String Theory a Disaster for Physics?

BlueCup writes "Mathematician Peter Woit of Columbia University describes string theory in his book Not Even Wrong,. He calls the theory 'a disaster for physics.' Which would have been a fringe opinion a few years ago, but now, after years of string theory books reaching the best sellers list, he has company."

Comments

Before the consensus ...

[aws4y]

Let me point out that this has been well known in physics departments for years. The problem is string theory is nowhere near producing any prediction that can be tested, this means that it is not science, any more than mathematics is physics.

A Physicist's Thoughts

[ichin4]

I am an (ex-) particle theorist. I worked on phenomenology, which is how particle physicists describe people try to work with actual data.

I don't think the rise of string theory has been the cause of the dearth of breakthroughs in particle physics in the last 30 years, but rather the effect. For all that time, nothing unexpected has come out of accelerator experiments -- just more confirmations of the predictions of the standard model developed in the 1970s, and more accurate measurements of its parameters. In an environment like that, it's no surprise that theoreticans turn to highly speculative and mathematically challenging models to keep their work interesting.

There are still some related fields generating new and interesting data for good young theorists to cut their teeth on -- cosmology, for example.

Re:Man...

[Mike Peel]

That tends to make me think that we do in fact, have a pretty good grasp of the laws of physics. IMO, the only thing we're missing is the "gravity to the rest of it" connection, confounded by the inconvienient fact that gravity appears to be the only force in the universe which is apparently instantainious over galactic distances.

We haven't thought that gravity is instantaneous for about 90 years now - General Relativity shows that the force of gravity moves at the speed of light. Have a read about gravitational radiation sometime.

Go work any celestial orbital mechanics problem, including the orbit of the earth around the sun, and try and make it work if the gravitational attraction vector is assumed to be toward where the sun appears to be now (as opposed to where it is right now instead where it was 8 minutes ago when that light left the suns position then). By adding any delay, the orbit falls apart, and our earth would have spiraled into the sun many billions of years ago.

I'm confused here. The sun is (pretty much) unmoving, and emits a (pretty much) spherically symmetrical gravitational field. So wherever the Earth is, the 'gravitational attraction vector' is going to be pointing to the sun - as that's the direction of the gravitational field. As the mass of the sun is (pretty much) unchanging, there will be no changes to the gravitational field over time, and things continue just as in newtonian physics.

Complications to this probably arise when you've got more bodies in the system, though - so if you include the other major planets, you'll get effects such as you're talking about, but they're on a far smaller scale than you think as the sun's so big in comparison.

(Note that the same does not apply to pulsars, black holes and the like - where there's a lot more mass, and things are a lot more extreme.)

Re:I'd call this a 'debate', but....

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

That's induction, buddy.

It also happens to be philosophy -- possibly mathematics -- rather than science.

The only way (that I know about) to prove "all X have Y" in science is to enumerate all X, which typically isn't possible in the physical world, and even if you do that, you still haven't proved that "all X must necessarily have Y".

... buddy.