String theory has never made a prediction that has come true and gets disproven each time we build a bigger particle accelerator and discover new particles. Like the theory can't even explain basic observations about particle physics and the universe. The String theorists just keep telling everyone that it will work out bro, trust us, give us more funding.
Like the only reason it hasen't been abandoned yet and is still weirdly popular is becuase of the perverse incentives in academics where it pays more to pursue this kind of groundbreaking nonsense than trying to advance the frontier of the established and boring Standard Model. And it's easy to be groundbreaking when you are just making shit up. Just think of the millions in research funding these charlatans have scammed from us. They have played us for absolute fools.
We need to round up all the String theorists and parade them through the streets with dunce caps, Cultural Revolution style. We need to do 70 hour struggle sessions against them until they pass out from exhaustion.
"Particles are actually tiny strings that wiggle" "There are 11 dimensions but you don't notice the extra ones cause their are too small" - Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
Dooing the :wojak-nooo: at the standard model everytime it makes an even more accurate prediction.
The math is pretty cool though. Like, its compelling how well all the weird math locks into place... based on the info we had at the time String Theory was being developed initially.
As you say, despite the math being compelling, it uh... doesn't seem to predict, reality, as we discovered more things.
But really, as accurate as the Standard Model has been, the sticky issue of integrating relativity into it, seems to imply we're missing something. So its very natural to look at the Standard model's inability to reconcile relativity, and assume we need to look at it from a different angle, and looking at it from an angle of 'math' seems like as decent idea as any.
I say this with a decade-old degree that focused more on chemistry, but P-chem does get pretty involved into quantum physics, so I'm at least theoretically familiar with the math.
But really, as accurate as the Standard Model has been, the sticky issue of integrating relativity into it, seems to imply we’re missing something.
As a non-scientist layperson who likes to follow science news, this particular problem has always been absolutely fascinating to me. The standard model is astonishingly accurate. General relativity is astonishingly accurate. But put them together and the results are incoherent nonsense.
Funny enough, this exact problem is what pushed me over the hump from being a wishy-washy liberal progressive into an actual socialist. I'm certain there's someone, somewhere, with the right intelligence and intuition to solve this problem. But they're probably toiling in some mind-numbing dead-end job because they never had the financial ability to attend a university and study physics. How many other incredibly challenging scientific problems could be solved if bright people could simply study what they're passionate about without having to worry about money?
doesn’t seem to predict, reality, as we discovered more things
What if it does predict reality but we live where the warp bleeds into it
This is an exaggeration, it was once a pretty enticing theory. But its been in trouble since the 1990s and dead in the water for 15 years or more.
The problem is the other theories we have arent much better. They're either clearly insufficient like LQG and it's successors, or overly dependent on the also rotten field of particle physics.
Sorry but as someone with a degree in physics this post and comments gave me a brain hemorrhage... Too much to even unpack.
Edit: Tackling just one of these points, "it's useless and doesn't help anybody"; this is exactly what people said about electricity and nuclear physics when those were first discovered. Now electronics are essential and ubiquitous, and nuclear power is a solution (among others) to climate change. Just because you can't imagine a use for something yet, doesn't mean it will never be useful. "What is the use of an infant?" etc.
both of your examples involve phenomena that was observed systematically before a theory was formed to describe it consistently. string theory is a neat math trick to make your divergences go away in your feynman diagrams.
Special Relativity (and by extension, General Relativity) is an example of a theory that was developed perfectly theoretically following Einstein's confusion over whether the speed of light was constant (as in Maxwell's Electromagnetism) or variable (as in Galilean Relativity). People had not systematically observed black holes and Lorentz transformations. So yes, a successful theoretical theory in physics can be developed mathematically. Deal with it.
Edit: other examples from mathematics are imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometry, which had no practical application for decades or centuries. Now they are used in engineering and relativistic physics respectively.
Defending string theory ain't it, Einstein's thought experiments were brilliant, but they were also based in a meaningful amount of engagement with the relevant physics that had already been discovered. String theory requires supersymmetry to not require 26 dimensions. 26 dimensional theory is not plausible for our universe. Supersymmetry is all but discredited in 2023. I certainly don't subscribe to it. You need supersymmetry to have a string theory in 10 dimensions that's possibly consistent with known physics, and you also need for it Witten's M-theory. You need to be living in a AntiDeSitter universe to have an AdS/CFT correspondence. Modern theoretical fundamental physics does not fucking work, period. Don't just say deal with it, like a child.
Also, not a great take here. Imaginary numbers were developed in Italy in application to solving the cubic equation in general in a very geometric manner. Important sure, but following from very tangible existing knowledge. Non-Euclidean geometry, similarly, was almost a natural development when you consider that Euclid's parallel postulate had been considering extremely suspect and out of place for centuries. These ideas came from the limitations of the pre-existing applied work. Don't mythicalize science just because no one actually teaches the history of physics and mathematics.
