20 Years of "Not Even Wrong"
math.columbia.edu
math.columbia.edu
Fast forward 10 years or so and I haven't regretted that decision. Not only is my pay much better doing this sort of thing but I really did nope out at the right time. I mean, I felt so smug about the noble prize being won by the attosecond researchers, one of whom had an office down the hall from our group. The same grad student who decided to bear the brunt of the CMS prof at the time justified the dearth of working in the group (although perhaps not the abuse, I don't know) as it would be potential "noble prize winning research." I feel I made the right bet at the time and don't regret it.
Not sure why you brag about how smug you felt over the further misfortune of someone you know is suffering abuse...
I read this as "I also saw a microcosm of this larger toxicity, and I'm glad I got out of it".
He could just as well used the story about the PhD student in computer science studying in Florida that committed suicide because their supervisor was trying to force them to publish incorrect results. (And then added how smug they felt about that group not getting awards).
I thought it was very interesting.
Besides, the anecdote actually offers something: a perspective from someone who escaped the grinder just in time. I don’t have a cohort study at hand, but I know both first- and second-hand that the situation described is not the norm, but all too common. In such cases, the correct response is what was described: jump ship whilst you can. You don’t need a double blind study to demonstrate this when simple logic is enough.
In the anecdote the author claims that the former group was toxic and that this was one of the reasons that influenced choosing a different group.
There are two claims about toxic behaviour. They are not the only claims, topics, or other interesting things one could draw from it.
Or is the mechanism different?
That's whats going on here. OP isn't going to a buffet and mocking starving kids - both folks were intelligent people, one of whom is justifying their life trajectory, and the other is taking a different tack.
I bet you'd be able to conjure up instances where you go "whew I'm glad I didn't do what that person did". We all can. That's not reveling in their misfortune, it's learning.
If someone dies in a car accident I can be glad it wasn’t me, but I haven’t learned anything.
If I do learn something from someone else’s misfortune, I could be pleased, relieved, possibly proud but I’m less sure about being smug.
I still don’t quite grasp the point about not being responsible for other people’s actions. If it’s never true then I’m not sure it’s all that useful.
It seems more like this is about our perception of other people’s responsibility?
It should not, and you should not have to defend yourself against this kind of behaviour. I would not have phrased it like that, but I agree with your message.
Sure. But that doesn't mean you can't show some basic human sympathy to the people who didn't "dodge the bullet".
I added the bit about the other more senior grad student in later but didn't remove the smugness bit. Of course you'll probably not believe me but of course I do not feel smug they faced abuse and I didn't. I do admit I feel smug about the so-called applied physicists getting the nobel prize first but that feeling is more directed at the senior professors and dept chairs and certainly that LHC professor, and not her the grad student who honestly was very bright and talented but just made a different choice which at the time seemed like a sure bet for doing high impact research.
I say I don't regret the decision, but really if I'm honest these were all justifications at the time. I partially decided to switch because of what I felt were bad results from their search, but it was a bet fundamentally, I didn't have some deep foresight that that other grad student didn't have and I was betting against the commonly held perspectives at the time including that which I held. Ironically, both the professor of the LHC group and the new professor who would become my PhD advisor both had the same first name, so it became the "choice between two Toms*" in my head, and I definitely liked the new Tom over the abrasive Tom, so I felt that deep down I was just following what was better for my heart (the lazy option) over for my career (the "work harder" option). But...I lucked out and it turned out to be better for my career too. There was luck in it too as she being more senior means she had already a incurred a sunk cost whereas I was fresh on my journey and could easy make one last switch before continuing the program.
I say I "feel I made the right bet" but that is only in hindsight. 23 year old me had no idea this would all work out this way.
* First name changed to protect privacy both of me and the related professors.
I get what you say about particle physicists viewing applied fields as lesser, that's a zoom in on xkcd:435, which especially in a school with emphasis on "fundamental research" will also mirror the allocation of resources.
But globally particle physics isn't the dominant actor budget wise: there was a fight in the US in the late 80's early 90's and they lost, which is why the Superconducting Super Colliders was cancelled. It's just not so obvious because applied fields usually don't need to build as big things as HEP and so don't need to concentrate the entire field in one experiment.
You're totally right about this. Especially at this point, a lot more money globally goes into other fields beyond fundamentals or particle physics, this might have really been localised to my alma mater.
