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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."
Some people really get tied in a knot about stuff like this.
asked a ninja.
No. The parameters of string theory can be bent far enough to encompass almost any observation predictable by other current theories. String theory can't predict anything reliably as a result, and can't be tested. That's why it's a disaster for modern physics. RTFA or STFU.
ResidntGeek
No... the combination's on a post-it note stuck to the front. But _we're_ locked inside!
I think ST is a very interesting and peculiar theory. I'm not sure it's a disaster. Even if ST is proved wrong in some way the math that resulted from ST is still worthwhile. However I think Woit's point is metascientifical, in that string theorists get more funding than those who are trying to provide alternatives to ST. That ST has become somewhat of a marketing term. This is surely damaging but again science is not excluded from human frailty.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
String Theory attempts an actual prediction and then gets it correct.
Till then, it's a bunch of fancy gobbedly gook as far as I'm concerned.
*Sigh* One of the biggest problems of string theory is it is damn near unprovable. It could be true. It might not be. But if the facts don't fit, you just modify the theory again. And yes, this is oversimplification, but not by much.
Makes me wonder if we are near the edge of what humans can know. Growing up, I took it on fiath that it was just a matter of time before we knew it all. Now, I am not so sure. Perhaps our monkey brains simply can't conceive of the true nature of reality.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
yes, BECAUSE:
either string theory is flawed and unproveable and is wasting time and holding back advancement from lack of studies in other directions.
OR
because string theory is beyond us right now and should net be focused on YET, if less of the brilliant people in science wasted time on string theory we might learn more! and become more enlightened by our new knowledge allowing for the possibility to product string theory.
There exists a universe in which major advances in Phyics would have been made if so many smart scientists were not distracted by String Theory.
I've never felt very comfortable with string theory. Not that it threatens some deep-held belief (I have few of those), but that it seems mostly like conjecture, trying to shoehorn increasingly complex theories to fit some phenomena that is probably explainable in a simpler manner which we just yet haven't found. Of course, physics often doesn't adhere to common sense.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
He blames string theory for this "crisis in particle physics," the branch of physics that tries to explain the most fundamental forces and building blocks of the world.
String theory, which took off in 1984....
Does string theory explain how its own effects are able to reach back in time a decade before its creation?
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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.
Did Glenn Beck rape and kill a girl in 1990? gb1990.com
Unfortunately, this proof only holds true for certain values of good.
Michio Kaku in his book Hyperspace describes why we can't actually get very far with this theory, is because "nobody is smart enough to figure it out". Since it was an accidental discovery in the 80's, he describes it as "21st century math that accidently made its way into the 20th century". The problem is to do with phase shifts and perturbation theory:
(Excerpted from Hyperspace: A scientific Odyssey through the 10th dimension)
To understand this form of tunneling, think of an imaginary Charlie Chaplin film, in which Chaplin is trying to stretch a bed sheet around an oversize bed. The shit is the kind with elastic bands on the corners. But it is too small, so he has to strain to wrap the elastic bands around each corner of the matress, one at a time. He grins with satisfaction once he has stretched the bed sheet smoothly around all four corners of the bed. But the strain is too great; one elastic band pops off another corner. Every time he yanks an elastic band around one corner, another elastic pops off another corner.
This process is called symmetry breaking. The smoothly strechted bed sheet possess a high degree of symmetry. You can rotate the bed 180 degrees along any axis, and the bed sheet remains the same. This highly symmetrical state is called the false vacuum. Although the false vacuum appears quite symmetrical, it is not stable. The sheet does not want to be in this stretched condition. There is too much tension. The energy is too high. Thus one elastic pops off, and the bed sheet curls up. The symmetry is broken, and the bed sheet has gone to a lower-energy state with less symmetry. By rotating the curled up bed sheet 180 degrees around an axis, we no longer return to the same sheet.
Now replace the bed sheet with ten-dimensional space-time, the space-time of ultimate esymmetry. At the beginning of time, the universe was perfectly symmetrical. If anyone was around at that time, he could freely pass through any of the ten dimensions without a problem. At that time, gravity and the weak, the strong and the electromagnetic forces were all unified by the superstring. All matter and forces were part of the same string multiplet. However, this symmetry couldn't last. The ten-dimensional universe, although perfectly symmetrical, was unstable, just like the bed sheet, and in a false vacuum. Thus tunneling to a lower-energy state was inevitable. When tunneling finally occurred, a phase transition took place, and symmetry was lost.
Because the universe begain to split up into a four- and a six-dimensional universe, the universe was no longer symmetrical. Six dimensions have curled up, in the same way that the bed sheet curls up when one elastic pops off first. For the ten-dimensional universe, however, there are apparently millions of ways in which to curl up. To calculate which state the ten-dimensional universe prefers, we need to solve the field theory of strings using the theory of phase transitions, the most difficult problem in quantum theory.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Well, yes, because that's not how science works. Theories have to be put forward which make predictions which can be meaningfully tested. If there is no way to actually test it, then it is, in effect, impossible to develop - by definition it cannot be wrong, and therefore is effectively complete, and science is 'finished', more or less. If such an idea ends up being the dominant trend, then yes, it would be something of a disaster.
I suppose we should stop looking for what started the universe, since we can't disprove the existance of God or anything. What a load of BS.
Would you class the statement "Everything happens because God says so" as scientific? I would hope not - such a statement is inherently impossible to scrutinise or critique, as "God did it" is, in this theory, a perfectly valid response. Science does not advance by pursuing ideas of that sort, but rather putting forward testable theories, and working out ways to stress them and see if their predictions hold, and refining them as a result.
That some ideas cannot be disproven is not a problem for science - instead we content ourselves with studying those that can be.
The secret combination to the universe is the same as the combination to my briefcase.
Dark Reflection
String theory is almost recursive.... a snake eating its tail.
TFA is right in one thing-- it's lead to physicist bigotry.... an increasingly inbred idea that string theory rules and all else drools, but in dimension 9. So many things are unsolved.... and Hawking has helped but the mathematicians that used to rule physicists are finding themselves in a reverse role, where expostulations must be found to match equations which were pimped for expostulation.
It's like curve-fitting, but with unprovable geometry, not Euclidian and not non-Euclidian.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Maybe Intelligent Design can get some respect if other hard-to-test and long-shot hypotheses are allowed to be called "science". Just because backers tend to be religious does not by itself make it wrong. If a Darwin or SETI cult formed, would evolution or SETI's hypothesis grow less likely? Human bias does not change the truth values of the universe. If biased people want to hunt down evidence for long-shot hypotheses, so be it.
Table-ized A.I.
...but also turned out to be a disaster for productivity at work recently. Two developers engaged in a battle of semantics as to whether or not M-theory was actually string theory or a unification of same. Almost an hour later, people had a concern that someone may end up being stabbed in the face; the argument, however, was cut short later when a concerned manager dealt with the high-strung arm-chair physicists.
Two hours later, the local protagonist "pulled their strings" sublimely bringing up the subject in the midst of those two persons and subsequently, another shouting match ensued. At one point, the intellectual conversation had almost degraded into a volley of "momma" jokes. By the end of the day, neither developer realized how close they were to being "strung up" by the rest of the team.
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.