Einstein’s thought experiments were brilliant, but they were also based in a meaningful amount of engagement with the relevant physics that had already been discovered
You don't understand the origins of String Theory as well as you think you do if you seriously believe that it was not based on a meaningful amount of engagement with the relevant physics that had already been discovered.
The origins of string theory were a relatively contemporary reexploration of the Kaluza-Klein combination of the relativistic metric with hidden dimensions and electromagnetic theory. But the basic jumping off point of string theory from a QFT can be described as specifically introducing an extra label parameter in addition to the proper time in the formulation that raises time to operator status (as opposed to the more common methods of QFT that lower spatial dimensions to the level of time). An extra dimension for the integrals in your Feynman diagrams that make the infinities a lot easier to tame that pop as divergences in the "1D" theory (Feynman diagram lines in QFT vs Feynman diagram pants in string theories). I don't think that's a particularly good motivating point to develop a theory, and I would go so far as to say it's crass to compare that to Einstein's thought experiments in such a misleading way. Consider that perhaps the landscape of valid string theories that don't describe our universe is so vast because as far as good ideas for guiding a new theory goes, it turns out that that's not such a usefully constraining one. String theory is stupid because there does not exist any meaningful amount of evidence in the known quantum gravity regime that we can access, and nothing that it predicts that turns out to be very useful. Are you going to try to argue to me that I should still think supersymmetry is plausible???
Kinda sorta, but you build theories on experimental mismatches (I.e. damn, that mercury conducts very well at low temperatures, how come?) and hope they predict something testable (like other weird fermions pairings/boson condensates).
string theory hasn’t yet hit its predictions (or did it?). On the other hand, from outside pov, doing weird math on something like that or predicting lasers would look kinda similar to string theory (damn so those nerds doing math on matter states they couldn’t even make) so :shrug-outta-hecks:
string theory hasn’t yet hit its predictions (or did it?)
It's not that string theory has failed in its predictions; there are no predictions because the theory isn't formulated yet. So many people misunderstand this. Give them a chance to actually discover the equations for the theory before you make comments about its predictions. We don't know what its predictions are yet.
I'll be honest, I don't really know what you mean. What is there to grift? PhD students studying string theory get paid starvation wages.
popular physics communication for the past 30 years have consisted of an absolutely ridiculous, quasi-religious hype train around string theory. if it were a good theory, it wouldn't take this long to formulate the equation based on the information that has been had. it's just not a good theory, and physicists aren't thinking particularly dialectically these days.
Give them a chance to actually discover the equations for the theory before you make comments about its predictions. We don’t know what its predictions are yet.
this is like suggesting that it took einstein 10 years to go from sr to gr because it was just too dang hard to get the coefficients right. string theorists can't find a string theory in the landscape that represents our universe because the core idea is so tautologically limited as to be rendered practically useless. it's a math trick, and little more.
string theorists can’t find a string theory in the landscape that represents our universe because the core idea is so tautologically limited as to be rendered practically useless
Very arrogant to say this. The physics that Einstein had to deal with was a lot easier. The physics that Newton before him had to deal with was easier still. Things are getting harder to harder in all areas of science and that is what gives the impression of stagnation. String research may or may not give a viable theory. We won't know until either it does, or something else takes its place. Either way, it and other models have to be researched.
or perhaps academia under capitalism is increasingly incapable of organizing itself productively towards meaningful discovery. i'm not saying no one should research it, but it is extremely overhyped, has done damage to the communication of science in general, and it has failed to ever deliver on any of the promises of its theoretical program. it's not arrogant to demand that the most communicated theory of physics in the modern age, that has been given unlimited good press by science communicators, actually be capable of being a theory of our universe and not a neat tool for describing weird atomic systems.
the most communicated theory of physics in the modern age, that has been given unlimited good press by science communicators
Okay so not actually the fault of string theorists then, but a capitalist media around science communication wherein science communicators exacerbate results for profit. Thanks for acknowledging that. But okay, keep blaming poor PhD students trying to do what they love. Fuck them, I guess.
Are you the poor PhD student, am I picking on your choice of field that's making you be this dense about it?
Lol no I left academia because of the debt and starvation wages. I'm not even a 'believer' in string theory, so to speak. I'm agnostic. As I said earlier, it may or may not yield results, but neither you nor I know either way.
you're trapped in the idealism pit comrade, there's nothing of value to being able to do string theory unless you're using to it to study black holes or atomic structures.
The fault of the actual string theorists that became those science communicators? Yes. Those ones
The fault of the actual string theorists that became those science communicators? Yes. Those ones
Mhm, all two of them.
yeah, just most of the major physics communicators of the last 30 years other than like Neil Degrasse Tyson. the brian greene's and michio kaku's broke physics communication to the public, and it's been fucked since.
