In a 'Dark Dimension,' Physicists Search for the Universe's Missing Matter
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
* Thinks string theory is wrong (in good company but doesn't prove anything).
* Seen lots of previous attempts to make testable predictions that didn't pan out (says nothing about this attempt).
* Thinks nobody should write articles about new ideas they don't agree with (completely indefensible).
Point me to some useful analysis, not just a rant from someone who doesn't like string theory.
I personally found the article interesting. The theory is probably not correct, but so what? We will know more when we test gravity at smaller scales, which we are doing to do anyway.
String theory has had 40 years to show something -- anything -- for its claims. At this point it's expensive, fancy mathematical LARPing.
It, like quantum computing and the amyloid-beta theory of Alzheimer's etiology, needs to see its funding diverted elsewhere to seed other promising lines of research.
I think a lot of the criticism of string theory ignores the fact that a lot of ideas have merit simply because they make you see things from a different angle. Even if they don't replace other models, these sorts of ideas are often worth something. You don't need to "believe" that the universe is literally made up of "the stuff" to appreciate that it could be a valid / self-consistent way of interpreting the world.
With limited resources, if you don't context switch, you starve everything else.
The problem with String Theory is that it totally dominated the field for near 4 decades, and the only outcome seem to be some “beautiful” formalisms that they are still trying to make useful somewhere.
It's kind of interesting when you actually take a closer look at the PR of string theory. There's lots of bombast about it being a candidate--the strongest candidate--for a theory of everything, but when you try to actually press for what that theory of everything, it ends up being "well, we don't actually have one yet."
To answer your "why" question more directly: string theorists themselves have been very loudly proclaiming for decades that they are the One True Path™ to a theory of everything. This isn't coming from incredulous science journalists trying to summarize a hot field of study for the general public, this is the messaging from the leading researchers themselves, and they've been doing it long enough that a knowledge of its existence and its role in the theory of everything is firmly embedded in public consciousness, even if all details beyond "tiny strings" and "something something extra dimensions" are stripped out. So we should hold the field to its own standard of why it should exist.
People are pretty desperate about looking for a way forward at this point.
Quantum computing is making steady progress though. It works and it offers a way to compute things we can't do with classical computing. It is just really difficult technically to pull off.
Not at all. He quotes two string theorists who say they think this proposal is unlikely.
"For the last thirty years or so, one tactic of those who refuse to admit the failure of string theory has been to go to the press with bogus claims of “we finally have found a way to get testable predictions from string theory!”. I’ve written about dozens and dozens of these over the years."
I guess perhaps you were only saying that that particular claim says nothing about this attempt? I mean, OK, sure, but you gave a notably incomplete description of your article. From your description, one would think that he only spoke in generality about string theory and made no reply to this particular idea, when in fact he did.
When it comes to understanding the fabric of the universe, most of what scientists think exists is consigned to a dark, murky domain. Ordinary matter, the stuff we can see and touch, accounts for just 5% of the cosmos. The rest, cosmologists say, is dark energy and dark matter, mysterious substances that are labeled “dark” partly to reflect our ignorance about their true nature.
How can you be interested in science, and yet not curious about that?
I’m still in camp “plausible explanation is this is all a big mass accounting error and models for how mass is distributed in galaxies are wrong by a couple orders of magnitude”.
And even if we're completely wrong, or it's a quirk of our models, or whatever else. That is also interesting.
Intelligence and consciousness (in the context of AGI or LLMs) is one such thing. When someone starts saying that LLMs can't possibly be conscious, at first I tended to politely point out we don't have a good, testable, definition of what conscious is and, therefore, we can't claim an LLM can't be conscious. Nowadays I just avoid the discussion altogether. I'll let them bring me back from the dead when we have a usable definition for "intelligence" or "consciousness" we can test.
I'm sure it'll be a machine waking me up.
But I think the question is like asking if the Broca's area in a human brain is conscious.
No real rhyme or reason why though.
So I'm not a physicists and don't have much more than a layman's understanding of all this. But isn't this just Kaluza-Klien all over again, and how is it any different than string theory?
Like really honestly for me the bigger headline is that "String theorist makes testable prediction".
Metaphorically I would call it "the wiring," but I assume that's metaphorical. What we observe internally, is the aggregate consequences of constraint satisfaction given the implementation specifics of the frame universe.
Me I also wed this to conceptually related concept is the emergence of coherent-universe-constraints that Wolfram has been writing about. Where things like relativity emerge necessarily from [information] propagation, regardless of implementation substrate.
The GUT is probably lurking in that marriage fwiw.
It appears obvious that if you add a 1D dimension that is perpendicular to all three observable dimensions and is a vector of the universe's expansion where most energy resides, then the universe expands at a constant rate in that 1D dimension and our observable 3D dimensions stretch by this vector in all directions simultaneously. However, we observe that the universe's expansion rate is accelerating, which suggests two things about our observations:
1. What we observe is under the time dilation effect, and each part of the universe we observe can have different rates of the time dilation effect due to the gravitational gradient of mass and the speed of matter (not the expansion speed). Thus, the universe is really expanding at a constant rate, and we are progressively slowpokes (our local time dilation effect is increasing... What could be the reason for this?).
2. There is no hidden dimension...
Adding an additional dimension of micron size transforms it into a 3D dimension. This is too far-stretched, even for a wild guesser like me...
Would love to discover new things about universe for sure... just let's not pretend our ignorance can be wrapped as knowledge.
[Edit] Quantum mechanics makes enormous and pervasively verified predictions. This theory will be useful to the extent it makes such verified predictions.
No, quantum uncertainty is not about about precision of measurement or ignorance. It is fundamental concept of quantum theory that is battle tested (in terms of measurements).