It's an inside view of something I'm curious about. It may be unrepresentative, but I'll take it over the repetitive high-level stuff you see all the time.
At least the stuff they do is actually good and not, you know, evil.
See also: congressional staffers.
Some of them, once you got a drink or two in them, would tell you about the indignity of academia: teaching 101 classes to kids who would rather not be there, scrabbling for grant money, the bitter jockeying for resources. Sure, you get your true-blue types, but they were largely outnumbered by people haunted by the sunk cost fallacy. And it's not really about nice cars, it's about "being able to arrive at the class you are teaching on time because your car doesn't break down every five minutes."
That’s such a stupid and harmful thing to say. People change and it takes some maturity to realise that what we wanted to do might not actually be a good idea. It’s completely unrealistic to expect even undergrads to actually know how research is done in a specific field, so how could they be sure that they’d like it?
One of the best PhD student I have seen in materials chemistry came from biochemistry. It’s much better to go and see somewhere else than persevere and go in an unsatisfying field anyway. That’s the best way of becoming an angry, bitter and resentful little professor. Now that I think of it, it might explain some of my lecturers…
The standard model is not complete in that we don't know what the mass term of the neutrino is, if it is Dirac or Majorana or some combination. There's the mysterious absence of the right-handed neutrino which is a good candidate for the "dark matter" particle. This is not "physics beyond the standard model" but "a missing piece of the standard model". There is at least one major secret inside the neutrino and Occam's razor makes that a good candidate for explaining the missing mass and maybe even the matter-antimatter asymmetry.
I don't see Woit saying that there are no frontiers. I see him saying that pushing the energy scale of our experiments higher, which is a frontier, is getting harder and harder, and leads to fewer and fewer discoveries--all the LHC has really done is confirm the Higgs and show zero evidence of supersymmetry.
> The standard model is not complete
I don't see Woit saying that the Standard Model is complete. He says it's "extremely successful", which is perfectly true. He also says there are "no hints from experiment about how to improve it", which is also perfectly true. Your statements about missing pieces of the Standard Model are also perfectly true, but the question is, what experiments do we do to figure them out? The LHC is not going to help us do that. Where else do we look? That's what Woit is talking about with "no hints from experiment".
20 years ago, I read "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene, as an introduction to string theory. I was initially impressed by the brilliance of the theories it presented. What really threw me for a loop, though, was realizing (as far as I understood or remember) that string theory isn't one neatly packaged theory. Instead, it's this colossal family of theories, with so many parameters that it's hard to make predictions, and to justify "why this one and not the other ones?".
Then, over the last 20 years, I read the 3 following books, which confirmed my initial impression.
- "Not Even Wrong" by Peter Woit, a deep-dive critique of string theory for the mathematically inclined. Woit's basically saying, "If we can't test it, can we even call it science?"
- "The Trouble With Physics" by Lee Smolin, which zooms out a bit. Smolin's beef with string theory isn't just about the science; it's about how this obsession is hogging resources and blocking other potentially groundbreaking ideas (including, but not limited to, his own). Think of it as a mix of a science critique and an insider's look at the politics and sociology of physics.
- "Lost in Math" by Sabine Hossenfelder, which asks if physicists' quest for beauty in equations and theories is leading them astray. This one's the most accessible, mixing in history, interviews, personal stories, and a bit of philosophy.
All three books are good, so if you have to chose one:
- Woit's book is for the math geeks.
- Smolin's is for those who like a side of sociology with their science.
- Hossenfelder's is for folks intrigued by the blend of science, philosophy, and human bias.
Also worthwhile, IMHO, is Sabine's most recent take on string theory, as a youtube video: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/03/whatever-happened-t... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRzQDyw5C3M
PBS Spacetime is where I go for a lot of "layman-with-the-lightest-touch-of-math"[0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime
[EDIT]
Phewww reading those 2004 comments on those posts. Professors getting really heated for sure.
I just tried that: Right away he was talking about the possibility of the universe being "infinite".
Yup, in physics courses, that one word was time to lose respect for the course, f'get about it, think about some of the pretty girls on campus, and get back to math, e.g., my paper on group representations, apparently of some interest in physics.
Is it in fact dead?