Acording to general relativity there is a link between time and gravity, Hawkins always talked about it, with his Black Hole discoveries. It is Known now that Galaxies are not only moving away from each other as Hubble discovered with Red shift, but they are accelerating, acording to classical physics a force must be acting on them to do so, Now here's the neat part, With General Relativity as gravity gets weaker, Time speads up, it would make sense that because there is no mass we can see outside of galaxies, time has spead up there, and possibly caused a reversal of gravity, because it would make sense that anti gravity comes from accelerated time which comes from the absence of mass...If time is accelerated out there because of the absense of mass it would cause the force that makes galaxies accelerate away from each other. You can prove that gravity is the same as a magnetic field by putting a hyper sensitive clock by either a high powered electromagnetic field or a large mass such as earth and use space as a control, for both nearby clocks will go slower next to the earth and next to the magnetic field. The dimensionality of the fields thus must be studied to find the geometric flow of this one force, take a sphere magnet into deap space and fire it out of a gun so only one force is acting on it, and have it hit a target, it will always hit at the equater of it's fields neither North Nor South will hit the target just the equater, because of the dimensionality of it's reaction with one force, this force that was the gun now represents gravity and in this experiment it isolates the electromagnetic force and it's dimensional reaction to only one single force; gravity, in this model all the forces can be geometricly aligned, and you have 21st century tech. Zukunft.
A little coaxing of the numbers, and string theory could prove the existance of Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny and Jesus.
BFD.
The parameters of string theory can be bent far enough to encompass almost any observation predictable by other current theories.
It is almost like a Turing-Complete programming language where anything definable can be executed (ran) by giving it the right programming code. With 11 dimensions to play with, one has a lot of wiggle room to shape imaginary little sub-atomic string machines that can be just about anything you want, bending it to fit new observations.
Perhaps an equation for God is nearly as hard to test as an actual god.
Table-ized A.I.
>>Okay, so because a theory (or more an idea or almost a philosiphy) cannot be disproven, it becomes a disaster for modern science?
If it can't be disproven, it's not really scientific. And thus claims a lot of focus that should be given elsewhere. Thus, since it's not scientific it should be disregarded.
>>I suppose we should stop looking for what started the universe, since we can't disprove the existance of God or anything. What a load of BS.
No. This claim is the opposite claim. If we were to accept the existance of God it would also be a disaster for modern science. It's not science. It allows for every answer and is not testible. In your example String Theory is Existence of God. The point is that we should properly disregard both as non-science and focus on other things. They don't make any testible claims. They aren't science. And if you sit around thinking about them, you are just wasting your time.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
I think ST is a very interesting and peculiar theory. I'm not sure it's a disaster. Even if ST is proved wrong in some way the math that resulted from ST is still worthwhile.
Think of Newtonian physics. We now know that Newton falls apart when viewed under the lens of Einsteinian relativity. But if you're dealing with relatively small masses, at relatively slow speeds, then Newton's physics works perfectly because relativity is too small a factor to affect the numbers. Likewise with quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level.
Neither of those three "theories" is a complete and accurate view of how the universe works. They are each of them a model for certain situations, and which one you choose depends on which one is most appropriate.
The thing about string "theory" is that it's more of a model than a theory. When physics gets down to this level, it's more mathematics than science. The theory/model that you use is never going to be perfect or complete, but as long as it fits the purposes you want it for, it's good.
Worked for Michio Kaku.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Yes, good point... because gravitons are detectable and all...
ResidntGeek
Let's open-source it this time. Bullshit should be shared, free, and open; not just for and by oil tycoons anymore.
Table-ized A.I.
I think the whole problem is that string theory is misclassified. As far as I understand, the whole reason for its existance is that people have noticed several beautyful equations for strings in 12-dimensional space. On the other hand, we are as far now from seeing a measurable connection between these equations and the world around us as we were 20 years ago.
This is not physics because physics ultimately deals with the real world around us, with things we can measure or at least hope to measure. However, since this is a beautyful theory, this is math.
IMHO, any beautyful math will someday find its application and even if it doesn't, it should be done solely for its beauty. In any case, if string theorists would start calling themselves mathematicians, all the problems with string theory would disappear. Just don't expect it to have any obvious applications.
First off, I should point out to those that aren't familiar with the world of physics that Lee Smolin is one of the principal advocates, at least in the public discourse, of Loop Quantum Gravity, a competitor to String Theory. That is certainly not to say he's bashing string theory for his own benefit, though. His arguements are all quite sound.
Secondly, in my own experience, speaking to physics professors about string theory, we're starting to see some saturation in the number of students willing to work on topics in string theory for their PhDs, and as jobs become more scarce for those who enter into the field (after all if they don't advance with predictions, there's less and less to do), we'll see more people entering into other areas, ro examining other theories.
And finally, I should point out that the last line, That string theory abandoned testable predictions may be its ultimate betrayal of science , is extremely insulting. I'm sure there's nothing string theorists would like more than to come up with a testable hypothesis that could be tested immediately, but the fact is that it's a difficult subject. Just because we can't test it now is no reason to start crying "pseudo-science".
I came here for a good argument
It's not really related, but I found this interview with Carver Mead very interesting. Related in that it's also about progress (or non-progress) of scientific theory.
Never trust anyone who makes up dimensions to make the math work.
Wait a second... you're saying the Easter Bunny isn't real?
*cry*
Sometimes my arms bend back.
http://physicsmathforums.com/showthread.php?t=56
Tied Up & Strung Out: Hollywood String Theory Movie!!! Looking For Extras!!!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
ALL TIED UP & STRUNG ALONG, a movie about String Theorists and their expansive theories which extend human ignorance, pomposity, and frailty into higher dimensions, is set to start filming this fall. Jessica Alba, John Cleese, Eugene Levie, Jackie Chan, and David Duchovney of X-files fame have all signed on to the $700 million Hollywood project, which is still cheaper than String Theory itself, and will likely displace less physicists from the academy.
"As contemporary physics is about money, hype, mythology, and chicks," Ed Witten explained from his offices at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, "The next logical step was Hollywood, although I thought Burt Reynolds should play me instead of Eugene Levy."
Brian Greene, the famous String Theorist who will be played by David "the truth is out there" Duchovney, explained the plot: "String theory's muddled, contorted theories that lack postulates, laws, and experimentally-verified equations have Einstein spinning so fast in his grave that it creates a black hole. In order to save the world, we String Theorists have to stop reformulating String Theory faster than the speed of light. We are called upon to stop violating the conservation of energy by mining higher dimensions to publish more BS than can accounted for with the Big Bang alone, and I win the Nobel prize for showing that M-Theory is in fact the dark matter it has been searching for."
Greene continues: "At first my character is reluctant to stop theorizing and start postulating, but when my love interest Jessica Alba is sucked into the black hole, I search my soul and find Paul Davies there, played by John Cleese. I ask him what he's doing in my soul, and he explains that the answer is contained in the mind of God, which only he is privy too, but for a small fee, some tax and tuition dollars, a couple grants here and there, and an all-expense-paid book tour with stops in Zurich and Honolulu, he can let me in on it. And he shows me God in all her greater glory, as he points out that we can make more money in Hollywood than writing coffee-table books that recycle Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, Feynman, and Wheeler. I am quickly converted, and I agree to turn my back on String Theory's hoax and save Jessica Alba."