I love that I said "all two of them" and then you literally named only two lmfao
they were also doing irreparable damage to public understanding of the field, we both understand there were more string theory apologists than those, sorry you didn't get a researched list of all the string theorists that have said dumb shit about their theory in public. Ed Witten counts for this, any time one of these numbnuts gives an interview it counts. james sylvester gates counts. any string theorist with a public audience has used it to advance their own bullshit
If you're so concerned about public damage in science your efforts are wasted on Ed fucking Witten (nobody knows who he is outside a niche circle) compared to say Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos whose tech bro rocket man AI antics are about a trillion times more damaging.
I'm not really concerned about it, but i also didn't roll into this post calling people essentially illiterates. of course billionaire tech psychos are a trillion times more damaging. i'm just not going to call people illiterates for agreeing that string theory is silly. i'll defend them because it is silly, it's not even wrong.
similarly I'm not convinced there is any evidence whatsoever for multiverse theory
There's actually been some very loose evidence against it iirc. Also even if Everett-Wheeler is correct there are interpretations of it that aren't "literally all probabilities are physically separate universes that really exist."
Physicists really should get together and hash out exactly what a "measurement" means materially. This isn't a joke, it's an open problem and worth funding, and they should do that instead of conceding the ground to philosophers. Nothing against philosophers, they just aren't doing physics is all.
When particles interact the super position becomes a position. Things are defined by each other. No need for deeper philosophy or agreement.
It's just about why wave functions are observed to collapse, there's nothing in the schrodingers equations that say there is a way to collapse (because it would imply the loss of information which is strictly forbidden from what we currently understanding) - it's also about why wave function collapse is observed to happen faster than light which should also be forbidden. The exact meaning of measurment and how we can know things about particles is great for epistemologists though! Like I said there's no reason to concede the ground to only philosophers, physicists should also figure out measurment too.
I mean, for the most part particle accelerators really simplify things. They take tiny little bits and smash them together. They look at the noise it makes and figure out what could have happened to cause it. Like if it splits it two it'd make a twang instead fo a pop. Just they have to build giant super sensitive tools to figure it out.
The problem is that when stuff is that small it everything is kinda the same. Light, sound, electricity. It doesn't make intuitive sense, but you know how you can get static on your hands and pick up fuzz? Picture that but on the scale of atoms to other atoms. So you just have to measure really carefully which direction things go and you can kinda figure out what they are made of.
Also, we just handed out a Nobel prize nomination for Quantum non locality. Which is absolutely brian shattering. The idea there being we don't actually know how anything works, or simulation theory is real but the simulation is being run on atoms in the universe so in effect it doesn't matter that it is real. Neither of those actually answer any question, and only make things only more confusing but the math we did seems to indicate that is the case.
Thanks
spoiler
Just a terrible joke about simulation theory, which seems like an even bigger waste of time than string theory to me.
oh yeah simulation theory isn't even smart enough to be wrong it's dipshit. The sound of bashing rocks together is a more cogent theory of the universe than simulation theory
No look, the More Law says there'll be More transistors, so we live in the Matrix.
Capeesh?
takes huge bong rip
The ancient aliens made big computers out of dark matter and we're just numbers on a screen to them, dude
I have a complaint. Who ever is simulating reality is lame as fuck
no reality is pretty communist. I just mean how come there aren't dragons and quests and shit.
I would like to donate my fervor to your cause. I'm in.
The overwhelming majority of theoretical physics has nothing to do with string theory, or even high energy physics. There's a lot more physicists working on "fucking magnets, how do they work?" than on string theory tbh.
I see other shit like people saying the universe is donut shaped or… idk time moves backwards
No serious scientist says that.
In order to start understanding physics, the first thing is to find reliable sources. Textbooks are the best way to go, but if you're just trying to understand it on a casual level, PBS Space Time is BY FAR the best thing to watch. The people running it are serious professional physicists and awesome communicators covering fascinating topics:
https://www.youtube.com/@pbsspacetime/playlists?view=1&sort=dd&shelf_id=0
To get an understanding of it that doesn't rely on analogy and metaphor you have to delve into the math, there's no way around it.
If you want the typical undergrad courses, Leonard Susskind has videos of his classes up on youtube. Don't worry that they're 10-15 years old, the basic math hasn't changed. The video quality does improve as they go though.
If you want a more self-directed approach, Roger Penrose's book The Road to Reality is a good resource and provides more of a roadmap. Also if you want to see Jordan Peterson utterly embarrass himself, watch his interview of Penrose.
road to reality is great but not for the faint of heart. Took me 9 months to get through it and I did maybe 25% or the excercises and was familiar with most of the introductory math.
