I feel it’s time for another physics rant.
Somebody named Paul Sutter wrote an article in Ars Technica called “ Requiem for a string: Charting the rise and fall of a theory of everything. String theory was supposed to explain all of physics. What went wrong?”
I have some excerpts from the article that indicate the thrust of the problem with string theory.
“Like most revolutions, string theory had humble origins. It started in the 1960s as an attempt to understand the workings of the strong nuclear force, which had only recently been discovered.”
“A group of physicists took a mathematical technique developed (and later abandoned) by quantum godfather Werner Heisenberg and expanded it. In that expansion, they found the first strings—mathematical structures that repeated themselves in spacetime. Unfortunately, this proto-string theory made incorrect predictions about the nature of the strong force and also had a variety of troublesome artifacts (like the existence of tachyons, particles that only traveled faster than light). Once another theory was developed to explain the strong force—the one we use today, based on quarks and gluons—string theory faded from the scene.”
So, look at this. They borrow a technique from someone who was extremely smart. But it was a technique that was discarded because it doesn’t work. They ignore the fact that it produces crazy answers and they try to nurse it along by expanding it into more dimensions and other complications. Shades of Ptolemy’s epicycles!
“Unlike its quantum cousins, when it comes to string theory, we have no fundamental theory—we have only a set of approximation and perturbation methods. We’re not exactly sure if our approximations are good ones or if we’re way off the mark. We have perturbation techniques, but we’re not sure what we’re perturbing from. In other words, there’s no such thing as string theory, just approximations of what we hope string theory could be.”
Wow. It’s useless and wrong and yet it lives on decade after decade.
“To be clear, our inability to understand string theory isn’t limited by experiment. Even if we could build a super-duper-collider experiment that achieved the energies necessary to unlock quantum gravity, we still wouldn’t be able to test string theory because we have no string theory. We have no mathematical model that can make reliable predictions, only approximations that we hope accurately represent the true physics. We can test those approximations, I guess, but it won’t help us determine the inner workings of the true model.”
They’re paying these people! No one’s forcing them to pay them but they keep on paying them.
“The beams of the LHC began their first test operations in 2008 with two main science goals in mind: finding the elusive Higgs boson and finding evidence of supersymmetry. Four years later, the Higgs was found. Supersymmetry was not. It’s now 15 years later, and there are still no signs of supersymmetry.”
Can we get our money back?
“The dearth of evidence has slaughtered so many members of the supersymmetric family that the whole idea is on very shaky ground, with physicists beginning to have conferences with titles like “Beyond Supersymmetry” and “Oh My God, I Think I Wasted My Career.””
You sure have! And our billions in funding for this clap-trap!
“Most string theorists of the modern era don’t work on string theory directly but instead mostly on the AdS/CFT correspondence and its implications, hoping that continuing to probe that mathematical relationship will unlock some hidden insight into the workings of a theory of everything. I wish them luck.”
I don’t!
We really need to restrict the funds available to really smart people such that only the one really smartest guy in the field is allowed to waste his whole life doing this kind of mental masturbation. This is not physics. It has the same relation to physics as rhythmic gymnastics has to power-lifting. I mean should I get tenure for coming up with the new variant called string cheese theory? Does my background in mozzarella qualify me to expound my theory that the universe is really a large amorphous blob of Italian dairy product? I think not!
The rest of them should be forced to do this crap in their spare time if they want to when no one can see them and during working hours force them to do something that pays the electric bill. Maybe they can get an engineering degree on the side and design quantum screw drivers or something.
Look at this quote again:
“To be clear, our inability to understand string theory isn’t limited by experiment. Even if we could build a super-duper-collider experiment that achieved the energies necessary to unlock quantum gravity, we still wouldn’t be able to test string theory because we have no string theory. We have no mathematical model that can make reliable predictions, only approximations that we hope accurately represent the true physics. We can test those approximations, I guess, but it won’t help us determine the inner workings of the true model.”
These guys have been futzin’ around with this thing for fifty years and they still haven’t got a theory to justify their paychecks. In China they would have been taken out behind the building and shot and their families would be forced to pay for the bullets they were shot with. Here they should have been tarred and feathered and ridden out of Princeton on a rail.
Camera Girl has often told me off for being, in her words, “scholastic-asstic.” By this she means too smart for my own good or more precisely an educated dope. And often she is exactly right. I wouldn’t dare tell her about this outrage to common sense because she would hit me for trying to waste her time listening to this nonsense. She would equate it with ecclesiastical scholars attempting to calculate the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. That is if she had ever heard of that concept before, which I’m fairly certain she has not.
So instead, I’m bringing this here for the larger audience to hear. Albert Einstein figured out relativity while working as a patent clerk. That should be the model. When someone figures out anti-gravity or faster than light pizza delivery then we can talk about a cushy office in the physics department at Cal Tech and maybe tenure. But if they’re going to spend forty years of academic salary and perks for this drivel, we need to break out the Chinese model. Who knows, maybe we can throw in the cost of the bullets for free. After all we are reasonable people.