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A few hundred people working on String Theory for about four decades is about $500 million. Hope this proof was worth it.
by xqcgrek2 10mo ago
A few hundred people working on String Theory for about four decades is about $500 million. Hope this proof was worth it.
- N_Lens 10mo agoYour entire life summed up probably costs $500k-4m (On average, depending). Some bean counter could probably argue that it isn't worth it.
- cyber_kinetist 10mo agoOver a couple of decades VCs have invested in vanity startups that cost billions of dollars like it's nothing, countless times. I think half a billion isn't that expensive for a program that searches for a potential "theory of everything" that can profoundly change our understanding of the universe (even if it brings no results!)
- lazide 10mo agoThen just call it maths, not physics?
- exe34 10mo agoyou can still call it whatever you like!
- lazide 10mo agoLast time I called it ‘a haven for folks afraid to have testable theories’ I almost got banned!
- exe34 10mo agoI'd like to express my doubts about your ability to understand their theories more colourfully, but I'm afraid I'm also under close scrutiny around here.
- lazide 10mo agoThis exact long running issue with string theory is surely my imagination, and I’m the only one who has commented on it. luckily it’s easy to prove me wrong. Right?
- Qwertious 10mo agoDidn't string theory create the concept of supersymmetry, which had testable theories? They were proven wrong, but that's a good thing.
- glenstein 10mo agoWe're long past the point where people can claim string theory has contributed nothing. AdS/CFT correspondence helped us understand what happens to information in black holes, and brought us the holographic principle which now is looking like it might potentially be the next big conceptual revolution in physics. Holography is making meaningful predictions in nuclear and plasma physics right now Holography desperately needs it's own Brian Greene style ambassador to share the good news. In terms of momentum and taking center stage, it's now in the place where String Theory used to be like 10-15 years ago as the frontier idea with all the excitement ever momentum behind it, and it has been borne from the fruit of string theory. It's quite amazing times we're living in but I think there's been no energy in the post covid world to take a breath and appreciate it.
- lazide 10mo agoLast i’d heard, ‘they provided an interesting alternative way of thinking of the problem’ but provided no unique insights or additional testable behaviors. The folks using the alternative theories ended up being able to formulate them more directly using other (‘normal’) physics later. Do you have a cite for anything contrary to that? It doesn’t help that when something does finally seem experimentally provable (Craig Hogan noise for example), but then gets tested and seems disproven, then it gets ‘removed from Canon’ as it were and ‘is not string theory’.
- lazide 10mo agoIt got retconned to ‘not string theory’ after that, if i remember correctly.
- runarberg 10mo agoI am not a fan of String Theory, but as far as fringe science theories go, String Theory is probably one of the more innocent ones. If you are going to pour money into a fringe science theory, I would much rather it goes to scientists trying to discover some properties of the universe which may or may not exist (and probably doesn’t exist; lets be honest here), than many of the awful stuff which exists on the fringes of social sciences (things like longtermism or futurism) or on the fringes of engineering (a future Mars colony, AI singularity, etc.).
- setopt 10mo agoGenuinely curious: Why do you consider a future Mars colony to be «awful stuff»?
- runarberg 10mo agoYes, I do. It is engineeringly possible, but societally a horror prescription. I maintain that even the moon landing was an engineering dead end, it resulted in no major breakthrough which we wouldn’t have reached otherwise (for much cheaper) and the humanity benefited nothing but bragging rights. It was then used to further nationalism and exceptionalism by one particular society which went on to conduct many horrible acts of atrocities in the decades that followed. The prospect of a Mars colony would be that except a million times worse. Humanity will never migrate to Mars, we will never live on Mars, we have nothing to gain by living there, and it may even be impossible for us to live a normal human life over there (e.g. we don‘t know if we can even give birth over there). The only thing it will give us are bragging rights to the powerful individuals which achives it first, who will likely use that as political capital to enact horrible policies on Earth, for their own personal benefits, at the cost of everybody else.
- koakuma-chan 10mo agoWhy colonize Mars? Why not Moon?
- whiplash451 10mo ago
- orochimaaru 10mo agoWhat would you have them work on? Predatory social media platforms that sell your data to advertisers and commoditize you.
- jjk166 10mo agoOr roughly the cost of producing Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker. Kinda wish that money had gone to string theory.
- analog31 10mo agoI suspect more people worked on solving quadratic equations in what I estimate to be the 1000 years since the problem was formulated, to when it was solved. The ancient Greeks knew that they could solve some quadratic equations but not others, and Al-Khwarizmi came up with the general solution. And then it was even further generalized with complex numbers.
- dimator 10mo agoso like 12.5 million a year? what an incredible self-own. aside from that, this number is meaningless without context: how much do other fields of research get?
- gmueckl 10mo agoDon't tell him how much money was invested into CERN over the same timespan to conduct experiments with highly uncertain outcomes. Or into gravitational wave detection. It wasn't certain that those waves even exist until the first measurement decades into the program.
- daquisu 10mo ago12.5 million a year for a hundred people seems reasonable? 125k per person per year. GP still said "a few hundred" - two hundred would drop that value to 62.5k per person
- yunwal 10mo agoIf all research bore fruit it wouldn't be research.
- glenstein 10mo agoNeil DeGrasse Tyson made an amazing point some years back that string theory costs practically nothing to develop. It takes some human capital to be sure, but in terms of infrastructure investments, it's pencils and paper and some computers. There's no high stakes mega project requiring massive infrastructure investments for questionable returns; no super colliders or gravitational wave detectors. For a field repeatedly challenged for not bringing testable predictions to bear, the fact that so much of its rich theoretical framework has been able to be worked out with minimal infrastructure investment is a welcome blessing which, I would hope, critics and supporters alike can celebrate.
- SyzygyRhythm 10mo agoI wouldn't downplay the opportunity cost of that much human capital. It really is quite a lot, given the obvious talents of the physicists. I'm not saying I fully agree with the position, but one way of looking at it is that thousands of incredibly smart people got nerd-sniped into working on a problem that actually has no solution. I sometimes wonder if there will ever be a point where people give up on it, as opposed to pursuing a field that bears some mathematical fruit, always with some future promise, but contributes nothing to physics.
- svara 10mo agoHaving people work on things that are at the limit of human understanding is an essential part of a modern educational system. For every professional string theorist, you get hundreds of people who were brought up in an academic system that values rigor and depth of scientific thinking. That's literally what a modern technological economy is built on. Getting useful novel results out of this is almost a lucky side effect.
- niemandhier 10mo agoThere is almost no opportunity cost: The academic pyramid swaps out the lower parts of the hierarchy at a high pace. You might lose a few smart people who become professors but the average sting theory phd goes to finance or whatever field requires absurd amounts of math at the moment. You do get people who are happy for a few years since they can live their childhood dream of being a physicist before the turn to actual jobs.