I'd recommend brushing up your calculus to 1st year university before diving in.
If you have a few months to spare:
Classical Mechanics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtOGurrUPmQ&list=PLyQSN7X0ro203puVhQsmCj9qhlFQ-As8e&index=2
Electricity and Magnetism - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1-SibwIPM4&list=PLyQSN7X0ro2314mKyUiOILaOC2hk6Pc3j&index=2
Wave Mechanics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuX_UExHa0M&list=PLyQSN7X0ro22WeXM2QCKJm2NP_xHpGV89&index=2
Quantum Physics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ3bPUKo5zc&list=PLyQSN7X0ro21XsVfRHhiWGEEJigdjpF3s + https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI13S04w8dM&list=PLyQSN7X0ro21y1VjcdTi5jbpH26O-Tk68
That is absolutely as far as you can go without getting into hardcore maths.
To a degree, it is all made up. Essentially, there are observations that we don't have an explanation for and it's up to theoretical physicists to try to come up with an explanation that fits that data. Experimental physicist than try to come up with ways that they can test this theory and try to disprove it or provide more evidence for it.
That exposed to pop sciency side, cause you can speculate with abandon. massive amount of it is doing like solid state electromagnetic properties, weird quasiparticles, plasma states, low temperature shenanigans, super conductivity, negative light speed meta materials and so on
Theory: it's infinity no matter how deep or broad we look. If we zoom out of our visible universe far enough, we'll see a multiverse, and a multi-multiverse, and then an unrecognizable layer of something that opens an entire new field of science and thought. If we zoom into subatomic particles far enough, we'll find more universes, more signs of sentience in forms we might miss at first or second glance, and eventually more universes.
We're simply in the middle if everything.
But everything else is also in the middle of everything. Our bodies are made of a googleplex of universes, and each of those universes are made of a googleplex to the power of a googleplex worth of universe.
We're fractals, at least in a poetic best-human-analogy-available kind of way.
Everything is buried in infinite layers of everything, and we're just in one unremarkable part of that infinity.
... or yeah maybe the Mormons are onto something, I dunno.
TO CLARIFY I don't think a dime of funding or effort or labor should go into verifying this quackery. It doesn't matter if we're in the 3D equivalent of Flatland or in the Matrix, not for now, because our speck of a speck of a speck of a speck of a speck of a speck of a speck of a of a speck of a of a speck of a of a speck of a of a speck of a of a speck of a of a speck of a of a speck of a of a speck of a of a speck of a of a speck of a of a speck of a of a speck of a of a speck of a planet and society need the effort way more than this shit.
The ancient Greeks knew there was a smallest constituent piece of matter they called Atomos (indivisible) because things rot away in finite time instead of in a Zenos paradox style way of continuously rotting forever, similarily you can only divide things so many times from what we observe. As far as we can tell, the modern particle zoo is as fundamental as it gets. There was some scientific interest that photons mightve been composite particles instead of fundamental as neutrino-antineutrino pairs in the 30s and 60s.
i mean the ancient Greeks also had serious qualms about the possibility of irrational numbers, so that assumption seems more conceptually motivated than anything to me
lol it's even worse because their math was geometric and constructive, so they didn't even believe in negative numbers. Irrationality being something hard to accept for them kinda makes sense because it's hard to grasp from first principles that two lengths may be incommensurate no matter how many tiny units they lay end to end. I think they killed the guy that proved it because it kinda shattered their whole world view that all mathematics could be geometric.
Professor: "I don't have anything prepared because I spent the summer drinking rum and getting divorced. What would you like to accomplish in this class? Write down your ideas on these cards, and stick them somewhere on the corkboard using these push pins."
Grad student #1: [Writes 'revolutionize particle physics']
Grad student #2: [Writes 'create a model of spacetime that has enough dimensions that octonions become useful']
Grad student #3: [Writes 'secure research funding; details to follow']
Professor: "Great. Now, we just need to work out a way to connect them."
Grad student #4: "Duhhhh.....String?"
Professor: "Excuse me?"
Grad student #4: "Yeah. Get a ball of string, and run it from one push pin to the next. That's what I would do if I was in charge."
Grad student #1: "..."
Grad student #2: "..."
Grad student #3: "DUUUUDE."
Professor: "That's not what I meant."
Grad student #3: "YES IT FUCKING IS."We are actually just in the one timeline where we can't figure out String Theory. They figured it out in all the other timelines.
I thought that was widely known? They called it string THEORY to make it seem more credible.
It's cool, chill out. Don't be mad that it hasn't made anyone money yet. It's not like string theorist are taking money from other forms of particle physics.
I got lots of string, bits of it even in a few drawers in my kitchen, theorize that, nerds.
literally. ed witten is probably the smartest guy that's never done a single useful thing in physics.
