A rather one-sided presentation, I might add, but since you concede that this has already been countered by pointing out Albright's poor science and publishing his own website calling his boss's work a "myth", I don't need to get into details.
The same happened with two scientists in a Dutch government-run climatological research institute.
Really? Who? The only one I've heard of is Tennekes, and as far as I've ever been able to determine, he was not fired — he simply retired. He certainly has said nothing to the contrary himself; all the claims about him being fired can be traced back to an off-hand claim by Lindzen.
Who else were you thinking of?
That goes for both sides of the table, however most politicians, scientists and activists have far more to gain by a "let's impose controls" attitude than with a "nothing to see here, move along" attitude, the global warming camp is far more influential than the sceptics camp.
I am trying to imagine what scientists have to gain by imposing economic caps on carbon. I really hope you aren't going to drag up the "they can't get grant money otherwise" claim.
The current rate of warming is nothing exceptional, and might even be just a ripple in the trend.
On the contrary, there is no evidence for any rate of change as large as present, other than the abrupt D-O events associated with a collapse/restart of the thermohaline circulation.
The past has seen increases in temperature of higher rates and over a larger range.
You are obfuscating the issue. Remember that my point was this: the rate of warming is larger than the natural rate of cooling into an ice age. This is true. There have been other events, not associated with the ice age cycle, which have shown a rapid cooling. But this is irrelevant to either my point or yours (which was that we need the warming to offset imminent cooling). It's irrelevant because there is no such imminent cooling. Ironically, global warming itself is the only thing that could set off that kind of rapid cooling via a THC collapse right now, and even if it did, the amount of warming needed to trigger such a collapse would likely outweigh the resulting cooling itself.
That's also the pattern to most ice ages (and we're at the peak following a small one of a couple 100 years ago):
We are in an interglacial period, but it is dishonest to claim that we are at the "peak" of one, implying that it's all cooling from here on out; there is no evidence of this.
a slow decline in temperature, followed by a sharp ramp upwards.
The "sharp ramp upwards" during a deglaciation is still significantly slower than the current rate of warming, and is also irrelevant to your claims about imminent cooling.
Warming and cooling are natural trends, on which we have some (small influence).
The influence may be "small" compared to the total change involved in the ice age cycle, but that doesn't mean that the resulting impacts are negligible in any absolute sense.
We should be worried about the warming trend, but not exaggerate our supposed influence.
Nor should we minimize our actual influence.
Thart's like worrying about a small wave, while the normal tide raises and drops the water level by several meters.
That's also a dishonest analogy, since you are choosing as a basis for comparison something (a small wave) which demonstrably has no impact to society as a whole. You cannot demonstrate the same about current climate change. Furthermore, the fact that there have been large climate changes in the past is a red herring; sure, the Cretaceous was much warmer than today, but that doesn't mean that we'd prefer to live in that climate.
We have seen nothing yet.
Of course this is false; we have seen a warming trend, which appears inexplicable in terms o
My main problem is that we're extrapolating a 4 billion year old climate with about 150 years of directly observed but partial data and 30 years of directly observed global data. Well, what is your argument that this amount of data is insufficient to extrapolate the next 100 years? This is not just a statistical fit to data being extrapolated, either; there is actual physics involved.
The tree ring studies originally done were riddled with accounting problems and were, very likely, fraudulent, Pretty strong words. I'm familiar with the M&M criticisms, but I'd like to see the basis of claims about outright fraud.
and the remaining indirect methods seem to point in many different directions. Non-tree ring proxies, borehole temperature reconstructions, and the direct instrumental record all support late 20th century warming.
If I was an environmental scientist at this point, and no matter what I published I risked physical threats to my security, I'd probably find another line of work. Very few scientists have actually received physical threats to their security.
They can't publish science anymore, everything they publish is a religious tract, hoping to sway one camp or the other to provide them protection and cash so they can continue their work. Ok, please cite examples from the peer reviewed scientific literature of studies which are unscientific religious tracts.
