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New Calculations May Lead To a Test For String Theory
dexmachina writes "A team of theoreticians, led by a group from Imperial College London, has released calculations that show string theory makes specific, testable predictions about the behaviour of quantum entangled particles. Professor Mike Duff, lead author of the study from the Department of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London, commented, 'This will not be proof that string theory is the right "theory of everything" that is being sought by cosmologists and particle physicists. However, it will be very important to theoreticians because it will demonstrate whether or not string theory works, even if its application is in an unexpected and unrelated area of physics.' In other words, string theory may finally have shed its critics' most common complaint: unfalsifiability. However, given the second most common complaint, I can't help but wonder: which string theory?" Update: 09/03 23:34 GMT by S : Columbia University's Peter Woit, author of the Not Even Wrong blog, says these claims are overblown, and adds that a number of string theorists said as much to Wired.
However, given the second most common complaint, I can't help but wonder: which string theory?
Exactly, if this turns out to be false it won't disprove all string theory.
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I scanned through the article and from what I see, they have made an equivalence between the maths used in string theory and the maths used in entanglement. This is interesting in itself, because this allowed them to port a result from string theory to entanglement theory, a result which was not known before and could be falsified.
However, this is like saying that the mathematical theory used to count apples harvested from an orchard (addition of natural numbers) is the same as the mathematical theory behind the algorithm the slashcode uses to count the number of comments below threshold (addition of natural numbers). It allows one to port result from ancient mathematics to modern applications without having to rederive everything from first principles; it does not mean that sub-threshold comments are, deep down, really made of apples.
If you dislike, please propose a better solution rather than just complaining.
It's turtles . . . all the way down . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I think the public media attacks string theory on the grounds of its impossibility to test because they don't know any better. Those of us in physics and math have very real and strong arguments against string theory that have little to do with testing.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
In other words, string theory may finally have shed its critics' most common complaint: unfalsifiability.
It's critics? It's CRITICS.
Holy crap man. After spending a significant chunk of your life working on string theory, wouldn't you want to test it? That's part of the whole "I'm a scientist"!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Thank you. That made me laugh, in part because it struck so close to home. I came to post the same, albeit less funny message.
As a physicist, I think string theory represents a lot of interesting math, but no interesting science. I have some pretty serious doubts that it will ever amount to anything useful.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Chill out, Pinky.
Where did I say I was using the one from Contact or anything. Yes, I'm using largely the version you explain there: as long as two hypotheses explain the exact same sets of measured data, go with the less complex one, leave the more complex one for when you actually have some data that the other one can't explain.
In exactly that sense, as long as the String Hypothesis doesn't have at least one testable prediction [b]of its own[/b], that can't be explained by the simpler GR and QM, it freaking fails Occam's Razor.
It doesn't mean it's _false_ and nowhere did I say it's _false_. I said until such time as it makes testable predictions of its own, it's just a _hypothesis_. Different thing from "false".
So basically, what, you made all that fuss to answer to your own strawman?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.