But it's not that easy, as standing in Greene's way is Michio "king of pop-theory-hipster-irony-the-theory-of-everything- or-anything-made-
you-read-this" Kaku, played by Jackie Chan. Kaku beats the crap out of Greene for alomst blowing the "ironic" pretense his salary, benefits, and all-expense paid trips depend on. "WE MUST HOLD BACK THE YOUNG SCIENTISTS WITH OUR NON-THEORIES!! WE MUST FILL THE ACADEMY WITH THE POMO DARK MATTER THAT IS STRING THEORY TO KEEP OUR UNIVERSE FROM FLYING APART, OUR PYRAMID SCHEMES FROM TOPPLING, AND OUR PERPETUAL-MOTION NSF MONEY MACHINE FROM STOPPING!!" Kaku argues as he delivers a flying back-kick, "There can be ony ONE! I WILL be String Theory's GODFATHER as referenced on my web page!! I have better hair!"
But Greene fights back as he signs his seventeenth book deal to make the hand-waving incoherence of String Theory accessible to the South Park generation, senior citizens, and starving chirldren around the world. "Kaku! Kaku! (pronounced Ka-Kaw! Ka-Kaw! like Owen Wilson did in Bottle Rocket)," Greene shouts. "It is theoretically impossible to build a coffee tables strong enough to support any more coffee-table physics books!!!"
"Time travel is also theoretically impossible, but there's a helluva lot more money for us in flushing physics down a wormhole. Nobody knows what the #&#%&$ M stands for in M theory ya hand-waving, TV-hogging crank!!! Get it?? Ha Ha Ha! We're laughing at the public! We're the insider pomo hipsters! Get with the gangsta-wanksta-pranksta CRANKSTER
Have you had a chance to explore noodle theory?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
According to string “theory”, the universe is a safe where you have combination but the lock is on the inside.
Join Tor today!
> ... not when one side, his own, acts of the panties are in a wad.
Hmmm... panties are a sort of two-dimensional string, wadded up in a higher-dimensional space.
Maybe we can explain the universe with panty-wad theory.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
IAAP (I am a physicist). Out of all the bloviating, often obnoxious high energy physicists who feel compelled to write popular books with pretentious titles (Dreams of a Final Theory (Weinberg); The Quark and the Jaguar (Gell-Man); The God Particle (Lederman); The Cosmic Landscape (Suskind); A Brief History of Time (Hawking)), Kaku has absolutely contributed the least to the actual science. Lisa Randall is 10x the physicist of Kaku, if not moreso.
I am a string theorist. I would write my own rebuttal to Peter Woit, who is well known in the community for being very vocal about his opinions, but it has already been well done (these are blog posts by Sean Carroll at Chicago/Caltech).
I'm all for public education on all topics of physics, including string theory, but this is an unfortunate case of a little bit of knowledge being dangerous for armchair physicists. In order to properly understand string theory requires understanding conformal field theory, supersymmetry and supergravity, Riemann surfaces, Kaluza-Klein theory, and so on, just to name a few of the introductory ideas. I don't think it's too unreasonable to assume that most of Peter Woit's audience has not studied any of these. But without studying string theory, I don't think it's possible to judge whether or not the things string theorists find compelling are in fact sufficiently exciting to warrant the attention it receives from them. For my part, I think they are.
Santa Clause?
That would be the Christmas attorney, I suppose?
This ain't rocket surgery.
If we were to accept the existance of God it would also be a disaster for modern science. It's not science. It allows for every answer and is not testible.
How does this follow? "God did it" and "how did God do it?" are two different things. I find it really interesting that the former excludes the latter. Some historians of science have argued that it was because of the idea of a rational God that the idea arose that nature was ordered and could be fathomed, particularly through observation and testing. Wasn't it Kepler who studied the heavens in order to "think God's thoughts after Him"? So the idea that God and science are incompatible is, to borrow a phrase, "not even wrong". It's simply a by product of the anti-intellectual, anti-historical, "don't offend me" nonsense that passes for thinking these days.
Science flourished within a theistic worldview in Europe and elsewhere, so I don't see how you can support the idea that God is a disaster when it comes to science. But maybe by "modern" you mean "completely materialistic". And of course that's true. It's the age old dilemma: which came first? The naturalist says, "In the beginning were the particles...". The Christian says, "In the beginning was the Word..." And never the 'twain shall meet.
Oh, what the hell, let's go for troll moderation. I'll go so far as to argue that denying the existence of God is actually hindering science. Why? Because atheism a priori denies the existence of an intelligence far greater than man's and therefore denies the possibility of design in nature. Therefore, the notion of using science to identify and measure design isn't considered (except, perhaps, with SETI. But aliens are metaphysically less scary than God. There's no evidence for them yet the search goes on.) Nor are information theory, computer science, and complexity theory being applied to natural, especially living, systems. Why not? Who knows what we'll find?
A real concern is that the "landscape" (the fact the string theory is really a collection of theories that could have something like 10^500 (yes, that's a googol to the fifth power) possible vacua as solutions) renders string theory nearly unfalsifiable. It's not that they can't predict anything. Indeed, they've predicted everything. If the LHC at CERN started up tomorrow and found a Higgs boson with a mass of 220 GeV, and some kind of light supersymmetric partner at 260 GeV, they could claim that's consistent with string theory. Heck, if the Tevatron folks at Fermilab found a fourth family of leptons next week, the string community could claim to understand that, too. I would love to see just one example of something that could credibly be found at the LHC that string theory can't explain. Just one.
That's not the point. I could postule my own theory about microscopic gremlins holding atoms togheter, and, if physical observations match my theoric results, no one could really argue about its validity. In that sense, string theory could be as valid as any other modern theory.
The most important part of new theories is the verification of predicted results - that's it, things that should happen theoretically but we haven't seen (yet). I don't know about ST, to be honest, but, for example, Heim theory (which aims to be a "theory of everything") made some interesting predictions that haven't been put to test yet; one involved localized antigravity created by rotating electromagnetic fields and another predicted a couple of unseen new particles, if i'm not mistaken. I'd love to see someone try to verify them.
No no no, I've seen this before. It's "12345".
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
I am a cosmologist, albeit one who works "close" to string theory (I am not a string theorist, but many of my collaborators are), and I am familiar with Woit's arguments (and have met the gentleman himself several times).
However, my impression -- and I speak as someone who works inside a particle theory group, and who has served on faculty-level particle physics search committees -- is that string theory is far from having a "lock" on theoretical particle physics today. In the article, Woit is quoted as follows: "By his count, of 22 recently tenured professors in particle theory at the six top U.S. departments, 20 are string theorists." Looking at the Particle Physics Rumor Mill (http://physics.wm.edu/~calvin/) which assembles the short lists for faculty jobs in particle theory many of (and perhaps most) the people getting offers are not "hard core" string theorists. Many of them will have written papers with some string content, but have wider interests in cosmology, particle phenomenology, and/or physics "beyond the standard model".
This statistic differs from Woit's, in that it is not just counting "top" physics departments, and looks at Assistant Prof hires, and not tenured faculty (although *outside* the top six, most Assistant Profs can expect to be promoted to tenue). However, I suspect that the "twenty out of twenty two" statistic is either over a very carefully chosen interval, or reflect a very broad definition of who counts as a "string theorist".
My feeling is that string theorists have a *hard* time getting jobs. In general, many places outside the top ten (ande most of the jobs are outside the top ten) do not have string theorists on their faculty, and string theorists have a hard time differentiating themselves from other people in their field, which makes it hard for them to get hired -- especially as they are competing against other, very smart people.