That does not mean that all conclusions are incorrect or made up, but very often peer reviews are sorely lacking, The actual scientific literature published in journals is peer reviewed.
and many reports have had chapters and sections stricken in the final draft, because those sections could cast doubt on the severity or existence of human impact on the climate. In many cases scientists voicing such doubts have not been gainsaid, but fired from "scientific" institutions. Please, give examples.
And while you've raised the issue, shall we discuss political meddling in the opposite direction (cough EPA report cough)?
Why are long term trends not taken into account in these reports, for example. They look at century time scales, but not longer, because (despite what you say) predictions are very hard to do for longer timescales, especially given the uncertainty in what humans will be doing in terms of atmospheric emissions and land use changes. Remember, climate physics is not the only input into climate prediction; you need projections of human activity as well. (See here.)
Winter is coming, and in 10.000 years we'll be in an ice age. The start of the downward trend in average temperatures is imminent (which means anywhere between now and 1.000 years)... It is far from established when the next ice age cycle is going to start, and there are some who claim that due to patterns in orbital dynamics, the current interglacial could be exceptionally long (as long as 50,000 years). (See here.)
Perhaps that is why the IPCC report does not look any further than the year 2100 Perhaps it is, as I said, hard to project much more than a century or two in advance.
the scary hockeystick curve will flatten out after that year, and if you look even further it will drop The current rate of warming far exceeds the natural rate of cooling during glaciation. That rate of warming will eventually level off, but it's not going to be outweighed by glaciation any time in the next few centuries.
It is true that eventually we will enter a new ice age, regardless of global warming, but no one is "ignoring" this fact. It's just farther off into the future; right now, the warming is what we have to deal with. If warming is a problem, you can't just ignore it because someday it will be cooler.
Our distant descendants (if any) may even be grateful for the extra CO2 we have released, since it might make the next ice age a little less severe. If that turns out to be the case, it's better to release the CO2 then, rather than now, when we don't need it. As we have seen already, it's far easier to raise the temperature quickly than it is to cool it, having to do with the ease in emitting CO2 as a byproduct of civilization and with the long residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere.
You missed the point is that you condemned him for both of the possible choices of action, and therefore you are irrational. Whether the other poster too is irrational is beside the point.
As far as observable physics goes, you can make an extra dimension theory approach the Standard Model just by making the extra dimensions approach the Planck length in size, so that they effectively don't exist as far as anything we can measure is concerned. But that's not very interesting. It's more interesting when you let the dimensions become large enough that there should be differences between the theory and the ordinary 4D Standard Model (but not so large that experimental bounds are obviously violated), e.g. new Kaluza-Klein particles or TeV-scale black holes. "Large" extra dimension theories which deviate from the Standard Model in an observable, but not already falsified way are becoming harder to construct.
According to this figure, you're right: the U.S. S&E workforce increased by almost 20% from 1993 to 2003, but the publication count was roughly constant. Funding per researcher actually increased by 70% or so (in constant dollars). The report is here.
Of course I can. It is silly to compare life-critical medical expenditures with quests for highly theoretical particulars. I'm not comparing applied bio to pure science, I'm comparing applied bio to applied engineering. You're comparing particle accelerator funds to engineering funding, which is applied, but then you say it's not fair to compare particle accelerator funds to applied bio. Make up your mind. If you're talking about pure science vs. pure science, drop engineering.
Now the question is, among non-life critical research how is that funding apportioned and what I showed is that an unjustifiably large percentage goes into the quest of yet another quark flavor. You showed no such thing. You ignored all non-NSF funds and what is "justifiable" is a value judgement, over which people, including those who fund pure science, may obviously disagree with you.
Number of articles, benefit to humanity, impact within the field, ability of achieve the same results for a lower price You've established that particle accelerators are inferior according to none of those metrics.
