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Why String Theory Is Not Science (forbes.com)
StartsWithABang writes: Earlier this month, a conference was held devoted to the question of whether untestable scientific ideas like string theory and the multiverse are actually science or not. While many opinions were stated and no one changed their mind, the answer is apparent: unless you're willing to change the definition of science to include "this thing that isn't science," then no, string theory is not science. It's a theory in the sense of a mathematical theory — like set theory, group theory or number theory — but it isn't yet a scientific theory. Of course, it could become science, but that would require that it actually do the things a scientific theory does: make testable predictions that can be validated or falsified.
So it's like Climatology?
Hint:
You're missing an element in an essential position. The upper left-hand side of your table is flawed. When this is fixed, there will be realignment of the table, and everything will really start to make sense.
The neutron is not your enemy. It's your friend, so long as you can contain it.
The condition for science is that it has to be testable in principle, NOT that it has to be testable within the limits of current technology. When Higgs came up with his theory there was no accelerator capable of testing it (although we did not know that at the time). So would that make the Higgs mechanism non-science until the 21st century when we built the LHC? Clearly not. So, unless String theory is completely untestable in principle, regardless of potential future technological advances, it is science albeit science which is currently impossible to test with current technology.
Obligatory: Unscientific
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Hypothesis is proposed science and theory is more tested and proven science. Whatever. A reasonably well developed hypothesis is still science.
a theoretical physics model?
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String theory, or any idea, for that matter, should not have its merit determined solely by how scientific it is. Science is a good hammer for testable hypotheses, but not everything is a nail, and claiming that everything not a nail is irrelevant will have us missing out on two of the three types of knowledge.
Most people don't have a clue that string theory is even a thing, so whether or not the high priests classify it as "science" or "something less" really has very little significance compared to such questions as "will the human race (and its "things") survive global warming?"
So since our ideas and theory frameworks which are selected and deselected based on observations are no science, we shouldn't create them anymore and stop using our imagination in order to call ourselves scientists? The science of physics is larger than the sum of its experimental, theoretical, computational and data-driven parts (to honor Jim Gray). It's the interconnectedness of those parts that drives the scientific progress forward.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
He chuckles at all your little "theories", but in the end He is entertained by us little humans trying to figure out His creation.
Just enjoy your time in this blessed ant farm of ours, my friends!
First, there is no string theory. There are a bunch of theories we call string theory. There are a bunch of theories that we call string theory, abut no basic priciples that are clearly laid out yet.
Second, even if we had a specific theory, we still do not know how to make calculations.
Third, general relativity was in the same situation. For a long time all it predicted was Mercury's perihelion precession and that could be done with alternate theories of gravitation or even extra planets. It wasn't until Eddington that relativity was really tested.
The reason that general relativy was largely untested was basically the same reason string theory is untested. The calculations are hard to do and the experiments are difficult to preform. It is conceivable that a race with an average IQ of 1000 and sufficiently advanced technology could in test string theory.
So we say string theory is not a physical theory because of our shortcomings?
That being said, string theorists have brought it on them selves. I think they spend too much time chasing their own tail and are crowding out other avenues of research.
Lubos' thoughts on this topic. http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/string-theory-is-as-much-science-as.html
There are a lot of pseudo scientists out there and it is not helped by masses of typically arrogant people that think they know what science is in the first place.
People confuse POLITICS with science. Bring up something about science and they'll say stupid things like "well X number of people agree with me" which isn't science. That is politics. Or you'll see something along the lines of "look at my nifty idea... all the numbers add up"... great... still not science... not unless you want to include Dungeons and Dragons min max builds in "science"... because there is a tautology in any formal logic that doesn't root itself in empirical evaluation. And then you get people that say "well, I can't provide evidence because its really hard... so I don't have to."... Not my problem.
Point being... ANYTHING that can't be tested is merely a hypothesis and that is fine... have your hypothesizes... that's super. It remains not science until its been tested with methodology that is pessimistic, cynical, skeptical, and exhaustive. That is... you propose a hypothesis... then you try to disprove it. DISPROVE. When you FAIL to disprove it... look for any fallacy in your position with the intent to find one. If you can neither disprove the position nor find a fallacy in your argument... THEN you submit it for peer review giving your peers full access to everything you did and how you did it so they can find problems if they exist.
