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In case you wonder who will win the argument in the end: Sal is short for Filippo Salviati, the alter ego of Galileo Galilei in his "Dialogue Concerning the Two

by fhars 14y ago

In case you wonder who will win the argument in the end: Sal is short for Filippo Salviati, the alter ego of Galileo Galilei in his "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems", and Simp is Simplicio, the obviously stupid defender of Ptolemaic and Aristotelian science. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_Concerning_the_Two_Chief_World_Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_Concerning_the_Two_Chi...

andrewcooke 14y ago
while it's clearly an article intended to persuade, and not trying to present a balanced view, i think the doubts and questions raised against string theory are still commonly held (i cannot for a moment comment on particular problems, but from the occasional things i hear from academia, string theory is not considered that "good" in an "aesthetic" sense... it may be the best we have, but it's kind of embarrassing how complex it is, and how little it gives (or fixes) in return)
- fhars 14y ago
  Well, yes. I do remember when someone put a copy of an article on the pin board of the library of the local high energy physics lab titled "String Theory Draws Theorists Together" and someone added "String-" in front of the word "Theorists" with a red marker sometime in the early 90ies. So it wasn't without distractors then, too.
- Steuard 14y ago
  Heck, many of the doubts and questions raised there are commonly held among string theorists. (The days of people exclaiming "We're going to unify physics within a few years!" are at least two decades behind us.) In my experience, string theorists do consider those issues significant, but not problematic enough to make them uneasy about the theory as a whole. As a string theorist, the thing that bugs me about this dialog is mostly that the string theorist character is so befuddled by relativity. I'm sure there must be real string theorists out there who are confused by the difference between "general relativity" and "quantum fields in curved spacetime" or who don't understand that GR introduces subtleties with things like globally defined time coordinates, but I've never met one (at least not to know it). And it's bizarre to see a string theorist character act so surprised by the notion of spacetime as an emergent property of some very different underlying physics, given that the same thing happens in string theory itself. (Certain fields defined entirely on the two-dimensional worldsheet of a fundamental string interact in specific ways that give them the structure of a spacetime manifold.)

by fhars 14y ago

andrewcooke 14y ago

while it's clearly an article intended to persuade, and not trying to present a balanced view, i think the doubts and questions raised against string theory are still commonly held (i cannot for a moment comment on particular problems, but from the occasional things i hear from academia, string theory is not considered that "good" in an "aesthetic" sense... it may be the best we have, but it's kind of embarrassing how complex it is, and how little it gives (or fixes) in return)

fhars 14y ago
Well, yes. I do remember when someone put a copy of an article on the pin board of the library of the local high energy physics lab titled "String Theory Draws Theorists Together" and someone added "String-" in front of the word "Theorists" with a red marker sometime in the early 90ies. So it wasn't without distractors then, too.
Steuard 14y ago
Heck, many of the doubts and questions raised there are commonly held among string theorists. (The days of people exclaiming "We're going to unify physics within a few years!" are at least two decades behind us.) In my experience, string theorists do consider those issues significant, but not problematic enough to make them uneasy about the theory as a whole. As a string theorist, the thing that bugs me about this dialog is mostly that the string theorist character is so befuddled by relativity. I'm sure there must be real string theorists out there who are confused by the difference between "general relativity" and "quantum fields in curved spacetime" or who don't understand that GR introduces subtleties with things like globally defined time coordinates, but I've never met one (at least not to know it). And it's bizarre to see a string theorist character act so surprised by the notion of spacetime as an emergent property of some very different underlying physics, given that the same thing happens in string theory itself. (Certain fields defined entirely on the two-dimensional worldsheet of a fundamental string interact in specific ways that give them the structure of a spacetime manifold.)