Of course, because naturally health/medical oriented research will always form the majority of the scientific budget, for obvious reasons. Sorry, you can't exclude applied bio on the one hand and include other applied fields on the other hand.
Large accelerators and manned space missions have some of the worst returns for the dollar. By what metric?
P.S. You're also still ignoring the existence of other funding agencies. Even if you want to consider "pure" science, NIH funds a hell of a lot of basic biology, in fact the NSF had to work hard in the 1970s to keep the NIH from taking over all of pure bio funding.
Just a month ago or so certain magnets failed increasing the cost the LHC. It will go operational in 2008. I know that. It's still not going to double the cost of the LHC or anything like that, and the price tag remains around a half billion per year, spread out over a number of countries.
Life sciences includes biomedical applications, which is not included under "biology". Uh huh. So you want to exclude anything applied from biology, yet include engineering.
First of all the cost figures are dubious. No, they're not. The LHC construction costs are already sunk: it's been built and will go operational shortly.
With respect to the SSC, note that you were making a statement regarding particle accelerators in general. It's dishonest to pick out the most expensive proposed project which was cancelled due to cost overruns, and hold it up as "proof" of the kind of money that particle accelerators "often goble [sic] up" (emphasis mine).
Wrong. Not wrong: "Research in the life sciences accounted for 52.0% ($27.7 billion) of total federal research dollars in FY 2004 (figure 2). Engineering was a distant second, accounting for 16.6% ($8.9 billion)."
Furthermore, I'm not talking about NSF funding, I'm talking about total government funding.
You commit various other logical fallacies, such as ignoring the amount of engineering research funded by industry (which is why government doesn't feel it necessary to fund more than it does), and implying that funding that goes to an accelerator project is simply taken from another field of science, like mathematics. In reality, it more often is taken out of a different field of physics, and moreover, many of those funds wouldn't even exist at all if not for the accelerator project. It's a common mistake to believe, for instance, that all of the funding for the SSC came at the expense of other scientific research, but in reality, the science budget was increased to make room for the project. (Which is not to say that nothing else in science was cut back, simply that "$X for the SSC" doesn't mean "-$X stolen from other science.) Case in point: when the SSC was cancelled, other sciences were not enriched with the funds that the SSC had been supposedly tying up.
If scientific publication growth has flattened, is that a problem? No growth is sustainable forever, after all: it will always plateau somewhere, as you hit "carrying capacity".
You could get more publications by increasing the number of scientists in the country, but even that has limits: you can't have more than 100% of the population doing scientific work (and realistically, much less). And by increasing the number of scientists, you will eventually start including more and more people who probably aren't cut out for science and won't contribute any additional quality, or maybe even any additional publications.
So for a plateau to be a problem, you have to argue that the U.S. both can and should be producing many more quality scientific publications than it is now. Is that the case?
[Particle accelerators] often goble up the same amount as the entire funding dedicated to biology, engineering, computer science and mathematics combined. That's not even remotely true. The Large Hadron Collider cost about $5 or $6 billion, spread out over a ~10-year period, which is about a half-billion per year — and that cost is shared by all the LHC member nations, not just the U.S. By contrast, the U.S. government funding for the life sciences in FY2004 alone was $28 billion, accounting for more than half of all the total research dollars in that year. Life science funding outweighed all physics funding (not just accelerator physics) by 5 to 1. (See here.)
I love big physics as much as anyone, but I doubt the SSC would have significantly increased publications overall. Sure, they may find out some great fundamental information about the creation of the universe, but overall impact on society would probably be minimal. You don't need an "overall impact on society" to increase publications. A wealth of new experimental data would do so as well.
Uh, yeah, people know about elastic energy. Nobody is claiming that elastic energy has just been discovered. What's new, according to the article, is applying that concept to determine a formula for the shape of a Moebius strip.
