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This is the well known litany from string theorists to try and justify the inordinate amount of money threw at them to get back nothing of physical value: no fa
by torrefatto 2y ago
This is the well known litany from string theorists to try and justify the inordinate amount of money threw at them to get back nothing of physical value: no falsifiable prediction.
Instead of reasoning on the worth of the effort spent in this direction to investigate nature (a very tangible companion) they try to steer the discourse toward this nonsense. We spent >50 years listening to these tales and the time has long passed since we are required to stop playing with these smoke and mirrors.
- jjk166 2y ago> justify the inordinate amount of money threw at them They're theorists, you're paying for pencils and paper. String theory may not have produced a theory of quantum gravity yet, but neither has any other line of inquiry.
- paulpauper 2y agosorta. the construction of particle accelerators has been justified to test the hypotheses of string theory
- torrefatto 2y agoYou are wrong. Particle accelerators have been built since way before any string theory was formulated. The biggest and most powerful existing accelerator (LHC) has been built to fulfill the high energy/high luminosity requirements to explore the Highs boson energy regime (that has been found) and at most the lightest supersymmetric particles (not found as of today). The Higgs boson is a cornerstone of the Standard Model. Supersymmetry is an extension to it that does not involve strings. https://home.web.cern.ch/science/physics/supersymmetry https://home.web.cern.ch/science/physics/supersymmetry
- torrefatto 2y agoYou are right, the amount of money spent in string theory proposals has been staggering if you take into account the size of the field. For decades competing (or even just non-aligned) research lines have been starved to feed this behemoth.
- NegativeK 2y agoHonest question. Do string theorists not use models on supercomputers?
- elashri 2y ago> no falsifiable prediction You forgot to add "with our current technology ability to probe the required energy scale".
- torrefatto 2y agoThey produced a family of theories with an infinite amount of underlying possible geometries, and we still don't know if these reduce in the low energy limit to the standard model. I humbly suggest this reading: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/is-string-theory-even-wrong https://www.americanscientist.org/article/is-string-theory-e... If not realistically "non falsifiable" this sounds to me at least "not scientifically relevant" in the context of physics.
- tim333 2y agoThey have probably produced some new maths, maybe as much as if you threw similar amounts of money at the maths department?
- bluGill 2y agoAnd right now we have no reason to think either would produce more useful math. Math at least is honest about studying math for the sake of math (or truth and beauty). Nothing wrong with throwing money at math, but physics is supposed to be about understanding the universe so if we only get math we get a bad return on investment no matter how nice the math is. Even if the math turns out to be useful elsewhere we didn't get what we wanted out of the investment.
- torrefatto 2y agoAt the cost of starving other research lines in theoretical physics (the thing they told are trying to work on).