June 14, 2008
And So What If It's Not Even Wrong
Jon Cartwright over at the Physics World blog:
"So what would you do if string theory is wrong?" asks string theorist Moataz Emam of Clark University, US, in a paper posted on arXiv yesterday. It's obvious, you might think. String theorists would briefly mourn the 40 years of misspent speculation and leave furtively through the back door, while anti-string theorists would celebrate in light of their vindication.
Not so, says Emam — string theory will continue to prosper, and might even become its own discipline independent of physics and mathematics.
Oddly, the reason Emam gives for this prediction is precisely the same reason why many physicists despise string theory. For example, in reducing the 10 dimensions of string theory to our familiar four, string theorists have to fashion a "landscape" of at least 10500 solutions. Emam says that such a huge number of solutions — of which only one exists for our universe — may make string theory unattractive, but in studying them physicists are gaining "deep insights into how a physical theory generally works":
Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:38 PM | Permalink
Comments
I am hardly an expert on the subject, but from reading Lubos Motl's blog (Motl is a string theorist and former Harvard Fellow) I gather that the reason sting theory is not likely to go away (or to be proven "wrong" is that it is in some sense "implied" by the known facts of physics.
As a rough analogy: some kind of geometry is required to measure and talk about space, though whether the space of the real world is best described by Euclidean or some variant of non-Euclidean geometry is up in the air (or used to be anyway.
Or put another way: whatever the final or true theory turns out to be (if it ever does turn out) it will have a stringy equivalent.
Posted by: Luke Lea | Jun 14, 2008 7:51:15 PM
On the other hand, Motl is probably the last person in the world you should read if you want an unbiased view of string theory.
(Or if you look at it from a meta perspective, the fact that not more string theorists treat Motl as the major embarrassment for string theory that he is, is in itself a major embarrassment for string theory.)
Posted by: Observer | Jun 15, 2008 4:10:17 AM
The sad reality is, we have been in one of the most lest productive periods of physics. After the Standard Model was essentially complete in the 1970's, (aside from dark matter and some interesting boundary black hole insights) we have dedicated most of our resources into String Theory, which at this point has been mostly mental masturbation (with some elegant mathematics as the needed porno).
I agree with Smolan and other critics. It is time to pull up the pants, and get on with life.
A good place to possibly start would possibly be quantum gravity.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Jun 16, 2008 10:35:24 AM
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