There are a few reasons for the string theory controversy. Well, any kind of controversy gets hyped by the media to be more than it really is. But it's also true that the media has portrayed string theory in a much more positive light in the past. One problem is that progress in string theory has slowed over the last 5 years or so. It had a boom circa 1985 followed by a bust, and another boom circa 1995. In such times, there is a "what have you done for me lately" perspective.
When you couple this to the fact that no big new particle experiments have come online capable of testing many ideas beyond the Standard Model, the lack of contact with experiment looks more pronounced.
One has to remember, though, that there are lots of other ideas in particle physics that have been hanging around for decades and have been waiting to be tested, too. String theory stands out more because it is more of a departure from traditional assumptions, but it does have testable models too.
Another issue is that two books have been published over the last few years which are critical of string theory, and ever since then, "string theory is dead!!!" has been the latest media darling, when in fact little has changed.
I think you may be conflating theories. MOND and dark matter are competing proposals to explain certain astrophysical observations. String theory is a unified field theory and a theory of quantum gravity; dark matter and MOND can be related to string theory, but usually are not.
To your specific question:
What is the relative percentage of scientists (in related fields) that believe in string theory compared to its alternatives?
it depends on what you mean by "related fields", and "believe in".
As a theory of quantum gravity: there are other theories of quantum gravity (e.g., loop quantum gravity, causal dynamical triangulations, etc.), but right now string theory is the only one which can successfully reproduce classical gravity (general relativity) in the large scale limit. Some of the alternatives may work, but none of them have been shown to actually be gravity theories, which is to say have a non-quantum limit that reproduces what we already know about the behavior of gravity.
I don't know what you mean by "believe in". Arguably, string theorists don't necessarily "believe in" string theory, in the sense of being sure it's correct. They're scientists just like anybody else. They might believe that it's likely to end up being correct, but almost every theorist believes that about the theory he or she works on.
If you measure it by what percentage of scientists choose to work on string theory vs. what percentage choose to work on other alternatives, then the number of string theorists outnumbers other quantum gravity theorists by more than 10 to 1.
As a unified field theory: there are grand unified theories (GUTs) out there which remain popular, but none of them unify gravity like string theory does (a so-called "theory of everything", or TOE). Well, that's ok: gravity has to be quantized, but it doesn't have to be unified with the other forces. GUTs are strong competitors to string theory among the conservative high energy theory community, but it is increasingly popular to consider GUTs which are embedded within string theory. (This is mostly because of the preceding point: GUTs assume that gravity is classical, but we know that it must be quantum. String theory is the only workable quantum gravity theory at this time.)
As an alternative to the Standard Model of particle physics: many of the proposals for physics beyond the Standard Model do not make use of string theory. Some of them include supersymmetry, large extra dimensions (yes, you can have extra dimensions without string theory), grand unified theories, various alternatives to the Higgs boson, etc. However, it turns out that almost all of those ideas are naturally implied by string theory for reasons of internal consistency, whereas they have to be postulated ad hoc without string theory. So again, there too it is increasingly popular to embed them within string theory. On the other hand, it is also very common to remain agnostic on the matter: by virtue of "effective field theory", you can consider theories which look like ordinary quantum field theories at low energy, but might act like string theory or some other kind of quantum gravity at high energies. In other words, in many (most!) experiments it doesn't matter whether you're doing string theory or not.
Sociologically: as a theory of quantum gravity, particle physicists tend to prefer string theory, whereas gravitational physicists tend to prefer other alternatives. Within the particle physics community, string theory is more popular with younger physicists, more traditional alternatives are more popular with older physicists.
There is some tension within the particle physics community itself. On the one hand, some of the more conservative physicists feel that string theory is too disconnected from experiment. (However, one should note that if you're looking for a quantum gravity theory, ALL alternatives to string theory are even more disconnected from experiment, since none of the oth
Half the scientists attribute this to a formula error. No. It's an observed phenomenon, it doesn't have anything to do with theoretical formulas.