The real issue here is that particle physicists have received no "surprises" in many years -- perhaps the only genuinely unexpected recent data point being the non-zero value of the cosmological constant. And this did not create a new problem, since the challenge for the theoretical community was always to explain why the CC was around 10^120 times smaller than its "natural" value, which is not much easier than explaining why it is actually slightly different from zero. In this enviroment, we have no good way to "prune" theoretical ideas, and the hope of many is that the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) will yield results that cannot be explained within the context of the so-called "standard model" of particle physics. In this sense *any* theoretical framework that had been worked on since the mid 1970s would risk falling into the same trap as string theory, since there is no data we can't explain with existing models -- if it was incompatible with the standard model it would have been dead on arrival, but any model which yields the standard model in some limit is not falsifiable with current data.
On the other hand, string theory does provide a rich mathematical structure with some very surprising results. The so-called "AdS/CFT" correspondence sets up a completely unexpected relationship between gravity and a particular class of field theories, and some calculations in QCD (the theory of the "strong" nuclear interaction) can be "organized" and performed using string theoretic ideas. This does not "test" string theory, but it does show that there are deep and unexpected consequences to what is ultimately a very simple idea and, in the absence of data, this motivates theoriests to keep working in this area.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/9709/9709318. pdf
Chapter 6 counters your arguments in a way that I think is quite clear (for a string theory paper, at least).
And while I won't try and claim there's some particle that we can discover at the LHC that string theory can't explain, by not finding light supersymmetric partners of existing particles, the LHC has the possibility to disprove string theory.
I came here for a good argument
There are dualities between string theory and quantum field theory that allow intractable QFT calculations to be performed using string theory methods. In some cases, millions of Feynman diagrams can be summed up by translating the problem into a string theory problem. While some people view string theory as being largely made up, theoretical physics is all about constraints. In order for things to be physically consistent a large number of aspects must fall into place. Even if string theory doesn't eventually fit the bill, the investigation thereof allows us to sample the space of theories, so to speak, so get an idea of what the ultimate theory will look like.
Time to confess, boy.
Infuriate left and right
Science did not flourish until the Deists decided that God was an honest pinball player. He built the machine, and he flipped the levers, but he didn't tilt the box or otherwise "miraculously" influence the flight of the ball. He left that all up to the initial starting conditions (and how far he pulled back the shot lever).
OK, that's an oversimplification of what they were claiming...but it's got the essence. And with those restricitions on "God did it!", scientific research became feasible. Without it... sorry. Can't do it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The statement that string theory makes no testable predictions does not necessarily limit its usefulness. As I understand it, the mathematics behind quantum theory and relativity are irreconcilable, in that they lead to infinities and singularities when extended into each others' domain. The brilliance of string theory is that it provides a general framework that encompasses both quantum theory and relativity, and thus it may be a superset of the "true" framework of the universe, if not the most concise description. The idea that string theory is "bad science" only because our universe may be one of 10^500 possible configurations (and string theory can't predict which one it is) is like saying that statistics is bad science because it can't predict the exact run of cards I'll have at my next poker game. The development a framework within which our observed universe is possible at all (which cannot be said of relativity or quantum theory) is a tremendous achievement in itself.
Think of it this way. Many theorists predict that our universe may be one of many (e.g., in a much larger "multiverse"), and these universes are not all expected to be identical. Therefore, the variations between them represent quantities that are not exactly "predictable" by any theory, and the best we can hope for is a meta-theory that describes all possible universes, and says that ours is one of them. The earth is not the center of the universe; the prediction of string theory may simply be that our universe is not the center of the universe, so to speak.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
I really find it hard to imagine that after over 30 years of work that string theory is wrong. Correct me if I'm mistaken, but as far as I know, string theory is the only generalization of quantum field theory that makes sense! For those who don't remember, general relativity and quantum field theory are not exactly compatible. Whereas quantum field theory makes it impossible to incorporate general relativity, string theory demands it! No other mathematical framework can claim to have that.
String theorists have yet to provide any empirical proof of their theory. This is not, however, sufficient reason to dismiss their theory outright. Testing some of the fundamental predictions of string theory may not currently be possible, but that does not mean that it will never be possible. What demands a plausible explanation, however, is why general relativity and quantum mechanics are not compatible with one another despite the failure to demonstrate an experiment which shows either theory to be wrong.
Yet, both theories cannot be entirely correct as general relativity "breaks-down" at the quantum scale, and quantum mechanics at larger scales. There must therefore be an underlying theory which combines the two, and the best we have today is string theory (or M-Theory for that matter).
Lisa Randall is 10x the physicist of Kaku, if not moreso.
That's all well and good, but more importantly, is she hot?
Fellow engineers, nerds, and other three/four-dimensional entities, Let us all be thankful for string theory: 1.) This keeps a large number of intelligent people studying fizziks, and out of the engineering and programming market. 2.) As e.e. cummings said: listen:there's a hell of a good universe next door;let's go
Life is tough. Life is even tougher when you're stupid.
Cold gaze *shudder* http://physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/randall .html
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/trivers04/images/r andall300.jpg
They're two totally different things. If I tell you all cats have tails you can bring me as many cats with tails as you like and it will not prove that all cats have tails. You can bring me a cat without a tail and it will prove that not all cats have tails, but it still won't prove that all cats have tails. Nothing can prove that all cats have tails. That's science buddy.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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Well, it turns out Newton's theory of gravitation is flawed and that Einstien's theory of general theory of relativity better explained things. So, following your logic that means that because Newton's ideas were flawed they were a waste of time. If Newton's theory wasn't discovered would Einstein be able to come up with his theory of general relativity? Even if a theory is proven to be false, it can still be a useful way of looking at things (e.g. F = ma). Another example would be the model of the atom. Our theory about how atoms work has evolved over the years, just because it turns out that all of our models have been innacurate, that doesn't mean they weren't useful in the evolutionary process of understanding.
No Sigs!
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Let's reword the post, then:
"If we were to accept the existence of God as a scientifically valid explanatory principle, it would also be a disaster for modern science. It's not science. It allows for every answer and is not testable."
This follows because the proposition "God did it" admits no proof outside of circular, tautological reasoning in which one can use apologetics to justify the proposition aside from, or in spite of, any evidence. It can't be falsified, and if the non-falsifiable is admitted as a scientific explanation, then science has fundamentally erred.
Or, to put it another way: the epistemological justification grounding any scientific explanation is its falsifiability. Without that, it's nothing but hot air. It holds no more epistemic validity than the statement, "cheese fries are better than hot dogs."
You're right about one thing: science can flourish in a civilization that holds dear many non-scientific beliefs. These beliefs can inspire scientists. They can guide our choices about what to study. But when those beliefs get confused with science, we're in trouble.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. --Dan Kaminsky
An idea cannot be "a disaster for physics". Scientists who think that theories are more important than observation and reasoning are "a disaster for physics". Fortunately, it's a disaster with a long history, and physics, somehow, continues to muddle forward.
Good way to sell books. Sloppy way to think.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Let's apply this to the Monkey/Shakespeare problem. Was the page produced by a very large number of monkeys over a long period of time via a highly improbable set of circumstances or was it produced by an intelligent (human, machine) agent? How do you falsify improbability? Chance or God. Are there any other choices?