When it has surpassed all that... you pretty much have science.
What we often get is nothing resembling that which is why it isn't science.
Pretty math? Sure... slow clap for that. But the reason this sort of science generally never does anything useful is because as Richard Feynman said... "It looks like science except it doesn't work". That is the issue here.
Cargo Cult Science:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Not science anymore than a guy with coconuts on his head is a tower control operator.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yes, they are just "tiny little vibrating strings".
So are they cotton strings, hemp, nylon?
Does a string have an associated particle?
Did they unravel from Ed Witten's jockey shorts?
Can they be quantified in terms of Plank scale?
Or are they just used to fly kites?
It's a theory in the sense of a mathematical theory — like set theory, group theory or number theory — but it isn't yet a scientific theory.
No, it's not.
All of those theories are based on sound, logical axioms.
String theory is a pile of bogus sh!t piled onto an ever-growing foundation of illogical, arbitrary, nonsensical "axioms".
String theory doesn't even get the meaning of a dimension correct. It's not just not science, it's not even math either.
Here's an entertaining read explaining it much better than I ever could: http://milesmathis.com/string....
The claim is not that "everything lacking testable hypotheses is irrelevant", but that "everything lacking testable hypotheses is not science". And this is of course a 100% accurate claim which verges on being tautological, since the scientific method is what defines science.
psychology
Undoubtedly.
control systems (excluding a few topics, most are un-applicable and highly theoretical)
Control theory is the application of mathematics to feedback control. As such, it appears to be fairly well founded. Lyapunov, Nyquist, Bode, Shannon, Pontryagin all were contributors to the theory. I grant you that the sociological equivalent is rather unscientific (why the blazes do social "scientists" keep appropriating terms from real science for their own nefarious purposes).
behavioural science
Undoubtedly. Similar to psychology.
statistics
Statistics is a branch of mathematics. It is an applied mathematics, for sure, but along the lines of astrophysics. You might look up the statistical representation of the singular value decomposition, among others.
economics (more of a snake oil)
Snake oil. Hisses a bit.
climate science
The jury is out on this one. Politicians politicized it to argue their points.
any theoretical disciplines
and the list goes on...
Don't get me wrong.. I am a man of science. As of late, word "science" is used and abused quite badly. For me, it is always the "scientific method" that counts. Body of knowledge is always contestable, unless it has survived the test of time.
One time, someone asked me "why science can't answer XYZ?".
My answer was "Science is a methodical way of exploring the natural world, and not a corpus of answers for all questions out there".
Yup. It''s a method of producing approximate answers.
David Deutsch argues that it is core:
https://www.ted.com/talks/davi...
Also, string theory is surely as testable as quantum mechanics. It's just currently impossible to say which is more valid.
They start with the premise that string theory is untestable, and come to the conclusion that it is untestable.
You seem to be confused about which side is taking a lot of money to fudge the data.
The author claims that there is no test that can be done that would prove String Theory true as opposed to other theories.
Unfortunately the author has proven many times that he does not understand particle physics in previous posts. The problem with String Theory is that there are far too many possible theories to consider (last count I heard it was around 10^500) to make detailed, concrete predictions. The second that we get an experimental signature for something like String Theory that number would collapse and theorists would be able to start studying the detailed predictions of a vastly smaller number of models. This would undoubtedly lead to some clever theorist coming up with signatures unique to String Theory which other, competing models would not have.
If you can't come up with ANY difference it would mean that the theories must be mathematically equivalent for all situations which are possible. We have had this happen in physics before. Matrix mechanics and wave mechanics are both different ways of doing the same Quantum Mechanics. Nobody worries about which is the "right" way because both make mathematically equivalent predictions.
I submit the answer to the theoretical basis of control systems is fuzzy logic, which happen to be very robust and pragmatic.
Only I can judge you.
