Evidence that the universe is made of strings has been elusive for 30 years | Hacker News Reader

Evidence that the universe is made of strings has been elusive for 30 years

smithsonianmag.com

53 pointsjonbaer17 comments

The author of this article is Brian Greene, who is the leading explainer of string theory to mass audiences. He has taken on the challenge of explaining a kind of physics that many see as unintuitive and messy, and this article is a kind of "checking in" on the health of string theory for Smithsonian readers. So cut him some slack about the title, and about the French horn analogy. The gist of it is "Did string theory math explode and leave a big mess instead of finding something experimentally verifiable?" and his answer is "No. Maybe the varying options for extra-spatial dimensions in string theory explains why we have this set of cosmological parameters and not some other set."

Which is basically just using the weak anthropic principle as a convenient excuse for a lack of verifiability.

Lee Smolin, the physicist who wrote "The Trouble with Physics", (http://leesmolin.com/writings/the-trouble-with-physics/) is the most notable critic of string theory. The basic problem with string theory is that it doesn't generate experimentally testable predictions, at least not at any energy level reachable. It may just be an mathematical exercise.

>That string theory unites general relativity and quantum mechanics is a profound success.

Hmm... I'm not a string theory guy but I was not aware that they'd done that in a meaningful way.

[edit] Googling I came across a quote from Peter Woit: "The sole argument generally given to justify this picture of the world is that perturbative string theories have a massless spin two mode and thus could provide an explanation of gravity, if one ever managed to find an underlying theory for which perturbative string theory is the perturbative expansion." Dunno if that's fair?

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

It would make more sense to me if the universe was built from precisely nothing. Thus everything around us would be merely abstract, but because we are part of it, we experience it as being real, or tangible.

The fact that multiple beings live in this abstraction is of course also an illusion, for we are all one.

Yeah, probably. My money's on it just being a mathematical pattern.

You could say this about any model of the universe that's computable. You don't seem to be making a claim that could possibly be useful, or I'm misunderstanding you.

No, my remark does not give any useful explanations. The main point is that if we start thinking about how our universe could come into existence from absolutely nothing, we could reach a model for it more quickly than by "just" matching theories to experimental outcomes.

Think bottom up, instead of top down.

The C string theory of everything: God called printf() with a string argument that wasn't null-terminated, and now we're just running on a buffer overflow until the universe segfaults and blinks out of existence.

It's pretty amazing to realize that everything you know is the result of accessing random leftovers in heavenly RAM, but that's what C string theory tells us.

There are alternate theories though http://xkcd.com/312/

Talk of a misleading title. This is not even the journalistic principle, which says if a question is posed in the headline, the answer is "no". The title question is "not even discussed" in the article. Which is ironic, considering the "Not Even Wrong" criticism of string theory and multiverses.

Its doubly bad in that its a historical survey containing no new results. I assumed based on the headline it was an editor trying to be "hilarious" when reporting a new paper claiming internal inconsistencies destroying the theory. The obvious analogy of fabric unraveling when strings break loose and all that. If, someday, string theory does "unravel" due to internal inconsistencies (IF!) then this would be a legendary headline for the paper, or for journalistic coverage of the paper.

Brain Greene - the author said this about the article:

"Hi Everyone, To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the key paper that launched string theory into the mainstream of physics, I've written personal retrospective, just published in Smithsonian Magazine, on this remarkable but challenging approach to unification. --BG PS: I didn't choose the title of the article, and don't consider it representative of the piece."

See https://www.facebook.com/BrianGreenePhysicist

i wanted to agree with you, and apparently the author, but reading the article left me thinking the title is pretty poetic

the title reminds me of a title of a poem by the russian poet osip mandelstam: sumerki svobody, may 1918(i); the word sumerki is vague in its definition and so can be understood and, as many have found intriguing and frustrating, translated as either sunset or sunrise, dawn or twilight, and the poem's terseness allows the reader to project their own preconceptions into the word, attempting to solidify its fluid nature to either find in the poem support or something to be angry about

this word 'unravels' has a similar fluid character, here's the goog run on it(ii) : verb

    1. undo (twisted, knitted, or woven threads).
    2. investigate and solve or explain (something complicated or puzzling)

undo or explain even the author of the piece seems to feel the titles fluidity:

    Should decades drift by without experimental support, 
    I imagine that string theory will be absorbed by other areas of science and mathematics, 
    and slowly shed a unique identity. 
    In the interim, vigorous research and a large dose of patience are surely warranted.

is this the twilight or the dawn of string theory? is it unraveling or unraveling?

and the author agrees: who knows?;

as others have noted this piece is more of a 'this is where we are and where we came from and where we're headed' so i think how you read the word unravel is largely based on your interest in the subject matter

(i) https://books.google.com/books?id=4O6F8BMhW6oC&pg=PA34&dq=%E...

(ii) https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

It seems that this article was published next year.

String theory is full of results like that.

(In case it wasn't obvious), the Smithsonian is primarily a print magazine. The magazine arrives at or near the start of the month, which means the articles are written and ready before the printing starts. When I was a subscriber I would sometimes get the magazine before the start of the month, and occasionally joke about time travel.

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