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Comment by qoez | Hacker News Reader

If they had that the hype could die. Luckily it cannot be tested so the hype will continue in perpetuity

I heard that there's so many variants of string theory. All theories that have interesting low-energy predictions have lost to standard theory (see: SUSY experiments at LHC). Now we're left with high-energy ones which may actually be wrong too but we can't test them yet.

Heh... as someone on the outside, I feel the need to ask:

Has it been rigorously shown that it can never be tested? Or is that your prediction?

They are getting close to making a testable prediction, any day now. Have been for the last 30 years. History is not always an indication of the future, but it is often a good sign.

But yes, not rigorous.

Test which version? Part of the problem is that string theory is a meta theory. There will always be ways to escape any negative experimental result.

String theory isn't a theory it's a family of related theories sharing some common mathematical tools.

People talk about this as though it's an attempt at deception, whereas two people notionally working in string theory could in fact be proposing highly incompatible models which would be conclusively ruled out (and a lot of them have been in so far as that can be done - i.e. experimentation has put tight bounds on their possible parameters).

> There will always be ways to escape any negative experimental result.

Yeah... except that hasn't been proven. That's just your belief, right?

I don't think anyone has proven that string theory can yield no testable predictions. I think if someone had, that'd be a big deal.

And I don't think we should pretend that an open problem is closed just because we don't like it.

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