String theory and multiverse theories are far from science. The comparison to religion is a good one. "You can't prove god doesn't exist." They are at best guesses of how multiple universes and dimensions could work, if they ever did exist. As far as I am concerned there is more concrete evidence of ghosts than string theory. Adding a little math into something made up doesn't make it real.
Tiny vibrating strings? That explains everything! But why not tiny vibrating llamas? I bet the math would still work out, plus that would make the theory somewhat interesting.
Government grants to institutions + the money available to speculators like Goldman Sachs through trading idiotic carbon credit schemes, makes it pretty one-sided. And then of course the energy companies themselves get in on the act, hovering up huge subsidises (again from the tax payer - notice how it's always muggins who pays the bill?) for "clean energy" and we have a winner.
In that case wouldn't it be a hypothesis? It's untested and, beyond filling some gaps in quantum theory and relativity, it hasn't been mathematically proven.
So it's a hypothesis, right?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I'm not a fan of string theory, but this is just idiotic. There have been plenty of areas of science that were untestable when they were first theorized. If someone comes up with a way to test string theory, it won't magically become science then. It just has to be open to the possibility of being disproven. So yes it is science. It might be a dead end. It might be a pointless theory. But it's still science.
For example, the theory that all matter is made up of small, indivisible bits (atomos) is unscientific. Whenever you find a new smallest building block (atom) there's a chance you'll find they're built by even smaller blocks (a core of protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons) and that protons again are made from even smaller particles (quarks). And maybe the quarks are built from superstrings. And maybe the superstrings are build from something we don't even have a name for yet. That doesn't make them bad ideas to guide scientific research and design experiments. Just like causality is a rabbit hole with no end, even if we could explain the whole formation of the universe back to the Big Bang we'd always be looking for what caused the Big Bang. And what caused that which caused the Big Bang. Scientific exploration is an educated guesswork, you take some observations and try to find a system or pattern or formula and if the results don't contradict reality, great. It's obviously even better if you can predict something new, but if I find that E = mc^2 and show a few reproducible examples it's up to the rest of the scientific community to find a contradiction where E != mc^2. I feel it's a bit like that with superstring theory, if we got multiple theories that both come to the same results then either they're different formulations of the same model or there will be distinct differences that are at least hypothetically testable.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It worked great when we really did not understand anything about the Universe. But now when quite a lot is already known, there is a hell of a to less you can predict. Like all the current accepted theories, they predicted things, but now their predictions are just known facts, so if someone come up with the theory of tectonic plates today, it could never be a science, as all predictions you can make with the theory are already known facts. It just seems wrong, that if a prediction is not made in time, then an entire branch of what could of been science, is now a pseudo science that can never really be proven.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Seems that Forbes is blocking people who use ad-blockers (funny - I don't block ads, just scripts and tracking). Wonderful given that at least twice this year they have served up malware. Anyone have any specifics about how they are detecting ad-blockers and how to fix the check so that it doesn't see me as having an ad blocker.
If you find yourself talking to a person who dismisses talk of multiverses or string theory as no better than talk of the supernatural, just ask them what a person would see while falling into a black hole. They will proceed to tell you their version. Then ask if someone outside the hole can ever verify anything they just said. They will say no, communication won't work from inside an event horizon to the outside. Then ask, if everything they said is all based on conjecture and extrapolating known laws, and can't be experimentally verified, why do they feel it merits discussion?
I think we have to be careful here, as the atom was only a theory for over a hundred of years.
There is also an issue that classical physicists would not want to believe that their theory fits into anything larger, as Newtonian physicists likely did not want to believe in relativistic physics, as religious types did not want to believe....
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I think that this would apply to evolution too... it's a theory but not a scientific theory. It can not be proven or falsified. It's a good theory given the evidence that we see but it can never be proven because until we get time machines we can't actually go back and observe when life actually began. Even if science proves a mechanism that could possibly create life spontaneously from the raw materials, that doesn't mean that is exactly what happened. So it will always remain a theory.
The coal industry, natural gas industry, oil industry, big agriculture, real estate agents who sell ocean front properties or places where hurricanes are common, etc.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
http://www.amazon.com/Not-Even...