1. Scientists are entirely human. Sometimes I think people expect more from both science and scientists. In the end, getting knowledge is hard. I have a copy of the Oxford Handbook of Epistemology which I keep on my night stand and every once and awhile it amuses me to read the first few chapters the upshot of which is "Fuck, we don't know how we know anything, really." Science works by having lots of unfruitfrul research programs. I won't say that research programs don't get "pathological" from time to time, in the sense that more energy is invested in them than it should be, but this is often only really discernible in retrospect. Even if a naysayer turns out to be right after a program has been explored, it doesn't mean that the naysayer was justified before the cards were all on the table.
2. Whether we like it or not, the search for truth is a practical matter, involving courting reputation, earning research money, winning war of ideas. This isn't so much new as it is profoundly more democratic than it used to be. Newton was famous for aggressively defending his reputation, to the point of arguably claiming to have invented things that he did not. Now we just have many, many, many more humans involved in science.
Indeed, this is exhausting and many scientists do hate this, but in the existing system, if you don't play by these rules, you will have difficulties collecting funding and/or a tenured position.
Particle physics is in a really weird place. I'm a layperson, but it seems to me we're in a position where either our technology is extremely far off from being able to collect the data we need, or we've missed something very fundamental in our approach, and it's going to take a major rethinking to figure anything out. I am not optimistic that we're going to make any significant headway here in my lifetime.
Though, as a layperson my opinion on all of this isn't worth the electricity used by my computer when writing it.
This is just the Politician's Syllogism[0], though:
We must do something.
This is something.
Therefore we must do this.
Are the detractors of string theory saying we should stop doing fundamental physics entirely? I don't think so
My understanding of string theory is that there isn't even a proper string theory variant of the Standard Model, and that most of the models people are trying out are basically toy models that kinda resemble, say, QED. This means it's not even coherent enough to ask the question if it fits existing data, which is part of the premise of it being "not even wrong."
Nobody knows this since there is no exact mathematical formulation of "the theory" to begin with.
> that fits existing data
Nobody knows this either since nobody has derived either General Relativity or the Standard Model of particle physics as an approximation to any string theory model.
This seems like a fundamental problem. If data is out of reach, we're left with nothing but noodling around with mathematics and simulation.
[1]: Igor R Klebanov, Edward Witten, Proton decay in intersecting D-brane models, Nuclear Physics B, Volume 664, Issues 1–2, 2003, Pages 3-20, ISSN 0550-3213, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0550-3213(03)00410-3. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S055032130...)
For this might want to assume that for each proton its lifetime is a random variable that obeys a Poisson process.
That's asking a LOT, might be seen as putting some severe constraints on what is going on with a proton and its internals.
The industrial organization failure is understandable. It’s all well and good to say “they should have recognized it wasn’t working and stopped” … but even if that’s true at the macro level, it’s very hard on an individual level.
An established physicist working on string theory has every incentive to keep building on that line of research. They have no competitive advantage switching to a new line. The specifics about how much expertise translate how far is beyond me, but it seems that nearby better ideas would have been found given the resources poured into this.
This is exactly The Innovator’s Dilemma. It’s even worse in academia than industry because the whole sector is so insular. I look forward to the reinvention of higher education and theoretical research…
Otoh: very possible their work produced spin-offs that were useful in other fields (math advances, thought experiments, practical research tools & equipment, people in other fields having a look at their work from a different angle, etc)
AND having bright people chew on a subject for decades & come up (mostly) empty, is a good hint there's nothing there. 'Unknown' vs. 'we've tried hard & not found much' is a useful result by itself. Think of it as reducing the search space.
Personally I know many people who abandoned Physics to reinvent themselves as data scientists. Good for them that they were able to re-purpose their training; that doesn’t mean physics training is the best way to become a data scientist. My bias is that quantitative social science is a better route, although some of what it gains from focusing on people is often lost through less rigorous mathematics and software development requirements.
The opportunity cost of those individuals educating exceptionally intelligent students to specialize in this particular blind alley is even greater.
The fact is there just aren't that many people out there interested in string theory for you to get up in arms about. People don't complain nearly as much about mathematicians, who spend their time on much less practical areas of endeavor.
Frankly, the fact that some people get to make their living working on marginally-productive things that they like makes me feel a bit warm and fuzzy inside, in a way not unlike the experience I get giving my cat cat food and a place to sleep.
