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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Can someone familiar with this area of academic research break down the trends he’s alluding to?

> He is critical of string theory on the grounds that it lacks testable predictions and is promoted with public money despite its failures so far,[1] and has authored both scientific papers and popular polemics on this topic. His writings claim that excessive media attention and funding of this one particular mainstream endeavour, which he considers speculative, risks undermining public faith in the freedom of scientific research. His moderated weblog on string theory and other topics is titled "Not Even Wrong", a derogatory term for scientifically useless arguments coined by Wolfgang Pauli.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit#Criticism_of_string...

I'm sure he is expressing a valid principle. By funding one area excessively, you can soon build up reams of scientific literature and interest, but this area needs have nothing or little to do with genuine scientific interest. Funding determines the interest. It's all about money unfortunately, even science.

I had the same feeling doing a phd two years ago. I think there is an unpopular opinion in science about the limits of what we can look at and what is required to achieve that. My conclusion was that the requirements are an economy of infinite growth and a society based on consumption. I did a parallel in my mind between the idea that "knowledge will always grow" and "economy will always grow". The limits are heavily related to social stability/agreement, and the tools we can have given the money(=social and environmental)/physical constraints.

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.

- "...and is promoted with public money despite its failures..."

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!)

> The amusing thing for me* is this is just coffee budgets for pen-and-paper theorists

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).

[0] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13770

The funding mentioned does not go directly to string theory research.

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.

In my view, those are very trivial amounts, for an entire subfield of research. I can think of individual federal grants no one on HN has heard of or cares about that are are larger than all of those put together, which are outright fraudulent—those are dime-a-dozen.

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.

In context, those are not shockingly high sums. The real problem seems to be what Woit summarizes in this 2004 (!!) comment on his blog:

> 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?

Well, its not true that people only worked on string theory during these last 20 years: notably Woit himself didn't. That there's loads of people in Brazil, Russia (or frankly any place except Princeton and IAS) trying weird approaches sums up to nothing in his telling.

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

The sad thing about that funding is how small it is. To billionaires and governments this is pocket change. Simons (personally, not the foundation) could spend ten times that to fund research into alternative models and not even notice.

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".

There's also a hidden component in these budget calculations: it is hard for people doing more "traditional" physics to find tenured positions, since many faculty hires went to string theory. So the salary that went to string theorists at the expense of other subareas of physics is quite a large hidden component. Crushed academic ambition is as real-world as it gets, since it involves years of extremely hard toil, wasted.

This is just false, string theory only competes in the theoretical physics sub-area; condensed matter, astrophysics, lasers, all that stuff have their own pots of money.

True or false, that's an assertion. Does anyone have any stats so that those outside the field (mostly taxpayers?) can assess all of this?

That research budgets are split by subjects many times before arriving to a node where "string theory" is a possible leaf is not a controversial statement, it is reflected in basically all budget documents you will find.

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.

Totally wild assertion. Most physics departments in the world have only one or two theorists and most of them are not in string theory. And most young physicists don't have the inclination to pursue string theory (even if they had the capability, which many do not).

Taking criticism of string theory hogging all the budget as "it's literally taking over the entirety of physics budgets" instead of "in the field of fundamental high-energy physics, there's no budget left over for alternative ideas to be developed to a similarly detailed level" is strawmanning.

Sure, it's just coffee, pens, paper, and 50,000,000,000€ particle accelerators! :)

That is not correct IMO. When a faculty is hired specifically in a given field the cost of the salary line is a few tens of million dollars.

Not a physicist, just a fan.

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.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.08642.pdf

> hoarded Japanese chalk

What a rabbit hole this turned out to be...

That was an enjoyable 30 minutes. Thank you.

Ah.

and For the audience at home: https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=hoarded+Japanese+chalk&ia=we...

And for the audience here on HN:

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)

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20237878 ("The Chalk Market: Where Mathematicians Go to Get the Good Stuf", 118 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.)

What is he in favor of? He seems to be criticizing both further experiments in string theory due to being not even wrong, and further experiments with the standard model, since it's either expensive or not getting anywhere. (I'm not a physicist and understand very little.)

> What is he in favor of?

See the category "Euclidean Twistor Unification" in his blog:

> https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?cat=31

It's not necessary to be in favor of anything, in order to criticize what's already out there. You can point out fatal flaws in an idea without needing to have an alternative in mind.

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.)

This paper (2012) seems to sum it up, though it assumes familiarity with trends in physics up to the origins of the standard model c. 1970:

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."

A short overview of the controversy "String Theory - A Controversy in Ten Dimensions", including the history and major players, is available at https://web.mit.edu/demoscience/StringTheory/index.html .

I think he’s talking about string theory.

TLDR:

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.

Personally, I think it is always good to have some people working on weird, unverifiable ideas.

Presenting them as the only one truth, however, is a problem.

Agree but very much with your caveat. If you study the mathematics of some sort of abstract structure you are doing research in pure maths. That is a worthy and completely legitimate pursuit and a ton of stuff started life as pure abstract mathematical research and ended up having real-world benefits way down the line that noone could have forseen.[1]

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...

> I think it is always good to have some people working on weird, unverifiable ideas.

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.

This overstates things. There are many, many, theoretical physicists who worked on regular old quantum field theory in both a fundamental and material science vein. I'd guess that if you got all the theoretical physicists in the world together, string theorists would make up less than 30%.

I hope you mean all the theoretical physicists working on the high energy theories of physics, because 30% is a sadly high figure even for that subfield. If 30% of all theorists would actually be of no use to any other physicists, that would be horrendous.

They were not even proven wrong.

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.

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