The fact that the unthinking moders of /. have reduced this to zero is a sad reflection of the lack of understanding of what constitutes science. The reality is that most of geology and palaeontology are on the same level as history, as being theories about recorded facts, rather than 'science'. This doesn't make them worthless - as a hard scientist who is now working for an MA in history I've got a dog in this race - but their claim to be 'science' is dubious.
Enough said.
No one starts with the premise that a hypothesis is untestable. Part of coming up with a hypothesis is the burden of coming up with tests that could disprove it. If a string 'theorist' can't or won't provide tests of their hypothesis, it is by default untestable. It is not someone else's responsibility to come up with tests for your hypothesis.
As a string 'theorist,' one must ask the questions: How would a universe where matter is made up of 'strings' differ from a universe where matter is made up of particles? How would one go about detecting/testing this difference? If one can't come up with differences, then what is the use of the 'theory?' If one can't detect/test the differences, then there is no way to determine (and no reason to believe) that matter is made up of 'strings.'
As an example of how this process is supposed to work, check out the Tests of General Relativity. Even when one is making extraordinary predictions that can't be tested with the technology of the time, one still has to come up with tests/predictions that could show that one's hypothesis is wrong.
As for string 'theory' as science, the basic scientific method is: observe, hypothesize, test. If you can't test your hypothesis, I would tend to agree that what you're doing is not science.
Sounds like evolution isn't science based on this criteria. Evolution doesn't make predictions for new species. Note that small mutations (micro evolution, if you must call it that) do not make new species.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Speculative Mathematical Physics
Hurricane activity has fallen over the last 30 years. Unlucky.
Because each hurricane is getting much bigger.
http://arstechnica.com/science...
Wow, almost as if something the size of a planet can be ... complex!?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Approximate yes, but in theory the approximation diminishes until such time as it is indistinguishable from the actual answer.
Our short lives and limitations do cause us to have attachment to things that have stood extremely tiny tests of time and perspective though. Relativity has been around for how long again? Could you show me how big that mark is on even the tiny geologic timescale let alone the believed age of our universe? Measurements of radiation seem to match it? Cool. But the timescale we believe that represents it is itself part of the model and instruments used to do the testing were built with the model. Does it all still work if we keep measuring on a relatively small sample like over the course of a million years from multiple points 100 million light years apart?
We can't help how little time we've actually been around and the even smaller amount of time we've been doing science. We can't help that currently we are limited to doing it from a relatively tiny perspective in a massive space. But what we can do is acknowledge those things are true and that we do not even have the perspective to comprehend a statistically relevant sampling how things work so our attachment level to the best we've found so far should be no more or less than playing a devil's advocate role of criticism.
Are our models wrong? The answer is almost certain that they are wrong but at least in the near term are useful.
Don't forget to fudge the data if it doesn't match your predictions. It isn't science, but it sure makes some people a lot of money.
Of course, that is also true with things like dark energy and dark matter and many other scientific predictions, so what's your point?
Or would the OP claim that mathematics is not science? That would be rather stupid. String theory, as a mathematical theory, is very obviously science. Mathematical theory does not care about applicability to any real universe. String theory as a possible model of the physical universe is science as well. What string theory is not is a known-good model of the physical universe due to the lack of verification of its applicability. That this verification may be impossible has no impact of its status as science.
Sure, if verification is actually not possible at all then it is not science that has useful applications, because that also would mean it cannot be used for predictions (that being one of the ways to verify whether a model does apply to reality).
I should also point out that both Quantum Theory and Relativity, the two foundations of modern phsics, are neither complete nor completely verified to be accurate. In fact, history would suggest that at some time in the future, both will have to replaced by more refined theories as there is a good chance that when trying to verify the currently unverified aspects, effects will be found that do not quite fit into them as they currently are. That does not make them useless. Classical mechanics is known to be wrong, yet very useful. You just need to known under which conditions it becomes inaccurate enough to matter.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
From 1959, a subtle but well defined and reasonably commonly understood test. There are not a whole lot of philosophical razors that have been this sharp for this long. And we are moving to what exactly? A gap for string theory to slip into. What else will slip into this gap? Could we ever trust scientists again?