I went back for another degree a few years ago and from my perspective there's a "here's what the old people think" line drawn in conversations the old people aren't invited to. I don't know if a reinvention is in the cards but there are a lot of folks on their way up who don't seem to be particularly impressed with the current state of affairs.
"string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard"
It does a good job talking about the collateral damage to the public. An entire generation read Michio Kaku and Brian Greene and many others and believed this was all legit when it seems like it's been a dud for a LONG time. If you couple that with the reproducibility crisis, you have a public that is far more skeptical of what scientists say now than in years prior.
Of course, "follow the science" is more commonly interpreted as the scientific community consensus ~= the truth. So having a generation of physics that essentially ended up as "never mind" doesn't instill a lot of public faith that scientists know what they're talking about in general.
Do you believe this to be a high quality style of thinking, if you consider it from a disconnected, disinterested 3rd person perspective?
And, honestly, can you blame them? Nerdy places such as HN have a fascination of fundamental science that is nearly religious in some aspects - not in a sense of dogmaticism, but in a sense that pursuit of abstract knowledge is seen as noble and desirable in and of itself, with any justifications distinctly secondary. But from the perspective of your average person on the street, today, scientists are those people who ask for a lot of money, and use it to build those giant things that run some incomprehensible experiments which occasionally translate to some equally incomprehensible headlines in the news. And that person can think of many ways in which said money could be used to make their lives better instead.
Now, you can reasonably argue that long term, benefits are there regardless, even if they are not obvious, and thus the people actually in charge of allocation resources should disregard such simplistic takes and focus on that long term. But, either way, one cannot be surprised at the discontent.
Someone commented in the Economist a few years back that the last subatomic particle to have commercial applications was the neutron.
We all know about how the web — which turned out to have a few commercial applications — was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in order to facilitate better collaboration and data sharing among researchers.
There's the advances in high-performance computing and data processing, medical imaging innovations like PET scans, fundamental tech for touchscreens, and so on.
And don't get me started on the motivational and inspirational value of science and how it encourages people to pursue engineering and other technical endeavors. Hard to measure, sure, but it's damn important. There's a reason the moon landing was the most watched event in the history of television.
It's difficult to overstate these indirect impacts.
My understanding was that a unique virtue of string theory was that (for better or worse) it was playing out with pencils and paper, and not demanding billion dollar funding projects for particle colliders or other such infrastructure and thus was relatively harmless as far as competition for resources is concerned.
Or at least that's Woit's point.
Yours sounds like an argument that it's not making good or testable predictions, certainly an indictment but not (so far as I can tell) responsive to my Q.
If the reason is that the theory is making experimental predictions that can be tested more cheaply (as in a number of areas in condensed matter physics, where you can do tabletop experiments to test things), that's good.
If the reason is that the theory makes no predictions that are testable at all by any experiments that are doable now or in the foreseeable future, as with string theory, that's bad.
At present, now that the LHC has failed to show any of the evidence for supersymmetry that string theorists were confidently predicting it would show, string theorists appear to be pushing for the next more energetic collider, confidently predicting that it will show evidence of supersymmetry.
I was hoping for something along the lines of "Yeah, check out chapter 4 of Peter Woit's book where he gets into the crazy things he witnessed at his campus during the 2010s" or something like that.
I guess I'll just try Peter Woit's book and peruse his blog a bit to see what he means.
Um, you specifically gave "not demanding billion dollar funding projects" as an advantage of string theory. So pointing out that string theory is in fact demanding such projects is exactly to the point. And it's not just right now; as my comment should have made clear, string theorists were promoting the LHC for the same reasons they are now promoting the next collider.
I found it a really useful overview of what led people to the current state of physics.
Anyway that's awful and bad analogy is something I wonder about when i look at some modern physics...and math actually but i'm just some dumb guy. Maybe Grothendieck's ideas will save us, maybe we need another, either way it sure feels like we are in a dead zone intellecually and has for about 15-20 years to me.
All that's to say, I loved this blog and it had a bigger influence on me and my mind than about 90% of the classes I paid a bunch of money for which I now think were a waste of time, capital, intellectual effort, and overall energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit#Criticism_of_string...
I have the opinion that the FCC is the example of such bias: we don't really know what to look for, but we (the scientific community) have to survive so we'll build a political argument to keep getting funds.
I think the proposal was during a severe heatwave, and I also though "where is the social goal in that science? What does it will bring to society? Do we really need to know that far those things?". I think it's at this moment that I started loosing motivation too.