The problem with science is that it doesn't yet know how to quantify intelligence.
Parent, I apologize if you mistake this as a response directly to your post. I'm attempting to support your response to the GP.
--
Essentially, using god as an answer to a "How" question is a complete and total cop-out and non-sequitor. Using him as an answer to a "why" question is perfectly acceptable. That is the distinction that scientists make between science and non-science.
If I were to say that the universe was created by God's having willed it so, you would look at me strangely, and rightly so. We cannot duplicate God's will, so any answer to the "how" question produced by that theoretical framework is meaningless.
The entirety of science is explaining how something works so that we can either repeat or predict what will happen. If something is proven non-repeatable even once, then the theory is proven flawed. There is nothing wrong with this, and in fact it keeps scientists intellectually vigilant.
String theory cannot explain how anything should work in any meaningful fashion, and so is not a useful theory. Essentially what it does is say "There is effectively an infinite number of possible ways for the world to work. Ta-da! We've got a theory!" This is meta-physics and does not belong in a serious technical discussion. I believe one of the above posters said it best when he said that string theory is a gigantic academic wank-fest.
I'm really sorry to say this about something that originally got me interested in Physics, but String Theory is complete and utter bunk unless it can make predictions that are proveable, applicable, and are not covered by any other theoretical framework.
SRSLY.
May be in 20 years from now we will read a very similar article about the impact of "most" of the systems biology work on Biology compared to the current view on String Theory on Physics. Systems Biology can easily generate untestable hypotheses and keep thousands of scientists busy forever.
Looks like his book doesn't come out until September 30. You can, however, check out his blog with the same title, Not Even Wrong.
Newtonian gravity came about because Newton had an idea and then used math to express it. Relativity came about because Einstein had an idea and then used math to express it. Quantum physics came about in a similar fashion. An idea (or ideas) and then math to express it (them).
The problem with string theory is that some equations came along that fit the data in an intriguing way and so physicists pursued and continue to pursue the math. The problem is, it's not based on some sort of idea that someone had. The idea is the thing that's missing. Math is great at expressing ideas, but it's not particularly good at creating them.
It could be that at some point, someone will come up with an underlying conceptual idea that the math can then be used to express, but until that happens, I don't think string theory is really going to become a practical theory.
It depends on whay you mean by knowing everything. Knowledge can be somewhat compressed in comparison to raw reality. I can describe the chemical characteristics of a grain of salt in much less space than it would take to map the precise location of every single atom that makes it up. If I'm discussing the solubilty of salt in water, that level of detail is potentially superfluous. For the vast majority of purposes, much of the information in the universe is trivial and of no deep meaning except in aggregate. Atmospheric physics is complicated (Navier-Stokes equations, Rossby number, adiabatic lapse rate and the like), but the gross principles can become reasonably well understood. Applying this knowlege to global weather prediction is something else entirely, and is in that theatre in which the prohibitively comprehensive level of detail can become a problem if you desire extreme levels of precision. The same situation may well be applicable to the fundamental laws of the universe. We may be able to comprehend them without having to know the entire, exhausive state of everything.
"But one thing they haven't done is coax a single prediction from their theory. In fact, "theory" is a misnomer, since unlike general relativity theory or quantum theory, string theory is not a concise set of solvable equations describing the behavior of the physical world. It's more of an idea or a framework."
Something that is a concise set of solvable equations describing the behavior of the physical world is a LAW!
An idea or framework is a THEORY!
This guy has a PhD? Just because something is too small to see, too difficult to imagine, too abstract to think is possible- DOESN'T mean it should be dismissed because headway has been rough the past 30 years! Did Physics become invented in the past 10 years? 100 years? or thousands of years!?
> quantify intelligence
.. you can't quantify intelligence because intelligence isn't and will never be measured in units.
I just threw up in my mouth. The purpose of the universe is to try and get as close to passing the Turing test as possible, but mathematically, nothing in the universe ever can. We're in a fishbowl
The point of science is not to quantify intelligence, the point of science is to predict things. You can't quantify intelligence, you can only ballpark it in the short-term in your neighbourhood, and change the definition of it as the universe changes around us.
> Chance or God. Are there any other choices?
That depends on whether or not you enjoy false dichotomies. Of course there are other choices. A fucking shitload of them. I love how people so incredibly dependant on believing that they are living at the apex of human knowledge, or believing that our species will even be around at some point to learn the answer. Who the fuck cares? Random chance? An all powerful being not created by anything else that was more powerful? Could you pick two even more unlikely edge-cases?
"Old man yells at systemd"
Well, you forgot one other thing about science: If my science says that a "cat" by definition has a tail, then these things you call "cats without tails" aren't actually "cats" at all, but something else, perhaps yet to be named.
I have no idea why I felt the need to bring that up.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Both God and String Theory have the same problems for the scientific method - neither of them is falsifiable - and neither makes predictions about things we don't already know that we can actually go out and test.
So (as a scientist) there is very little point in thinking about either of them for very long because they simply don't get you any further in making workable personal jet packs, or any of the other fun stuff that science is generally so good at.
Falsifiability is a reasonable requirement. It says: "OK Mr. Proponent of God/StringTheory. tell me one experiment I could reasonably consider doing that (if it hypothetically failed) would prove that God/Strings definitely doesn't exist." But there IS no such test for either thing. String theory is just so very flexible that it can accomodate almost any failed experiment by picking another one of the ten-to-the-power-500 possible variations on how space is wrapped up, and experiments that might manage to disprove it appear to require more energy than the entire universe contains in order to perform them. Meanwhile, God is claimed to be utterly omnipotent - so any experiment we think up to prove that he's not there, could merely be written of as him "testing our faith".
Lack of falsifiability doesn't prove or disprove a theory - it just makes the theory worthless for science.
So it's fine to believe in God and be a scientist - so long as you realise that your theory of the universe isn't going to help you make personal jet packs (which you still owe me by the way!).
If somewhere in all the religious texts it said "God can do absolutely anything EXCEPT make purple stars" - then we could all get out our telescopes and go look for purple stars. If we ever found one then the case would be closed. If we never found one - then we still wouldn't know for SURE that there was a God - but ultimate proof isn't something science can ever really provide. But as it is, we are told by the proponents of the God theory that he can do absolutely anything he likes - and we know that if he does exist then he has no compunction in planting REALLY convincing bogus evidence for the big bang just to "test our faith". So we can't make ANY predictions about God whatever and any theory that includes him in any way whatever is useless for our progress. If we employ our belief in God, we can't make a computer that works reliably because God might decide he doesn't like us calculating PI to a bazillion places so the machine would be useless for all practical purposes. We can't find out whether there was life on Mars because he does stuff like burying really convincing solid stone dinosaur bones to try to cheat us into a belief in evolution when he knows full well that it's not true. A world with a God in it is simply not open to doing any kind of useful science - so if we'd like to have personal jet packs (sorry to keep harping on about those - but really, they are a bit overdue), we'd better put God theories to one side while we're designing them. If we used a God-based universe as our model, the only really plausible way to get jet packs is to sit on our backsides and pray for them to materialise out of thin air.