I wouldn't be so quick to take some uknown offset in energy for... a bunch of extra dimensions with dark energy lurking in them. Extra dimensions is just one theory of dark energy, and not even the most popular. There are plenty of others. And what is observed is not just an "unknown offset in energy", but an accelerating expansion of the universe. Normal kinds of energetic fields can't do that: they only make the expansion slow down because they gravitate. That's why dark energy is fundamentally different.
It's just too cheap of a cop out. It's not a cop out, it's a theory which can explain some of the observations we see, just like any number of other proposals out there. It's obvious that you're prejudiced against this particular explanation.
The "fraction of a milimeter dimensions" don't make sense to me. I see. It doesn't make sense to suv4x4 of Slashdot, therefore it's wrong.
If these dimensions have some sort of limited dimensions, it means spatial must have some too. That sentence makes no sense. But taking a guess, did you mean to say "If the extra dimensions are finite in size, then the ordinary three spatial dimensions must be finite too"? If so, that's not correct. Geometrically, some spatial dimensions can be finite and some can be infinite.
Which screws up with the 4D sphere universe theory or endless universe theory (it expands as matter expands with it). No, extra dimensions screw up neither of those. The ordinary three spatial dimensions can still behave like the surface of a 4D hypersphere. And all dark energy theories are compatible with expanding universe theories: that's the whole point! Dark energy describes a universe whose expansion is continually accelerating.
It looks to me as if scientists are hanging onto tricky math to mix and match all weird phenomena they can't explain themselves on the quantum level. Your argument seems to amount to "math is too hard for me, therefore physics theories with math are wrong". I can't tell what your objection actually is. Physicist propose new theories to explain new phenomena, weird or not. I don't know what you think quantum mechanics in particular has to do with it.
I'm not ready to accept those extra dimensions are any more dimensions than the red/green/blue quarks are actually red, green or blue. The extra gauge dimensions of quantum chromodynamics are not the same as extra spatial dimensions. One main reason is that the extra spatial dimensions respond gravitationally just like the normal spatial dimensions do, while the gauge dimensions do not. When you allow the gauge dimensions to be dynamical and couple to matter and energy, they become true space dimensions and you get the Kaluza-Klein theory, which is what is being discussed here.
If they fess up "ok we're just making this up to make math easier", then doesn't matter what they claim about dimensions. They're not doing it to "make math easier", they're doing it to explain observed astrophysical phenomena. The number of dimensions of space affects the behavior of particles and the expansion of spacetime.
Both of which theories? Extra dimensional theories of dark energy? Other theories of dark energy? Dark matter? MOND? String theory? Which two theories are you comparing the consensus (or lack thereof) for?
You mean dark energy. And yes, large extra dimensions can be made to fit within string theory. But you're wrong about the experimental validation. Indeed, the whole theory being proposed here is experimentally motivated: it has observable consequences. The problem now is to work out other consequences as cross checks, to add evidence to hopefully one of the dark energy theories, and to rule out the others.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's one.
A rather one-sided presentation, I might add, but since you concede that this has already been countered by pointing out Albright's poor science and publishing his own website calling his boss's work a "myth", I don't need to get into details.
The same happened with two scientists in a Dutch government-run climatological research institute.
Really? Who? The only one I've heard of is Tennekes, and as far as I've ever been able to determine, he was not fired — he simply retired. He certainly has said nothing to the contrary himself; all the claims about him being fired can be traced back to an off-hand claim by Lindzen.
Who else were you thinking of?
That goes for both sides of the table, however most politicians, scientists and activists have far more to gain by a "let's impose controls" attitude than with a "nothing to see here, move along" attitude, the global warming camp is far more influential than the sceptics camp.
I am trying to imagine what scientists have to gain by imposing economic caps on carbon. I really hope you aren't going to drag up the "they can't get grant money otherwise" claim.