The amusing thing for me* is this is just coffee budgets for pen-and-paper theorists. What they say about academic disputes: the lower the stakes, the more intense the politics.
*(Observing from a safe distance!)
Unfortunately not. From his website [0], the extent of the grant funding involved is much more than just coffee budget:
> The Black Hole Initiative that features this on its website: $16 million from the Templeton Foundation, $3.6 million from the Moore Foundation. > The Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography: $8 million from the Simons Foundation. > NSF Grant: $400,000 from the NSF. > DOE Grant: $3.5 million from the DOE.
This kind of money could fund a whole lot of other theory. Hell, it even could fund a lot of experiments (albeit not in high energy physics).
Investments in quantum computing research are orders of magnitude larger, even in Europe alone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Flagship
Edit: Removed snark, add reference.
Also, note that your first three examples aren't public money, rather private philanthropy. No one can speak against where Jim Simons gifts his billions (and in point of fact Simons is an expert in quantum field theory himself—no one's scammed him, if he's decided string theorists are worth donating to. He reads and understands the papers they write).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician)
- "(albeit not in high energy physics)"
It's a fair anchoring point, isn't it? It's the theory and experiment side of the same field. We're just spending 0.01% of the experimental budget on some (possibly wrong and possibly dead-end) theory ideas, and the coffee that produced them.
> It takes a non-trivial amount of time and effort to absorb new mathematical ideas and by so dominating the mathematical end of particle theory for twenty years, string theory has monopolized the time of the mathematically sophisticated members of the community. It has also quite literally driven out of the field a lot of people who were interested in other sorts of ideas about how to apply mathematics to questions in particle theory.
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=119&cpage=2...
edit: How bonkers is it that another two decades have been pissed away on this?
Honestly, I get the impression that what Woit is really upset about is that people like his idol Witten didn't switch to work on his ideas, because only the genius of "towering intellects" like Witten's could solve this very hard problem. 0
A global anything-goes-if-you're-qualified frontiers research program would cost a few hundred million dollars. The odds of it finding some game changers are likely pretty good.
Instead we're getting a $17bn revamp of the LHC to turn it into a "Higgs factory".
For example, string theory funded by the NSF that "steals" money from laser research is plausibly only found in the "elementary particle physics - theory" program, which is part of the Physics division, which is part of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate.
You can find all NFS awards in the physics division, so about one step above where string theory could plausibly show up here: https://tableau.external.nsf.gov/views/NSFbyNumbers/Details?...
sadly the page is pretty shit so the filter selection is probably reset, and they don't label by division program so you'll have to mouse over each one and categorise yourself. As a guide to how much work it is, there was 350 awards in the physics division and about 30 of those in the theory program.
It’s not just coffee and blackboards and hoarded Japanese chalk: the goalpost slalom around supersymmetry drives discussions about what colliders to build and how to operate them [1]. Before scalar field excitation at 125 GeV it was predicted by many that the power and luminosity of that run would show weak bosonic superpartners in the first run. With Higgs at 125 GeV it gets really tortured as an argument.
This is also the subtext with the really aggressive public branding of “dark matter”, when it should really be called something like “large scale apparent gravitational anomaly” or some dry thing like that, it’s not an MCU franchise: positing a bunch of mass that has none of the other properties of matter is a perfectly fine line of inquiry, but the verbal capitalization of Matter is because weakly-interacting massive particles are another way to argue that maybe, just maybe maybe, this is indirect evidence for supersymmetry.
But most of all the damage is in attacking the definition of science: if you envelope-math metastable vacua consistent with compactified Calabai-Yau dimensions at (last I checked) order of 10^250 what you’re left with is “it’s strong anthropic, there’s no explanation”, which is exactly where Susskind and that lot have ended up.
It’s time for these people to retire.
What a rabbit hole this turned out to be...
That was an enjoyable 30 minutes. Thank you.
and For the audience at home: https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=hoarded+Japanese+chalk&ia=we...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723202 ("Mathematicians Are Hoarding a Type of Japanese Chalk", 109 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19718287 ("Mathematicians are hoarding a type of Japanese chalk (2015)", 123 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20237878 ("The Chalk Market: Where Mathematicians Go to Get the Good Stuf", 118 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770017 ("Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business", 110 comments)
All the comments here attributing Japan's ability to have a chalk factory to basically Orientalist culture reasons are disappointing.