String theory has similar problems - and I could understand why people are beginning to think it's a waste of time for such a large proportion of Physicists to be working on it. The theory is at the point where it certainly COULD be true - but if it doesn't tell us anything we don't already know and there's no way for us to ever disprove it - then it's just not very useful.
www.sjbaker.org
"Untestable! Unfalsifiable!" This is a common refrain from string theory critics, and even from many string theory fans - and it really bugs me. I'm a philosopher of science, and I say: forget falsifiability!
Well, don't completely forget falsifiability - but don't let it be the whole story. Falsifiability was already outdated philosophy of science 50 years ago. Its main problem is what's sometimes called the "Quine-Duhem Thesis" - roughly speaking, any treasured theory can be made to fit any evidence, as long as you're willing to adjust enough auxiliary hypotheses. Here's an ordinary example: when your high school science lab experiments didn't fit predictions, your results didn't get published in Science for falsifying the theory at hand. Instead, quite reasonably, you drew the conclusion that something wasn't quite right with the instruments, etc., and you kept the original theory. The tricky question is to figure out when it's reasonable to excuse recalcitrant data, and when you're unreasonably trying to rescue a theory that's just wrong. Intelligent design advocates can lay out all sorts of falsification criteria, and then make similar excuses should unhappy data come their way. So does that make ID a science? (If on the other hand you insist that only actual falsification makes something a science, then only theories we no longer believe can count as scientific!)
It's too easy in all sciences - not just string theory - to make theories "supported" by the data. Given this problem, the name of the science game is to find the simplest explanation that fits the data. It's very hard to say exactly what counts as a simpler theory, but some theories are clearly less simple. Compare the hypothesis that "the butler did it" to the hypothesis that "unknown sneaky aliens planted all that evidence to make it look like the butler did it." Both hypotheses fit the evidence equally well, but the latter is clearly less simple, and we normally never even consider it for a moment.
String theory explains all the data, from quantum physics to relativity, with a simplicity that's hard to beat. (Its elegance is so good, we're apparently willing to posit 11 dimensions for it!) That's what makes it a legitimate scientific theory. Of course it would be great to have more relevant data, to see if string theory can accommodate them simply too. But just because we can't get such data (now, or maybe ever) doesn't spoil the current scientific status of the theory.
The existence of God can only be proved subjectively, and even then it's still a matter of interpreting a numinous subjective experience, and deciding to name it "God." And you could still be fooling yourself. Maybe it wasn't THE GOD, but just A REALLY MIGHTY GODLIKE ENTITY. How would you know the difference?
Anyhow, before one decides whether to believe in "God" it's a good idea to have a definition of what He is so one knows what to look for.
In my case, I believe God would have to be utterly transcendent, and an immaterial non-composite entity. In other words, something nonexistent. Can something nonexistent exist?
On the other hand, I also believe that God is all there is, and there is nothing that is not God. If one could take a step back and look at *everything* one could observe the totality of God. However, the All is both eternal and infinite. One could not ever see the totality, nor indeed can "God" ever actually be realized, because the totality is in constant flux.
Since God is all that exists and also the utter transcendence of existence, the union of many paradoxes would be required to fully appreciate the nature of "God." Such a mind transcends - and encompasses - reason, and hence it is beyond knowledge, proof, and expressibility in language.
Language and reason are tools for sharing experience, but they are not the only means. I may not be able to describe God, but I can point you to the door beyond which you can experience God, and then you can know for yourself.
Science - String Theory especially - is something like that too. The value of science is that it gives us the means to test and manipulate reality. Within the macroscopic realm it is expressible via the conventions of common experience. But as we get into quantum physics and string theory the ideas become uncanny. When you try to explain the relation of a string to space-time, the common experience of cause preceding effect no longer applies. So we need new language to express these new experiences. At a certain point these "experiences" may well become utterly inexpressible.
But perhaps, just like the experience of union with the Ultimate, there is a conventional means to point the right direction.
.
-- thinkyhead software and media
> I find it really interesting that the former excludes the latter.
.. who really cares? Its like discovering how to predict how planets orbit, and then going, "Aw crap, its predestined and somebody already knows how it works, so why bother learning more." There might be design in nature, but it doesn't help me in knowing that, and I'm waiting for science to prove it. As soon as its as irrifutable as me dropping a brick and seeing it hit the ground, well then, I guess I'll just have to conclude God was a complete asshole for making the human race work their asses off instead of him just dropping off the blueprints. To me God is a moot point; I will admit he might exist like I will admit he might also be a small piece of burnt toast that was zapped up by alients 6,000,000 years ago, surgically implanted with a super-advanced bio-mecanical brain, and installed as the janitor of the Milky Way. It just seems that humans have more of a tendancy to be wrong than right, and thats what I love about science rather than faith. It embraces proving the wrongs, where faith almost always dictates never testing it.
God is not a distaster when it comes to science. Many influencial scientists and mathematicians were spiritual. Interestingly enough, many become spiritual when they get closer and closer to a 'oh shit I cant answer THIS' part of their contribution. I agree with you that science and faith are not mutually exclusive.
> Because atheism a priori denies the existence of an intelligence far greater than man's and therefore denies the possibility of design in nature.
This is flat out wrong. Atheism says things came about because who the fuck gives a shit. I think the biggest stumbling block in debates between religious people and athiests comes from bringing the matter of intelligence into the whole situation altogether. I am not religious because I am comfortable existing without believing in a higher power. The religious members of my family, and my religious friends, I absolutely support in their belief of a higher power. But I really do draw the line when somebody suggests that athiesm, in and of itself, is a faith which comes down to "Either we're the smartest, or aliens are." Me, I don't care
I will repeat; who the fuck cares.
> I'll go so far as to argue that denying the existence of God is actually hindering science.
You'd also go so far as to be dumb, because at that point, you cross the line in your argument. Many ultra-spiratual people 3000 years ago were advancing knowledge and science, and God was yet to be documented. I think, what you mean, is that denying the existence of spirituality is hindering science, and you might be right. I will make this very clear. These people, from 3000 years ago, and today, are smarter than me, and better than me, in my opinion. And some of them do favour a faith in a higher power in order to achieve their endevours of advancing human knowledge.
I really wish you realized that your argument is the easy way out, and I also wished that you understood that those who have achieved great things did so because they did not put their faith first. They put the science first, and balanced it out with some healthy faith.
"Old man yells at systemd"
"How did God do it?" Takes it as given that God exists. If you take that on faith, great! Science isn't about faith, though. Science is about testing hypotheses to see if the underlying theory is valid. Unfortunately, at some level, I believe we just can't test any further...we get stuck due to the fact that we're (at least currently) trapped in our universe. Thus, any base-level explanation of our universe, God, String Theory, or otherwise is at least highly difficult to prove (at best), or just has to be taken on faith. So go worship your God or your Strings or whatever, I'm gonna go smoke a joint :)
Nothing can prove that all cats have tails.
Nonsense. All you have to do is examine all cats and see if they all have tails.
(Of course, from a certain philosophical standpoint nothing can be proven. I'm assuming "prove" actually means something outside of a high-flying philosophical discussion.)
Now, some of these could do with an explanation. Quantum foam probably can't be observed directly (as yet) but it must radiate for the same reason black holes must radiate - the laws of thermodynamics don't provide for exceptions. In fact, it's the requirement for a non-absolute environment that produced the theory of quantum foam in the first place. We won't be able to see this radiation directly, but we should be able to observe the effects of it, as it should purturb high-energy atom-smashing experiments ever-so-slightly and apparently randomly.
