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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.
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.
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
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".
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.
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
ST is an attempt to unify QFT with GR. In that setting QFT and GR are a consequence of ST. However string theorists have discovered something called the landscape. In which not only is QFT and GR possible but so are 10^500 other types of universes and the theories that describe them.
This is a huge problem. Of course there is the possibility that finding the ultimate theory of everything is impossible and this would be the physics dual to Godel's incompleteness result. Which I'm sure sure scares the shit out of many physicists.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
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.
The main problem I have with ST is that in its attempts to unify QFT with GR, the WGT becomes much too ambiguous with regard to WGO. Does our universe even qualify as proper SFU? And does ST demonstrate HTAW? Our universe, being ASLOM could be considered little more than a running simulation in the light of TBNT. The RFLN of alternate landscapes may not even BCWN; to assume there is a limit to their VPIN is shakey.
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.
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.
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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.