(In most of the reasons Japan and America are different here, America is the weird place, not Japan.)
See the category "Euclidean Twistor Unification" in his blog:
Woit himself is working (pretty casually to my eyes) on some mathematical reformulations of the Standard Model. He's not advocating aggressively for these ideas, and I'm pretty sure if you asked him, he'd say there's no evidence that any one idea should dominate the research landscape the way string theory did. None of what exists out there is particularly compelling. (This is one of the reasons people worked so much on strings. It's the best of a bad lot.)
String theory solve no new problem.
There were hypes on what string theory can do. When they were proven wrong, they just come up another unverifiable shit and start the hype again.
Presenting them as the only one truth, however, is a problem.
If on the other hand you say that abstract structure is a fundamental building block of the universe and, say, unifies the standard model with gravity etc but actually your theory isn't explaining anything observable I would say that isn't theoretical physics[2] but is just "making shit up".
So far string theory has failed to produce any sort of verifiable prediction[3], so I just don't see how it's physics (you could say "yet" perhaps).
I enjoyed the video "String Theory Lied to Us and Now Science Communication is Hard"[4] by Angela Collier, who is a computational astrophysicist[5], because it gives a sense for how these things impact other physicists and the popular perception of science.
[1] And Ed Witten for example is without doubt a very impressive mathematician - he won the Fields medal.
[2] Which is the science of matter, energy, space, time etc all the stuff which makes up the natural world.
[3] In particular, the one that has been tried is supersymmetry and the LHC, as I understand it as a non-physicist, brought about an experimental result that called supersymmetric extensions of the standard model into serious doubt https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3068
[4] https://youtu.be/kya_LXa_y1E?si=FTC0sbs2ubxGyydZ
[5] https://jila.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/group-files/20...
The problem is, for 40 years theoretical particle physics was working only on this one single weird unverifiable idea. Pretty much all other ideas were brushed aside.
People's egos, careers, reputations and funding are dependent on keeping up the façade, so you can't just reboot and start over. You have to keep paying lip service to the emperor with no clothes. Theoretical physics used to be the "king of sciences", but now it more and more appears as a dead end, intellectually and career-wise, for the next generation of physicists.
The core hypothesis of string theory is unfalsifiable, at least if we find another theory at the same scale that is then verified by experiments.
If it turns out that there is nothing significant "beneath" the Standard Model (ie that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics can be unified with only minor extensions), then string theory may remain unfalsifiable forever.
Reflections and Impressionistic Portrait at the Conference Frontiers Beyond the Standard Model, M. Shifman, FTPI, Oct. 2012
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.0004v1.pdf
It points to string theory having no predictive capabilities due to multiple-universe issues, we just happened to have evolved in a universe where the (randomly selected) parameters allow for element formation and life:
> "Thus, there is no point in trying to understand the world order: the mass hierarchies, the smallness of the cosmological constant, the absence of the fourth generation, you name it. Nor such attempts will be meaningful in the future. All this is an environmental coincidence. Just take it as is and live happily ever after. This is nothing else than the anthropic principle in its extreme realization, with a religious (or philosophical, if you put it milder) flavor."
> "Indeed, even if this is true, we will never know. All “extra” universes are causally disconnected from our, so there is no physical way to confirm their existence of non-existence in experiment. So, this part of the landscape paradigm is the act of belief in today’s string theory, not supported by any evidence, and not to be supported by evidence in the future."
> So first of all, correct, the beautiful ideas came out of string theory. But that was not the original promise of string theory. The original promise was to describe the physics of this universe, unify all forces of nature, the three forces, electromagnetic, strong and weak described by the standard model and quantum theory of gravity. This has not happened. And now we hear that actually was not such a big deal. It's actually such a big thing. We've learned so much more.
> It's like, you know, I tried to think of a good analogy. It's like, remember Moses? He took Israelites out of Egypt. Mm hmm. And he told them that he will lead them to the promised land. Yes. So imagine Moses after 40 years of wandering in the desert, you would say, you know, guys, you know, this idea of a promised land is not such a big thing. Look how much we've learned. We've learned about the desert. We've learned so much about the sand.
> [Interviewer: That's a great analogy.]
