4 ms·

All it needs is an experiment that can test it.

• qoez 10mo ago
  If they had that the hype could die. Luckily it cannot be tested so the hype will continue in perpetuity
  • qarl 10mo ago
    Heh... as someone on the outside, I feel the need to ask: Has it been rigorously shown that it can never be tested? Or is that your prediction?
    • bluGill 10mo ago
      They are getting close to making a testable prediction, any day now. Have been for the last 30 years. History is not always an indication of the future, but it is often a good sign. But yes, not rigorous.
    • slashdave 10mo ago
      Test which version? Part of the problem is that string theory is a meta theory. There will always be ways to escape any negative experimental result.
      • XorNot 10mo ago
        String theory isn't a theory it's a family of related theories sharing some common mathematical tools. People talk about this as though it's an attempt at deception, whereas two people notionally working in string theory could in fact be proposing highly incompatible models which would be conclusively ruled out (and a lot of them have been in so far as that can be done - i.e. experimentation has put tight bounds on their possible parameters).
      • qarl 10mo ago
        > There will always be ways to escape any negative experimental result. Yeah... except that hasn't been proven. That's just your belief, right? I don't think anyone has proven that string theory can yield no testable predictions. I think if someone had, that'd be a big deal. And I don't think we should pretend that an open problem is closed just because we don't like it.
  • mcmoor 10mo ago
    I heard that there's so many variants of string theory. All theories that have interesting low-energy predictions have lost to standard theory (see: SUSY experiments at LHC). Now we're left with high-energy ones which may actually be wrong too but we can't test them yet.
• ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
  One day when I'm not being lazy I might publish a point by point refutation of the usual nonsense anti-string theory memes. Until then, here's what I said on this point 25 days ago, specifically the first paragraph starting with "like another commenter". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336655
  • AnimalMuppet 10mo ago
    OK, but if there are no predictions that we can test for several generations, how do you tell the difference between science and science-sounding nonsense?
    • ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
      Good question, I touch on this on the same comment, in the paragraph starting with "I keep repeating these things on HNs". The TLDR is that you can never expect the same level of certainty when you don't have direct experiments, but you can still rule out _some_ hypothesis, and see how far other hypothesis take you. This is called theoretical physics. Just because you can't make an experiment doesn't mean you can't do anything.
    • queuebert 10mo ago
      There is no a priori reason why a bunch of meatbags would have the ability to test all laws of physics of this universe. I think we may have gotten lucky for a while there. String theory is so far out there that a new methodology has been developed, namely using beauty or symmetry or Occam's Razor to choose between competing theories. None of these have the pedigree of empiricism, but they may also not be wrong. I hope some aesthetic could be applied to the laws of the universe, but that is also not at all guaranteed.
      • ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
        > I hope some aesthetic Certainly internal self-consistency will take you a long way if you don't have experiments. Some people find beauty in this :-)
• Animats 10mo ago
  High-energy physics is kind of stuck on that. Most of the interesting questions involve energies or distances way beyond what's reachable by experiment today. Meanwhile, there's interesting experimental action in low-energy physics, down near absolute zero. Many of the weirder predictions of quantum mechanics have now been observed directly. Look at the list of Nobel laureates in physics since 1990. A big fraction of them involve experiments with very low energy states, where thermal noise is small enough that quantum effects dominate. Some of that work led to useful technology. That's forward progress.
  • watersb 10mo ago
    > Most of the interesting questions involve energies or distances way beyond what's reachable by experiment today. Astronomers can observe extremely energetic environments from a great distance. It's not a controlled experiment, but sometimes they get lucky and see something that suggests new physics. I have no idea what might be needed to provide astronomical evidence for string theory.
  • asdff 10mo ago
    Kind of interesting to think about how the scale (range or magnitude) in which we are able to detect something has such striking implications for the model that gets developed based on these findings. Even when we are able to operate at higher resolution sometimes the model makers still operate on their own scales. For example, I believe political science and economics ought to be studied from a biological perspective if they are to be fully understood, since gene by environment interaction determines so much. However, there seems to be little interest among political scientists and economists to study the nitty gritty of molecular and population genetics, and little interest among the molecular and population geneticists to study political science and economic theory. And because of this, seems to me such models will always fall short compared to models that operated on a perhaps more appropriate scale of inputs.
• slashdave 10mo ago
  Provide a viable test, and you will be sure that an experimentalist will jump at the chance