Problem is, supersymmetry (SUSY) is the only theory that even attempts to explain why the masses of particles are as small as they are -- including the Higgs particle. Without SUSY, the Higgs, W, and Z bosons become nearly infinitely massive due to loops in their feynmen diagrams.
Not quite. Only the Higgs is affected since it is the only scalar particle. Its mass does not become even vaguely close to infinite they just get dragged up to the Planck-scale at 10^19 GeV. SUSY is not the only possible explanation: Large Extra Dimensions solves the problem by reducing the Planck scale to ~10 TeV or so (but introduces other problems like why do protons appear stable).
Sparticles are a good candidate for dark matter, but they're unlikely to be detected by the LHC.
Only the lightest sparticle is good candidate for Dark Matter and, if produced, it can be detected at the LHC by the missing momentum which is carries which is a typical signature in almost all SUSY searches. However to confirm that it is Dark Matter we need the underground experiments to see it as well since all the LHC will be able to tell is that it lived long enough to escape the detector i.e. about 50ns if travelling close to the speed of light. However to be Dark Matter it needs to be stable enough to last ~13.8 billion years without appreciable decay.
If no sparticles are found at higher energy levels, then someone will have to explain what's wrong with particle physics in general
That depends. Suppose I tosh a coin and keep getting heads. How many heads in a row do I need to get before you become suspicious that something is not right (e.g. that I'm lying or tossing a two headed coin)? 10 heads in a row? 20 heads? Even if you are suspicious how many heads do I need to tosh before you are certain that something is wrong? This is the problem that the Standard Mode faces. It is not impossible that the light Higgs came about by really phenomenal luck but the chance of that happening is about the same as tossing ~110 heads in a row. In my subjective opinion that means that there must be some physics we are missing but this is a subjective opinion and you still cannot completely rule out that it could be just down to phenomenal chance.
Science is undertaken to advance our ability to make life better - in the many ways it might. Has all the money/man-years we've invested as a culture in ST yielded any benefit outside the realm of ST itself? As a tax payer who indirectly funds such esoteric endeavors, I want to know what this is doing for science. Hey.. Sheldon even left the field...
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
The author suggests it's not a theory but a hypothesis. But isn't having an hypothesis part of science? How far would science get without them?
30 years is a thing now? Why not use all available data which goes back much more than 30 years?
Did they predict an increase in cyclone intensity and fewer cyclones? The answer is no - they're now just trying to fit the theory to the data and making it seem like they know what's going on. If the next 30 years cyclonic activity increases and wind intensity decreases, what then?
This is the problem - they make predictions, which are then falsified and then come up with assertions as to why their predictions failed, because you know, this time they'll get it right...
Caused by warming seas, not a warming atmosphere. Given the oceans have 1000x the heat capacity of the atmosphere, the idea that the latter is driving the former is kind-of laughable.
Hurricane activity has fallen over the last 30 years.
Tell that to the people in the Pacific.
Government grants to institutions + the money available to speculators like Goldman Sachs through trading idiotic carbon credit schemes
And in the other corner we have the most powerful economic force on the planet, the fossil fuel industry, can anyone even think of another industry that can bring a superpower's military machine to it's knees?
However, political/economic muscle will never let the facts get in their way, so why adopt them? Forget political/financial arguments, they are aimed at your emotions and as such only have a 50/50 chance of being right. Find out HOW the scientists know what they claim to know.
BTW: Government grants to institutions have very little effect on the conclusions of researchers. If they did, the science would change whenever the government changed. (Hint:it doesn't).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"Given the oceans have 1000x the heat capacity of the atmosphere, the idea that the latter is driving the former is kind-of laughable"
Yeah, right, kind of.
Not.
I have studied what the scientists say about this for ten years. But I've also made a point of studying what the sceptics say, looking at the model results compared to actual reality and squaring the science with the hyperbolic press and political statements. Let me tell you, there's a huge discrepancy here. It's almost as if the science is (on the whole) being manufactured to order. This isn't new. It happens in social "science" all the time.
Just like math is science. But it is not physics. It is a physics ispired math.