> Who cares about the promised land? What do you think would people say to him? And yet here we are. This is called, by the way, you mentioned this expression, moving the goalposts. This is not moving goalposts. This is going to a different stadium. It's starting to play a different game. Like you used to play soccer at one stadium. Then you go to another stadium. You start playing baseball and you say, no, we are playing soccer. We're still playing soccer. Yes, yes, yes. Stating that your original goal is not meaningful.
> It did not work out. It did not work out. How about just starting with that? It did not work out unequivocally, not by saying the next 10 years [it will].
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_oPMcvHbAc
PS: It's probably one of the best podcasts I've ever watched. It made me realize the obvious thing: that scientists are also psychological humans, each of who has subjective personal preferences, even if they don't realize or admit them. Case study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_oPMcvHbAc&t=8712
I am pretty sure that all these people simply kept thinking that string theory was the most promising way to understand quantum gravity and even (to some extent) 'just' quantum field theory.
So why do people decide to trust the opinions of Peter Woit over those of, say, Edward Witten?
Witten has given quite a lot of interviews over the years, but his more mainstream views are unlikely to make it to the front page.
But no matter the actual reason, I think anyone with a post-graduate science education can agree that it's a pretty big howler to call string theory an A+++ physical theory, when it so far hasn't predicted a single thing. That's a clear sign that the people talking are engaged in empty PR, not in informing the public in any meaningful way.
First, I was explicitly talking about the handful of brilliant people who literally no longer have to apply to grants, or, if they do so, they are all but guaranteed to get funding for whatever topic they want to work on.
And in your second paragraph you repeat the usual talking point. But why do you think it did not convince those people?
Historically, it is not unusual for intellectual wrong turns to persist for decades or centuries. On the flip side, brilliant insights can also be abandoned too early.
The problem here is that data has dried up and cannot guide us. Some future tech will open up new data and then progress will resume. Without data, physics becomes theology.
__________________________________________ Feynman's talk "Seeking New Laws" excerpt: "But the age that we live in is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature. And that day will never come again. I don’t mean we’re finished. I mean, we’re right in the process of making such discoveries. It’s very exciting and marvelous, but this excitement will have to go.
Of course, in the future there will be other interests. There will be interests on the connection of one level of phenomena to another, phenomena in biology and so on, all kinds of things. Or if you’re talking about explorations, exploring planets and other things. But there will not still be the same thing as we’re doing now. It will be just different interests.
Another thing that will happen is that if all is known– ultimately, if it turns out all is known, it gets very dull– the biggest philosophy and the careful attention to all these things that I’ve been talking about will have gradually disappeared. The philosophers, who are always on the outside, making stupid remarks, will be able to close in. Because we can’t push them away by saying, well, if you were right, you’d be able to guess all the rest of the laws. Because when they’re all there, they’ll have an explanation for it.
For instance, there are always explanations as to why the world is three dimensional. Well, there’s only one world. And it’s hard to tell if that explanation is right or not. So if everything were known, there will be some explanation about why those are the right laws.
But that explanation will be in a frame that we can’t criticize by arguing that that type of reasoning will not permit us to go further. So there will be a degeneration of ideas, just like the degeneration that great explorers feel occurs when tourists begin moving in on their territory."
As I understand it, they have stopped working on a string theory of quantum gravity or theory of everything, and instead shifted to trying to apply string theory to other areas such as cosmology. Which, frankly, looks to me a lot like researchers whose research didn't pan out trying to salvage their research rather than admit that decades of work didn't pan out.
It should also be pointed out that string theory has had a fairly hefty juggernaut of popular science PR behind it. That means being honest about your failures--especially towards a popular press, to whom your allies have been touting that you are the most important discoveries ever made--is going to invite a popular press backlash, up to and including accusations of fraud.
But I just don't think he's serious enough about it, and there is the risk that - yes - superstring has dominated the scene for 40 years, yet the "chief defender of objectivity" for half that time has been Woit, who is too elitist to host any blue-skies open debates on short-cuts, anomalies and epicycles in the standard model (yes, its full of them), and how to simplify the mathematical framework to allow physical intuition to grasp new physical approaches. Instead, Woit seems - as a math instructor - to assume the standard model is 100% kosher (apart maybe from chiral electroweak symmetry breaking details). That's precisely where superstring goes wrong. If the correct theory is simply a logical superset which includes the standard model, then progress and unification would have been rapidly achieved 40 years ago. It's clearly more subtle than existing efforts have assumed. It's time to go back to basics and question everything.
