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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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
Rather elegantly, in fact, by postulating the existance of a universe where "took off" is not a synonym for "created".
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.
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.
A little coaxing of the numbers, and string theory could prove the existance of Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny and Jesus.
BFD.
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.
Never trust anyone who makes up dimensions to make the math work.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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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/
Um sorry, but even amateur scientists know that a scientific LAW is merely a THEORY that has not been successfully falsified for such a long period of time that it is assumed that a single, even several, experiment(s) controverting it is a botched experiment(s).
But if enough people can prove it wrong, it goes. Even Sir Issac Newton's most basic equations are discarded in the scientific canon, replaced by Einstein's more complete set. Scientific LAW tends to get amended rather than scrapped, and that's what seperates it from theory.
The SCIENTIFIC METHOD, what science is *supposed* to be based upon, relies upon repeatable results based upon a given set of assumptions: the theory. If you can't test it, what's the point?
The writer of the article doesn't claim that string theorists are WRONG, he claims that they are WASTING THEIR TIME. Why? Because he feels they are more interested in "elegance" and "beauty" than they are in finding a relevant way to describe the universe that is useful and TESTABLE.
Whether that is right is a matter of some debate, but get the premise right.
--
Torodung
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.
I am a theoretical physicist. I am educated in Supersymmetry, Riemannian geometry, and the original Kaluza-Klein theory. I am educated in field theory in curved space time, but not Supergravity, nor do I care to be.
I have only one thing to say about all of this. Everytime I sit in a talk on strings or branes all I can think is one thing.
Extra dimensions are the epicycles of Modern Physics
That's all I have to say. If you understand this, it is profound.
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.
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
The analogy is thus.
Q "Look, the orbits aren't exactly circular"
A "Try adding more circles"
Q "..."
A "Try adding more dimensions"
I don't mean to say that the true answer is simpler in a sense. I honestly have no idea.
I came to this conclusion after sitting through dozens of talks and realizing that so many physicists were using extra dimensions like a tool in their toolbox (like renormalization or something), but that tool has never actually fixed anything yet. It's their hammer and everything looks like a nail. Only no nails are proven to exist.