The current rate of warming is nothing exceptional, and might even be just a ripple in the trend.
On the contrary, there is no evidence for any rate of change as large as present, other than the abrupt D-O events associated with a collapse/restart of the thermohaline circulation.
The past has seen increases in temperature of higher rates and over a larger range.
You are obfuscating the issue. Remember that my point was this: the rate of warming is larger than the natural rate of cooling into an ice age. This is true. There have been other events, not associated with the ice age cycle, which have shown a rapid cooling. But this is irrelevant to either my point or yours (which was that we need the warming to offset imminent cooling). It's irrelevant because there is no such imminent cooling. Ironically, global warming itself is the only thing that could set off that kind of rapid cooling via a THC collapse right now, and even if it did, the amount of warming needed to trigger such a collapse would likely outweigh the resulting cooling itself.
That's also the pattern to most ice ages (and we're at the peak following a small one of a couple 100 years ago):
We are in an interglacial period, but it is dishonest to claim that we are at the "peak" of one, implying that it's all cooling from here on out; there is no evidence of this.
a slow decline in temperature, followed by a sharp ramp upwards.
The "sharp ramp upwards" during a deglaciation is still significantly slower than the current rate of warming, and is also irrelevant to your claims about imminent cooling.
Warming and cooling are natural trends, on which we have some (small influence).
The influence may be "small" compared to the total change involved in the ice age cycle, but that doesn't mean that the resulting impacts are negligible in any absolute sense.
We should be worried about the warming trend, but not exaggerate our supposed influence.
Nor should we minimize our actual influence.
Thart's like worrying about a small wave, while the normal tide raises and drops the water level by several meters.
That's also a dishonest analogy, since you are choosing as a basis for comparison something (a small wave) which demonstrably has no impact to society as a whole. You cannot demonstrate the same about current climate change. Furthermore, the fact that there have been large climate changes in the past is a red herring; sure, the Cretaceous was much warmer than today, but that doesn't mean that we'd prefer to live in that climate.
We have seen nothing yet.
Of course this is false; we have seen a warming trend, which appears inexplicable in terms o
And while you've raised the issue, shall we discuss political meddling in the opposite direction (cough EPA report cough)? Why are long term trends not taken into account in these reports, for example. They look at century time scales, but not longer, because (despite what you say) predictions are very hard to do for longer timescales, especially given the uncertainty in what humans will be doing in terms of atmospheric emissions and land use changes. Remember, climate physics is not the only input into climate prediction; you need projections of human activity as well. (See here.) Winter is coming, and in 10.000 years we'll be in an ice age. The start of the downward trend in average temperatures is imminent (which means anywhere between now and 1.000 years)... It is far from established when the next ice age cycle is going to start, and there are some who claim that due to patterns in orbital dynamics, the current interglacial could be exceptionally long (as long as 50,000 years). (See here.) Perhaps that is why the IPCC report does not look any further than the year 2100 Perhaps it is, as I said, hard to project much more than a century or two in advance. the scary hockeystick curve will flatten out after that year, and if you look even further it will drop The current rate of warming far exceeds the natural rate of cooling during glaciation. That rate of warming will eventually level off, but it's not going to be outweighed by glaciation any time in the next few centuries.
It is true that eventually we will enter a new ice age, regardless of global warming, but no one is "ignoring" this fact. It's just farther off into the future; right now, the warming is what we have to deal with. If warming is a problem, you can't just ignore it because someday it will be cooler. Our distant descendants (if any) may even be grateful for the extra CO2 we have released, since it might make the next ice age a little less severe. If that turns out to be the case, it's better to release the CO2 then, rather than now, when we don't need it. As we have seen already, it's far easier to raise the temperature quickly than it is to cool it, having to do with the ease in emitting CO2 as a byproduct of civilization and with the long residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Dear American Scientists: I hope you'll still be able to work at a (non-federal) University.
