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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
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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.