Superstings are tough, as they're not assumed to be everywhere, but again we should be seeing some experimental evidence by now. They have negative gravity, for example, which makes them bloody obvious even if you can't see them. Particles should clearly be exposed to a force that is repulsive in nature. With 99% of the Universe in the form of clumps of dark matter, we should have much better luck at seeing that. Again, particles should behave oddly on occasion. We're not seeing it.
This lack of exciting observations may mean that upgrades to the standard model may not be necessary, useful or even vaguely correct. In which case, the observations and/or chains of thought that led to those ideas may need revisiting. Observation trumps speculation, and the observations we are seeing do NOT match up to more modern speculations.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Ok, this is a thought-experiment. Take it or leave it....
What is evil for a stone? A stone has no interests to concern itself with.
"Evil" is that which is harmful to a living being, in other words that which threatens, harms, coerces, or destroys a living being.
Is killing always evil, and is it so for all involved? Perhaps a parent saves his child from a perceived thug by killing him. Perhaps the parent felt no particular ill-will, but acted rashly and with too much force. Has the person who was killed had evil perpetrated against him? Has the parent committed an evil deed or a good one, or both? How would you mix them in your metaphysical cauldron?
Likewise, perhaps a person acts out of malice, and then a moment later feels regret. Where has the evil gone? Poof! Maybe it never existed.
The continuum of good versus evil is broad and subjective. That evil which is done today may turn out to be beneficial in the long run. That good which is done today may turn out to foster future evil! Yet there is no such thing as "disembodied evil." It is a value judgment brought to a particular situation, and one which always exists with respect to Life.
Life gives rise to the whole continuum of good/evil. To wit, the concept of "resources" is meaningless without Beings: entities having needs. There is an intimate connection between all concepts which emanate from the existence of living beings. As to the relation of resources to the concept of good/evil, that which provides for the sustenance of life is generally Good, that which deprives is Evil. (Except of course in those instances where provision is detrimental and deprivation is beneficial, in which case provision is really deprivation and deprivation is actually provision.)
The original language of Genesis used to describe the Tree in the Garden is not "good and evil" in the general sense but rather "advantageous and disadvantageous," which specifically imply beings having interests. In other words, the allegory of Adam and Eve describes the emerging awareness of self/other, and knowledge of those fruits which benefit or harm self/other.
While there is are fairly well-defined objective standards as to what constitutes a resource, or a need, there is a much slipperier and more subjective notion of what constitutes good/evil (and if you ask me, these words have been so usurped by armchair ideologues they have lost all sense of rational meaning).
But it is clear that to provide resources for another is an act of good, and so we should seek to be giving. And to deprive another of what they need is an act of "evil" so we should resist our tendency to be stingy.
So, by this definition, are most of us "good" or "evil" or something in-between? Indeed, how does "God" fare in this test?
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-- thinkyhead software and media
That's actually an interesting point. If "cats", by definition, always have tails, then the statement "all cats have tails" is simply an arbitrary definition of "cat", rather than a useful scientific theory.
http://outcampaign.org/
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.
http://outcampaign.org/
Honestly, I don't see the need for a String Theory. Weren't the good old char array good enough?
640KB of virtualized ram will be enough for everybody
Simple theory? Did you ever sit down and listen to two string theorists discuss ? IAAPANAPOS (I am a physicist and not a philosopher of science), but it seems that falsifiability seems a crucial ingredient of any theory. If you cannot test a prediction repeatedly (and this is where your science lab argument fails), then it could just as well be astrology or religion.
If on the other hand you insist that only actual falsification makes something a science, then only theories we no longer believe can count as scientific!
That's actually a reasonable and sound position. It's more or less impossible to prove something correct in science - we've discovered many times that if a theory looks right on one level, when you go deeper it's just a good approximation. So you can never really be sure whether you've found the right answer, or just something close to it. And from our experience of science the odds are in favour of the 'good approximation' side.
On the other hand, when you've proven something wrong, you're pretty damned sure that it's wrong. It's then a scientific fact. You can't do that for something that appears right - it's more like a scientific guess.
It's important to keep this in mind - remember that something you believe to be correct is almost certainly not correct in every particlar. And follow up on those "Hmm, that's odd" moments, because those are how progress is made.
Verification is absolutely important, but much more important is that the theory have the property of falsifiability: That you can setup experiments that would falsify the theory.
The school of Karl Popper asserts that science progress by trying to falsify it's own theories. Much has been argued against this, in particular that there are so many ways to keep on doing that that this is not very progressive, so people argue that scientists should try verify their theory with observation.
Yet, I think, this should not discard the criteria of falsifiability as a fundamental criteria of science, and scientists must be prepared to be proven wrong. This is what distinguish science from all the pseudo-science and crackpot.
Secondly, theories should be kept as simple as possible - I think this originates from Albert Einstein, but I have forgotten the original quote - if you can describe something in a simple manner then it is likely to be that way, while a complex theory may obscure the simplicity while describing correctly the world as we see it.
If ST fails on these then ST should be discarded as crackpot.
American's shun science careers because they are so punishingly expensive. Conside the lifecycle of someone who want's to go into String Theory:
4 years undergrad ($40-$120k in cost)
5-7 years grad school (making $15k per year)
2-6 years postdoc (making $40k per year)
7 years pre-tenure (making $60-80k per year)
tenure (making $80-$100k per year)
Oh, and if you fail at any point along the line, you have no career. Since you are looking at 18-24 years to get to tenure, that's a HUGE
investmet to make. You are basically looking at not knowing whether you have a career or not until you are 36-42 years old.
Compare this with the career track of an equally bright student going into CS, and getting a job in tech.
4 years undergrad ($40k-$120k in cost)
starting job ($60k-80k)
5 years experience ($80k-$120k)
move into management ($100k-$150k)
etc... notice how the CS grad going into IT hits the $60-$80k range 7-13 *years* before the scientist?
Plus, while there is less risk of being laid off as a tenured professor, the risk of having your career evaporate as an IT person (please note, IT person who could have hacked being an academic scientist) is MUCH lower. Sure, you may loose your job, but there are plenty of other jobs.
Few American's go into science because the economics of science is so bad. I don't know how to fix that, but the cause is pretty clear.
Oh... by the way, I am an American who was on the academic track in String Theory and got off the merry-go-round. Everytime I talk to my friends who stuck it out I am overjoyed I left. My friends are at the mid-potsdoc stage right now. They are trying to scrape by living on $40k a year in ultra expensive locals like Boston, and live in terror that the only jobs they will be available will be in middle of no-where universities in unpleasant places. By way of contrast there are tech jobs to be had in a variety of nice locals to meet most peoples tastes. It's particularly hard on the women, who are starting to hear their biological clocks tick VERY loudly, and who are still years away from being settled in enough to take a break to have children. It's also very hard for both genders to find a long term mate, as they face the aforementioned prospect of having to move a lot to unpleasant places (like Norma, OK, middle of nowhere PA, middle of nowhere plains states, etc) if they want to continue their careers. And let's not even start talking about the two body problem (two romantically entwined academics).
So basically, if you want more Americans to go into science, make it suck less.
Many physicists stopped being scientists some time in the 20th century; they stopped following the scientific method, their experimental methods became sloppy, and so became their reasoning. They started valuing theoretical elegance more than testable hypotheses, and they became more enamored with formulas than data.