I don't think there is such a thing as a federal university in the U.S., unless you're counting the military academies.
Unless, of course, you just misspoke and were referring to something else other than caring about what party the Bush administration is in.
You missed the point is that you condemned him for both of the possible choices of action, and therefore you are irrational. Whether the other poster too is irrational is beside the point.
If you care about what party they are in, then you're a partisan stooge. If you don't care, you're just ignorant.
Wow, damned if you do and damned if you don't.
As far as observable physics goes, you can make an extra dimension theory approach the Standard Model just by making the extra dimensions approach the Planck length in size, so that they effectively don't exist as far as anything we can measure is concerned. But that's not very interesting. It's more interesting when you let the dimensions become large enough that there should be differences between the theory and the ordinary 4D Standard Model (but not so large that experimental bounds are obviously violated), e.g. new Kaluza-Klein particles or TeV-scale black holes. "Large" extra dimension theories which deviate from the Standard Model in an observable, but not already falsified way are becoming harder to construct.
It's interesting; for possible contributing factors, see these conclusions from a related study.
According to this figure, you're right: the U.S. S&E workforce increased by almost 20% from 1993 to 2003, but the publication count was roughly constant. Funding per researcher actually increased by 70% or so (in constant dollars). The report is here.
P.S. You're also still ignoring the existence of other funding agencies. Even if you want to consider "pure" science, NIH funds a hell of a lot of basic biology, in fact the NSF had to work hard in the 1970s to keep the NIH from taking over all of pure bio funding.
With respect to the SSC, note that you were making a statement regarding particle accelerators in general. It's dishonest to pick out the most expensive proposed project which was cancelled due to cost overruns, and hold it up as "proof" of the kind of money that particle accelerators "often goble [sic] up" (emphasis mine). Wrong. Not wrong: "Research in the life sciences accounted for 52.0% ($27.7 billion) of total federal research dollars in FY 2004 (figure 2). Engineering was a distant second, accounting for 16.6% ($8.9 billion)."
Furthermore, I'm not talking about NSF funding, I'm talking about total government funding.
You commit various other logical fallacies, such as ignoring the amount of engineering research funded by industry (which is why government doesn't feel it necessary to fund more than it does), and implying that funding that goes to an accelerator project is simply taken from another field of science, like mathematics. In reality, it more often is taken out of a different field of physics, and moreover, many of those funds wouldn't even exist at all if not for the accelerator project. It's a common mistake to believe, for instance, that all of the funding for the SSC came at the expense of other scientific research, but in reality, the science budget was increased to make room for the project. (Which is not to say that nothing else in science was cut back, simply that "$X for the SSC" doesn't mean "-$X stolen from other science.) Case in point: when the SSC was cancelled, other sciences were not enriched with the funds that the SSC had been supposedly tying up.
If scientific publication growth has flattened, is that a problem? No growth is sustainable forever, after all: it will always plateau somewhere, as you hit "carrying capacity".
You could get more publications by increasing the number of scientists in the country, but even that has limits: you can't have more than 100% of the population doing scientific work (and realistically, much less). And by increasing the number of scientists, you will eventually start including more and more people who probably aren't cut out for science and won't contribute any additional quality, or maybe even any additional publications.
So for a plateau to be a problem, you have to argue that the U.S. both can and should be producing many more quality scientific publications than it is now. Is that the case?
Mod -1, NonSequitur.
Uh, yeah, people know about elastic energy. Nobody is claiming that elastic energy has just been discovered. What's new, according to the article, is applying that concept to determine a formula for the shape of a Moebius strip.
TFA (as opposed to the Slashdot summary) says it's the largest visible/infrared telescope. None of the telescopes you've listed are in that category.
There are a few reasons for the string theory controversy. Well, any kind of controversy gets hyped by the media to be more than it really is. But it's also true that the media has portrayed string theory in a much more positive light in the past. One problem is that progress in string theory has slowed over the last 5 years or so. It had a boom circa 1985 followed by a bust, and another boom circa 1995. In such times, there is a "what have you done for me lately" perspective.
