities at this point in time. String theory makes testable predictions, it is falsifiable. It's just not something we can falsify with our current technical means. That doesn't make the theory unscientific. Would Quantum Field Theory be unscientific if it had fallen in the hands of the ancient Greeks? The theory falsifiability is an intrinsic property of the theory, irrespective of our technical ability.

joelbondurant0 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]