Part of what derailed string theory was actually an event in experimental particle physics - the discovery of the Higgs boson without any accompanying particles. Up until that point, theoretical physics had built up a certain paradigm for how to think about physics beyond the standard model. The nongravitational interactions would be unified in a "grand unified theory", and (slightly broken) supersymmetry would protect the Higgs boson mass from being massively increased by virtual particles. This paradigm is logically independent of string theory, but it was integrated into how string theorists think about reality, and in particular how "string phenomenologists" (the kind of people trying to identify which Calabi-Yau provides the shape of the extra dimensions) approach the task of applying string theory to reality.
The experimental evidence now tells us that this paradigm is almost certainly wrong. But there is no consensus on what should replace it, and there is very little attempt to identify new paradigms that would naturally find a home in string theory. String phenomenologists are still mostly looking at supersymmetric grand unification, and the string theory elders are pursuing topics in quantum gravity which are unlikely to yield empirical payoffs any time soon.
This comment section indicates that skeptics of string theory have won the battle for Internet public opinion. But smart money should bet on a revival of string theory once fruitful new paradigms are found.
So, when you come up to him as a fellow theoretical physicist and criticize his "platonic" stance his reply would be - if he is bothered at all to answer: "Ah, so the thing you are working on, did you try ... gives essentially an elegant mathematical solution to your theoretical problem that you were trying to solve for months."
Of course this is embedded in an institutional failing - namely funding throughout the 50 years.
But as Planck - who found himself reluctantly in the middle of a turning point - remarked on how insurmountable institutions and the persons associated with it can become: Science progresses funeral by funeral.
On this note: Ed Witten's dad a theoretical physicist himself, still lives at the ripe age of 102.
Communicating science to the general public on public forums is extremely important, and probably should be considered a job requirement for all scientists. Several reasons:
1. Obviously it may affect how the public perceives science and its social and economic value, and thus how we vote, which can affect public funding for basic research necessary for advancing science.
2. More importantly, the antidote to chaos is reason and knowledge. We live in an era of increasing emotionalism, irrationality, and a flood of sophisticated disinformation strategically exploiting and amplifying those two to sew general chaos. Science communication on public forums gives the public an alternate perspective to consider. Without that alternative perspective, the battle is already lost.
These things are necessary even if it requires suffering being flooded with all sorts of random stupidity.
--- Carlo Rubbia
Started my Ph.D. in particle physics about the same year as the "first superstring revolution". Left the field post-PhD not due to any great foresight, but due to boredom.
With the benefit of hindsight, I was lucky to have done so. As it turned out I was on the tail end of the "Golden Age" of particle physics.
Woit is spot on. Find it remarkable that "string theory" and its various mutations still dominates the field after 4 decades of not being able to make testable predictions.
One almost feels sorry for the current generation of "the best and the brightest" theorists who have devoted most, if not all, of their careers to supersymmetry and string theory. Their predecessors built the Standard Model [SM], whereas their work has not lead to anything.
There are still open questions in the SM: neutrino mass, CP violation [a parametrization], QCD confinement [a Millennium Prize awaits], nature of the Higgs boson phase transition, why three generations, etc.
Someone one asked me, surprised, why I would leave the field that "investigates the fundament forces of nature".
My reply, "It reads better than it lives."
Maybe I'm too dumb to get it but I kind of suspect the theory is just wrong.
I try to think like, It's not that I think I know better. I know I don't have the facts. But I do have the ability to reason, and so you can explain a thing to me in a way that holds water, or fail to.
The view is that progress isn't because the established old guard changes opinion, it's because the next generation has better values.
More soberly, we see this in other aspects of the economy. The famous China Shock study [2] looked at the effects from ramping up trade with China on rural factory towns in the US.
The finding is dark: People who lost their living from "economic displacement" didn't move to a new city: they simply settled into their misery. However, the research shows their children do move to greener pastures.
Last one: home technology and feminism [3]. In the first half of the 20th century, many technologies drastically lessened the household workload - refrigerator, indoor plumbing, washing machine, etc.
The biggest effect was on the 2nd generation of women after WW2 - the women's children saw that they had more time, and started working en masse rather than aspiring to being homemakers.