When you couple this to the fact that no big new particle experiments have come online capable of testing many ideas beyond the Standard Model, the lack of contact with experiment looks more pronounced.
One has to remember, though, that there are lots of other ideas in particle physics that have been hanging around for decades and have been waiting to be tested, too. String theory stands out more because it is more of a departure from traditional assumptions, but it does have testable models too.
Another issue is that two books have been published over the last few years which are critical of string theory, and ever since then, "string theory is dead!!!" has been the latest media darling, when in fact little has changed.
To your specific question:
What is the relative percentage of scientists (in related fields) that believe in string theory compared to its alternatives?
it depends on what you mean by "related fields", and "believe in".
As a theory of quantum gravity: there are other theories of quantum gravity (e.g., loop quantum gravity, causal dynamical triangulations, etc.), but right now string theory is the only one which can successfully reproduce classical gravity (general relativity) in the large scale limit. Some of the alternatives may work, but none of them have been shown to actually be gravity theories, which is to say have a non-quantum limit that reproduces what we already know about the behavior of gravity.
I don't know what you mean by "believe in". Arguably, string theorists don't necessarily "believe in" string theory, in the sense of being sure it's correct. They're scientists just like anybody else. They might believe that it's likely to end up being correct, but almost every theorist believes that about the theory he or she works on.
If you measure it by what percentage of scientists choose to work on string theory vs. what percentage choose to work on other alternatives, then the number of string theorists outnumbers other quantum gravity theorists by more than 10 to 1.
As a unified field theory: there are grand unified theories (GUTs) out there which remain popular, but none of them unify gravity like string theory does (a so-called "theory of everything", or TOE). Well, that's ok: gravity has to be quantized, but it doesn't have to be unified with the other forces. GUTs are strong competitors to string theory among the conservative high energy theory community, but it is increasingly popular to consider GUTs which are embedded within string theory. (This is mostly because of the preceding point: GUTs assume that gravity is classical, but we know that it must be quantum. String theory is the only workable quantum gravity theory at this time.)
As an alternative to the Standard Model of particle physics: many of the proposals for physics beyond the Standard Model do not make use of string theory. Some of them include supersymmetry, large extra dimensions (yes, you can have extra dimensions without string theory), grand unified theories, various alternatives to the Higgs boson, etc. However, it turns out that almost all of those ideas are naturally implied by string theory for reasons of internal consistency, whereas they have to be postulated ad hoc without string theory. So again, there too it is increasingly popular to embed them within string theory. On the other hand, it is also very common to remain agnostic on the matter: by virtue of "effective field theory", you can consider theories which look like ordinary quantum field theories at low energy, but might act like string theory or some other kind of quantum gravity at high energies. In other words, in many (most!) experiments it doesn't matter whether you're doing string theory or not.
Sociologically: as a theory of quantum gravity, particle physicists tend to prefer string theory, whereas gravitational physicists tend to prefer other alternatives. Within the particle physics community, string theory is more popular with younger physicists, more traditional alternatives are more popular with older physicists.
There is some tension within the particle physics community itself. On the one hand, some of the more conservative physicists feel that string theory is too disconnected from experiment. (However, one should note that if you're looking for a quantum gravity theory, ALL alternatives to string theory are even more disconnected from experiment, since none of the oth
Both of which theories? Extra dimensional theories of dark energy? Other theories of dark energy? Dark matter? MOND? String theory? Which two theories are you comparing the consensus (or lack thereof) for?
You mean dark energy. And yes, large extra dimensions can be made to fit within string theory. But you're wrong about the experimental validation. Indeed, the whole theory being proposed here is experimentally motivated: it has observable consequences. The problem now is to work out other consequences as cross checks, to add evidence to hopefully one of the dark energy theories, and to rule out the others.