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Personally, I think it is always good to have some people working on weird, unverifiable ideas. Presenting them as the only one truth, however, is a problem.

seanhunter 3y ago
Agree but very much with your caveat. If you study the mathematics of some sort of abstract structure you are doing research in pure maths. That is a worthy and completely legitimate pursuit and a ton of stuff started life as pure abstract mathematical research and ended up having real-world benefits way down the line that noone could have forseen.[1] If on the other hand you say that abstract structure is a fundamental building block of the universe and, say, unifies the standard model with gravity etc but actually your theory isn't explaining anything observable I would say that isn't theoretical physics[2] but is just "making shit up". So far string theory has failed to produce any sort of verifiable prediction[3], so I just don't see how it's physics (you could say "yet" perhaps). I enjoyed the video "String Theory Lied to Us and Now Science Communication is Hard"[4] by Angela Collier, who is a computational astrophysicist[5], because it gives a sense for how these things impact other physicists and the popular perception of science. [1] And Ed Witten for example is without doubt a very impressive mathematician - he won the Fields medal. [2] Which is the science of matter, energy, space, time etc all the stuff which makes up the natural world. [3] In particular, the one that has been tried is supersymmetry and the LHC, as I understand it as a non-physicist, brought about an experimental result that called supersymmetric extensions of the standard model into serious doubt https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3068 https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3068 [4] https://youtu.be/kya_LXa_y1E?si=FTC0sbs2ubxGyydZ https://youtu.be/kya_LXa_y1E?si=FTC0sbs2ubxGyydZ [5] https://jila.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/group-files/2021-09/cv_collier.pdf https://jila.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/group-files/20...
sampo 3y ago
> I think it is always good to have some people working on weird, unverifiable ideas. The problem is, for 40 years theoretical particle physics was working only on this one single weird unverifiable idea. Pretty much all other ideas were brushed aside. People's egos, careers, reputations and funding are dependent on keeping up the façade, so you can't just reboot and start over. You have to keep paying lip service to the emperor with no clothes. Theoretical physics used to be the "king of sciences", but now it more and more appears as a dead end, intellectually and career-wise, for the next generation of physicists.
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  This overstates things. There are many, many, theoretical physicists who worked on regular old quantum field theory in both a fundamental and material science vein. I'd guess that if you got all the theoretical physicists in the world together, string theorists would make up less than 30%.
  - itsacomment 3y ago
    I hope you mean all the theoretical physicists working on the high energy theories of physics, because 30% is a sadly high figure even for that subfield. If 30% of all theorists would actually be of no use to any other physicists, that would be horrendous.

seanhunter 3y ago

Agree but very much with your caveat. If you study the mathematics of some sort of abstract structure you are doing research in pure maths. That is a worthy and completely legitimate pursuit and a ton of stuff started life as pure abstract mathematical research and ended up having real-world benefits way down the line that noone could have forseen.[1] If on the other hand you say that abstract structure is a fundamental building block of the universe and, say, unifies the standard model with gravity etc but actually your theory isn't explaining anything observable I would say that isn't theoretical physics[2] but is just "making shit up". So far string theory has failed to produce any sort of verifiable prediction[3], so I just don't see how it's physics (you could say "yet" perhaps). I enjoyed the video "String Theory Lied to Us and Now Science Communication is Hard"[4] by Angela Collier, who is a computational astrophysicist[5], because it gives a sense for how these things impact other physicists and the popular perception of science. [1] And Ed Witten for example is without doubt a very impressive mathematician - he won the Fields medal. [2] Which is the science of matter, energy, space, time etc all the stuff which makes up the natural world. [3] In particular, the one that has been tried is supersymmetry and the LHC, as I understand it as a non-physicist, brought about an experimental result that called supersymmetric extensions of the standard model into serious doubt https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3068 https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3068 [4] https://youtu.be/kya_LXa_y1E?si=FTC0sbs2ubxGyydZ https://youtu.be/kya_LXa_y1E?si=FTC0sbs2ubxGyydZ [5] https://jila.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/group-files/2021-09/cv_collier.pdf https://jila.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/group-files/20...

sampo 3y ago

> I think it is always good to have some people working on weird, unverifiable ideas. The problem is, for 40 years theoretical particle physics was working only on this one single weird unverifiable idea. Pretty much all other ideas were brushed aside. People's egos, careers, reputations and funding are dependent on keeping up the façade, so you can't just reboot and start over. You have to keep paying lip service to the emperor with no clothes. Theoretical physics used to be the "king of sciences", but now it more and more appears as a dead end, intellectually and career-wise, for the next generation of physicists.

nathan_compton 3y ago
This overstates things. There are many, many, theoretical physicists who worked on regular old quantum field theory in both a fundamental and material science vein. I'd guess that if you got all the theoretical physicists in the world together, string theorists would make up less than 30%.
- itsacomment 3y ago
  I hope you mean all the theoretical physicists working on the high energy theories of physics, because 30% is a sadly high figure even for that subfield. If 30% of all theorists would actually be of no use to any other physicists, that would be horrendous.