I think Einstein may have been responsible for that development: while relativity was a great insight and made useful, testable predictions, it falsely instilled the belief in physicists that Einstein's way of doing physics was the way they should all follow. The problem with that is that most physicists aren't as smart as Einstein, and even if they were, there is only a small number of self-styled visionary scientists any field can comfortably accommodate before becoming unscientfic.
I'd say yes. Plus she's a geek chick. What more could you ask for?
But why is the rum gone?
"Secondly, theories should be kept as simple as possible - I think this originates from Albert Einstein, but I have forgotten the original quote"
Most famously attributed to William of Ockham:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
>>And with those restricitions on "God did it!", scientific research became feasible. Without it... sorry. Can't do it.
So long as you view God as unable to do anything science works out fine. You simply find your result and credit God with the discovery. "Why did that happen?" is the same questions as "Why did God make that happen?" -- with the noted a priori assumption that "God did it" tossed in for sport.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Makes me wonder if we are near the edge of what humans can know.
But as Dijkstra notes, that might not necessarily halt progress "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science":
<cut'n paste>
For instance, the vast majority of the mathematical community has never challenged its tacit assumption that doing mathematics will remain very much the same type of mental activity it has always been: new topics will come, flourish, and go as they have done in the past, but, the human brain being what it is, our ways of teaching, learning, and understanding mathematics, of problem solving, and of mathematical discovery will remain pretty much the same. Herbert Robbins clearly states why he rules out a quantum leap in mathematical ability:
"Nobody is going to run 100 meters in five seconds, no matter how much is invested in training and machines. The same can be said about using the brain. The human mind is no different now from what it was five thousand years ago. And when it comes to mathematics, you must realize that this is the human mind at an extreme limit of its capacity."
My comment in the margin was "so reduce the use of the brain and calculate!". Using Robbins's own analogy, one could remark that, for going from A to B fast, there could now exist alternatives to running that are orders of magnitude more effective. Robbins flatly refuses to honour any alternative to time-honoured brain usage with the name of "doing mathematics", thus exorcizing the danger of radical novelty by the simple device of adjusting his definitions to his needs: simply by definition, mathematics will continue to be what it used to be. So much for the mathematicians.
</cut'n paste>
Hey, he's a prof at my alma mater, CCNY, and I'm from New York City
so watch what you say before I kick your ass motherfucker.
How's that for arguing a scientific point in a rational way?
Fuck You again.
When is it reasonable to conclude that the signal from Ceti Alpha 6 that repeats "1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 56" is not a natural signal?
The moment a cease and desist gets sent back claiming prior art.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
You have no idea what you're talking about, do you? What makes something science is whether or not it is disprovable - or to put it another way, testable.
You are absolutely right. I was sloppy on the wording. In my defense, however, I'd ask you to read the thread. Basically, the ggp was stating that the guy "has his panties in a wad". I was pointing out the reason for this "attack" on string theory. It has nothing to do with emotionalism, but everything to do with the lack of scientific rigor.
So, while I was sloppy in my rebuttal, I'd argue that you missed the point of the thread, picking nits.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
It's not just the money, it's the whole quality of life.
:) But as I look forward I can see the day coming where to accomplish what I want to accomplish, I will need to start doing more managing of people than I do now. At some point you can't realize your vision unless you start scaling significantly beyond yourself.
It's being able to live somewhere nice instead of facing possibly having to live in some bubblefuck town in Iowa that has the only university that was hiring in your area of research that year.
It's actually being capitalized. Compare what it takes to get a grant to buy the computing and other equipment you need to what it takes me in the commercial world to get equipment. I am fantastically better capitalized than anyone I know in academia. I've known physics profs who built racks in the machine shop, and soddered their own serial cables to save money... I'd rather not waste my time.
It's respect for my time and personaly life. My commercial job is much more respectful of my time and personal life than academia is. If you aren't working 80 hours a week and sacrificing everything in the sciences, people start to question whether you are 'committed' or not. That perception can make a big difference in whether you get to have a career. By way of contrast, nobody questions the commitment of my manager who knocks off every Thursday at 4pm to go to his sons baseball game.
As for my daily job... I rather enjoy the work I do. I have a tremendous amount of control over my own projects. I get to work with cool cutting edge tech. I can see how my work leverages out to make the lives of hundreds of millions of people better. There's a lot more fulfillment for me there than I would get still chasing String Theory.
As to the dream of going into management, I can sort of agree with you there. I am currently dodging the management bullet myself
"God is not a man, that he should lie,
nor a son of man, that he should change his mind.
Does he speak and then not act?
Does he promise and not fulfill?" - Numbers 23:19 (NIV)
"Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath." - Hebrews 6:17 (NIV)
I can't find any better quotes at the moment, but yeah, God is constant and unchanging, and the laws of the universe (both physical and spiritual) reflect that.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
First off, I should note that I am a nuclear/particle physicist so I actually know something about this stuff.
Yeah, the vast majority of string theory is probably crap. But what people don't seem to realize is that 99% of what all theorists say is crap. That 1% that actually manages to get something right gets all the fame and tends to be the only ones the general public hears about, but the sad truth is that most theorists take the shotgun approach: They try to come up with as many different theories as possible in the hope that one of them might actually turn out to be right.
The article seems to imply that the existence of string theorists is preventing advancement in particle physics. That's BS. The reason why there haven't been any new dramatic discoveries in particle physicists in the past few years is because there haven't been any new experiments! Science is experimental in nature. Progress is made with new experiments. The theorists can speculate all they want but no consensus will be reached until somebody tests it. Unfortunately experiments in particle physics have become so massive and expensive that progress has slowed significantly.
Actually, there have been many discoveries in less traditional aspects of particle physics...neutrino mass for instance. So I'm not even entirely sure what the article is complaining about. Yeah, traditional accelerator experiments haven't done much since the discovery of the top quark at Fermilab, but again it's because there haven't been any new experiments since then. Other than RHIC, which focuses on a very different kind of physics (and RHIC has also been producing many interesting new results).
When the LHC finally comes online expect a flurry of new discoveries. Until then the theorists can speculate all they want. If they weren't wasting their time on string theory they would be wasting their time on something else.
Physics is good
Happiness is a choice.
Yes, you can live more simply, and be perfectlly happy with much less in the way of material wealth. I agree. There are trade-offs. I actually left physics for reasons that had nothing to do with the arguments above: it wasn't fun for me anymore. If you enjoy it so much more than the alternatives, then perhaps an academic career will be worthwhile to you, in spite of the sacrifices compared to other career paths you could have chosen.
The problem is that these days the sacrifices to go into science compared to your other options are getting very steep. At the same time many of the things that made science a nice job are available elsewhere. Flextime for example. One of the nice things about being an academic scientist was that to a large extent you had great flexibility in when you worked. That's now true in the private sector as well. Another was that science presented some very interesting problems, and certain kinds of people really *enjoy* working on such problems. But there are now interesting problems to work on in the private sector as well.
Basically, the relative benefits of being a scientist are shrinking, and the relative costs are increasing.
then the statement "all cats have tails" is simply an arbitrary definition of "cat", rather than a useful scientific theory.
Exactly. Just like Newton's second law - there is no alternate definition of force, so Newton's second law is actually just a definition.
Newton's third law is a theory, though (and depending on the wording, an incorrect one).
Isn't that just an interpretation of special relativity?