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> it's about how this obsession is hogging resources and blocking other potentially groundbreaking ideas My understanding was that a unique virtue of string th
by glenstein 3y ago
> it's about how this obsession is hogging resources and blocking other potentially groundbreaking ideas
My understanding was that a unique virtue of string theory was that (for better or worse) it was playing out with pencils and paper, and not demanding billion dollar funding projects for particle colliders or other such infrastructure and thus was relatively harmless as far as competition for resources is concerned.
- kenjackson 3y agoOne resource could be the minds of brilliant scientists.
- glenstein 3y agoAgreed, I think this is the strongest counterpoint. But it effectively requires restating the point to clarify that it's tying up minds, time, energy, which are non-trivial things; but not infrastructure.
- oldgradstudent 3y agoThey may be brilliant, but if they're string theorists, they aren't scientists. Or at least that's Woit's point.
- geysersam 3y agoNot remotely true. The predictions theoreticians make guide what experiments are made. If the predictions are of low quality the experiments are unlikely to give us any valuable data.
- glenstein 3y agoLet's say I agree to that. How does that translate into an argument that string theory is hogging resources (e.g. funds, infrastructure, colliders, space telescopes) that are now no longer available to alternative projects? Yours sounds like an argument that it's not making good or testable predictions, certainly an indictment but not (so far as I can tell) responsive to my Q.
- pdonis 3y agoNot requiring billion dollar funding projects could be good or bad, depending on the reason. If the reason is that the theory is making experimental predictions that can be tested more cheaply (as in a number of areas in condensed matter physics, where you can do tabletop experiments to test things), that's good. If the reason is that the theory makes no predictions that are testable at all by any experiments that are doable now or in the foreseeable future, as with string theory, that's bad.
- glenstein 3y agoTotally agree. I tried to account for this by saying "for better or worse." But what are its actual, real-world claims on our major experimental infrastructure in the present?
- pdonis 3y ago> what are its actual, real-world claims on our major experimental infrastructure in the present? At present, now that the LHC has failed to show any of the evidence for supersymmetry that string theorists were confidently predicting it would show, string theorists appear to be pushing for the next more energetic collider, confidently predicting that it will show evidence of supersymmetry.
- glenstein 3y agoI accept this as at least somewhat responsive. But (1) it's pretty vague and speculative as a statement about how resources have in fact been allocated thus far. And (2) it seems like no matter how much I try to clarify, you just can't resist making this into a matter of how bad string theory is, which is all well and good but is not the point of my question. I was hoping for something along the lines of "Yeah, check out chapter 4 of Peter Woit's book where he gets into the crazy things he witnessed at his campus during the 2010s" or something like that. I guess I'll just try Peter Woit's book and peruse his blog a bit to see what he means.
- 3y ago