No negative or positive finding tests string theory, it just suggests more knobs to twiddle. The one shining hope is that if we don't find supersymmetry, it is dead as a theory since it cannot accommodate a universe without.
You just contradicted yourself there. There is a negative finding which tests String Theory: not finding SUSY would exclude it as a viable model. That is the one test which we know about so far but the problem is that String Theorists are overwhelmed by the number of possible models and also lack the tools needed to extrapolate from the Planck-scale down to the LHC-scale.
This is why there are no concrete signatures indeed last I heard there were no candidate theories which even generated the know physics of the Standard Model because they had no way to figure out how the models look at low energy. Once they have the maths to do this the number of possibilities will rapidly reduce and we can start on whittling away the rest.
Since is a process, not a state. Some ideas might be not testable or verifiable yet, but formulating such ideas does not make den nonscientific if their goal is to explain 'the way things work'.
" falsifiable" is sophomoric criteria that people pick up early and repeat. It has a lot more criticism at higher levels then is known in public circles
Sub; Save Science and Create space for Peace
Now look at philosophy of Cosmology- on you tube by Martin Rees- 2014 trying to to justify Big-bang at the cost of misleading Science!
Where do you end up ? Boomerangs on body-mind and Spirit
Science at cross roads -2004. Now Science at cross-functional de-spirit by all theories
Big-bang, Singularity, LHC with Unwanted High-Energies, neutrinos under ill-conceived logic, String theory, Super-massive Black-holes
where do Science stand up ? Promoting Anarchy, Chaotic state and Cosmic Confusion
Unable to comprehend super-novas, Herbig-Haro jets,Milky-way stability or even the function of van-allen belts and Space Data ??
and unable to digest . Earth to ionosphere under mis-use ?
Now one sees minds-under filtration-Ego prevails- misleads go to test permissive society without Regulation or Discipline index ?
Ultimately science Credibility is at stake? Save Earth Planet and life support
Energy from the SUN core travels 200,000 years to reach the outer layer- How many Steps ?
Scale it up as a link to 200,000 Light years- one reaches Heart and Center of the Universe .
How is it connected ? Search origins-cosmology vedas interlinks. Science in philosophy can halp in time.
Paradigm shift means Think-tanks- Wisdom to lead scienific spirit with an orderely modes derived from nature and Philosophy.
Cosmology is a subject that needs best of brains Trust- origins- Cause-Effect- vedas- interlinks- vIsible-invisibble comlex,
Universe as part of multi-Universe and Cosmos.
Cosmic conscious spirit ceates the neessity-Demand-curiosity-Sustain - space Cosmology vedas interlinks.
Revise the Cosmos quest - Nature-Philosophy-to create awareness of Dimensional Knowledge Base Culture-base concepts in scientific
spirit to interlink prime Functional concept- cosmological index.vidyardhi nanduri [independant Research]
your ref : Why trust a theory ?http://www.whytrustatheory2015.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/program/index.html#gross
As Bullwinkle said, "This time for sure!"
In a letter to Japan, published in the NY Times, sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund, 21 scientists declared: "Japan's whale research program fails to meet minimum standards for credible science. Also, their whaling is not designed to answer questions relevant to the management of Whales, and Japan refuses to make the information it collects available for independent review. Its research program lacks a testable hypothesis and performance indicators needed for acceptable scientific standards." "While Japan claims the hunt is purely for research purposes, they return to port with hundreds of tons of whale meat PACKAGED and ready for the country's commercial markets. This vividly shows Japan's determination to maintain a "commercial" whaling industry under the guise of science in an internationally protected sanctuary. (Antarctica, established through the efforts of U.S. Vice-President Gore). We can not allow them to continue to flout such international agreements." http://www.stopwhalingnow.com/
Just because you can't test your prediction, doesn't mean it isn't science
Just because you don't know what prediction to even make, again, doesn't mean it isn't science.
Science is a very simple process
Observe -> Question -> Hypothesize -> Predict -> Test -> Collect Data -> Theorize -> Observe
Just because the limits of our technology and brain matter may currently prevent one or more of these steps does NOT mean it isn't science.
You want something that isn't science, go look at religion.