String theory has never made a prediction that has come true and gets disproven each time we build a bigger particle accelerator and discover new particles. Like the theory can’t even explain basic observations about particle physics and the universe. The String theorists just keep telling everyone that it will work out bro, trust us, give us more funding.
Like the only reason it hasen’t been abandoned yet and is still weirdly popular is becuase of the perverse incentives in academics where it pays more to pursue this kind of groundbreaking nonsense than trying to advance the frontier of the established and boring Standard Model. And it’s easy to be groundbreaking when you are just making shit up. Just think of the millions in research funding these charlatans have scammed from us. They have played us for absolute fools.
We need to round up all the String theorists and parade them through the streets with dunce caps, Cultural Revolution style. We need to do 70 hour struggle sessions against them until they pass out from exhaustion.
“Particles are actually tiny strings that wiggle” “There are 11 dimensions but you don’t notice the extra ones cause their are too small” - Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
Dooing the :wojak-nooo: at the standard model everytime it makes an even more accurate prediction.
String theory? More like stringing me along theory
The math is pretty cool though. Like, its compelling how well all the weird math locks into place… based on the info we had at the time String Theory was being developed initially.
As you say, despite the math being compelling, it uh… doesn’t seem to predict, reality, as we discovered more things.
But really, as accurate as the Standard Model has been, the sticky issue of integrating relativity into it, seems to imply we’re missing something. So its very natural to look at the Standard model’s inability to reconcile relativity, and assume we need to look at it from a different angle, and looking at it from an angle of ‘math’ seems like as decent idea as any.
I say this with a decade-old degree that focused more on chemistry, but P-chem does get pretty involved into quantum physics, so I’m at least theoretically familiar with the math.
But really, as accurate as the Standard Model has been, the sticky issue of integrating relativity into it, seems to imply we’re missing something.
As a non-scientist layperson who likes to follow science news, this particular problem has always been absolutely fascinating to me. The standard model is astonishingly accurate. General relativity is astonishingly accurate. But put them together and the results are incoherent nonsense.
Funny enough, this exact problem is what pushed me over the hump from being a wishy-washy liberal progressive into an actual socialist. I’m certain there’s someone, somewhere, with the right intelligence and intuition to solve this problem. But they’re probably toiling in some mind-numbing dead-end job because they never had the financial ability to attend a university and study physics. How many other incredibly challenging scientific problems could be solved if bright people could simply study what they’re passionate about without having to worry about money?
doesn’t seem to predict, reality, as we discovered more things
What if it does predict reality but we live where the warp bleeds into it
This is an exaggeration, it was once a pretty enticing theory. But its been in trouble since the 1990s and dead in the water for 15 years or more.
The problem is the other theories we have arent much better. They’re either clearly insufficient like LQG and it’s successors, or overly dependent on the also rotten field of particle physics.
Sorry but as someone with a degree in physics this post and comments gave me a brain hemorrhage… Too much to even unpack.
Edit: Tackling just one of these points, “it’s useless and doesn’t help anybody”; this is exactly what people said about electricity and nuclear physics when those were first discovered. Now electronics are essential and ubiquitous, and nuclear power is a solution (among others) to climate change. Just because you can’t imagine a use for something yet, doesn’t mean it will never be useful. “What is the use of an infant?” etc.
both of your examples involve phenomena that was observed systematically before a theory was formed to describe it consistently. string theory is a neat math trick to make your divergences go away in your feynman diagrams.
Special Relativity (and by extension, General Relativity) is an example of a theory that was developed perfectly theoretically following Einstein’s confusion over whether the speed of light was constant (as in Maxwell’s Electromagnetism) or variable (as in Galilean Relativity). People had not systematically observed black holes and Lorentz transformations. So yes, a successful theoretical theory in physics can be developed mathematically. Deal with it.
Edit: other examples from mathematics are imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometry, which had no practical application for decades or centuries. Now they are used in engineering and relativistic physics respectively.
Defending string theory ain’t it, Einstein’s thought experiments were brilliant, but they were also based in a meaningful amount of engagement with the relevant physics that had already been discovered. String theory requires supersymmetry to not require 26 dimensions. 26 dimensional theory is not plausible for our universe. Supersymmetry is all but discredited in 2023. I certainly don’t subscribe to it. You need supersymmetry to have a string theory in 10 dimensions that’s possibly consistent with known physics, and you also need for it Witten’s M-theory. You need to be living in a AntiDeSitter universe to have an AdS/CFT correspondence. Modern theoretical fundamental physics does not fucking work, period. Don’t just say deal with it, like a child.
Also, not a great take here. Imaginary numbers were developed in Italy in application to solving the cubic equation in general in a very geometric manner. Important sure, but following from very tangible existing knowledge. Non-Euclidean geometry, similarly, was almost a natural development when you consider that Euclid’s parallel postulate had been considering extremely suspect and out of place for centuries. These ideas came from the limitations of the pre-existing applied work. Don’t mythicalize science just because no one actually teaches the history of physics and mathematics.
Kinda sorta, but you build theories on experimental mismatches (I.e. damn, that mercury conducts very well at low temperatures, how come?) and hope they predict something testable (like other weird fermions pairings/boson condensates).
string theory hasn’t yet hit its predictions (or did it?). On the other hand, from outside pov, doing weird math on something like that or predicting lasers would look kinda similar to string theory (damn so those nerds doing math on matter states they couldn’t even make) so :shrug-outta-hecks:
string theory hasn’t yet hit its predictions (or did it?)
It’s not that string theory has failed in its predictions; there are no predictions because the theory isn’t formulated yet. So many people misunderstand this. Give them a chance to actually discover the equations for the theory before you make comments about its predictions. We don’t know what its predictions are yet.
Give them a chance to actually discover the equations for the theory before you make comments about its predictions. We don’t know what its predictions are yet.
this is like suggesting that it took einstein 10 years to go from sr to gr because it was just too dang hard to get the coefficients right. string theorists can’t find a string theory in the landscape that represents our universe because the core idea is so tautologically limited as to be rendered practically useless. it’s a math trick, and little more.
