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Witten has revolutionized mathematical physics, and his development of topological quantum field theory was nothing short of monumental. Much of Witten's own p
by glenstein 2y ago
Witten has revolutionized mathematical physics, and his development of topological quantum field theory was nothing short of monumental.
Much of Witten's own point above is that advancements in string theory have cashed out in revolutionary new mathematical approaches that would be of lasting value even string theory itself never receives any experimental confirmation.
I think article highlights something very beautiful about how physics, including string theory, have lead to the creation of new math, and how that is suggestive of an unmet promise. To ignore that just to come in and repeat for the 1000th time the world's most repeated thing about string theory, and take a completely unnecessary cheap shot at Ed Witten is the perfect embodiment of why comment sections can too often be a depressing waste of time.
- 77pt77 2y agoThe only cheap thing here is the amount of actual physics that came out of all of this ptolemaic endeavor. And writing ptolemaic is probably too charitable because the Almagest at least predicted movements quite well at the time (apparently it now deviates too much).
- zachf 2y agoIs your preferred remedy that quantum gravity be entirely defunded, or instead that more funding be redirected to any of the other programs to study quantum gravity? If the latter, which ones in your opinion are more likely to be productive than string theory?
- 77pt77 2y agoI have no remedies. But I refuse to say "thank you very much" when sand has been thrown at my eyes for decades.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- naasking 2y agoYour suggestion implicitly asserts that string theory was productive, which is exactly the claim that seems to be in contention. I don't think it's too wild to suggest that, without the constraints of string theory imposed by advisors, lots of novel approaches would have been tried. We have no idea what could have been produced. As for quantum gravity specifically, arguably not much progress will be made without more data, and we now have some proposed experiments that can be conducted here on Earth to test them.
- zachf 2y agoThere are in fact exceptionally strong incentives to discover alternatives to quantum gravity which could be tested in experiments. These are the same incentives that always drive the scientific process, and new theories cost next to zero to produce. The reason string theory is popular is not because string theorists somehow prevent funding of other directions. It is because string theory has given us tools like AdS/CFT that are useful in other contexts to understand real physics—-and the alternatives have not (yet). There are many physicists who spend their lives studying alternatives to string theory with 100% of their time. I hope for their sake that there is a similar pot of gold at the end of their rainbows. It has not yet materialized.
- naasking 2y agoOh Ads, you mean that space that emphatically does NOT describe our universe? Ads/CFT is overblown. It's just an interesting mathematical result that hasn't borne much meaningful fruit for actual physics. I'm sorry, but string theorists absolutely do prevent funding other research because funding is finite, grad students have to research something their advisors think is worthy, and their advisors have their heads full of "beautiful math" so that's what they tell their students to work on if they want their PhDs, and that's what they hire their post grads to work on if they want a job. Only now as the strong theory haze has started dissipating are we starting to see novel approaches, like Oppenheim's post quantum gravity theory.
- zachf 2y ago
- glenstein 2y agoBuilding out the toolkit of physics is vital to the advance of physics itself, and last I checked Ptolemy hasn't produced tools that have advanced our understanding of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy in black holes.
- 77pt77 2y agoThose guys basically developed Fourier analysis with very clunky notation. We'll be very lucky if these guys are doing anything even remotely as useful.
- glenstein 2y agoThey produced conceptual breakthroughs that have advanced our understanding of black hole physics in ways not previously possible. If that was just lying around as a simple repurposing of a Fourier analysis, it wouldn't have sat around as an unresolved problem for decades. But I understand that words meaning things is not part of the operative definition of success in the goalpost relocation industry.
- 77pt77 2y agoIt's getting harder and harder to hide the complete lack of achievement. You can only strike each others' egos for so long.