Debunking String theory

[domi]

Book in question:
NOT EVEN WRONG: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics
by Peter Woit

The Times has the following book review:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-2214707,00.html

 

[Shadders]

Hi there,

First post on this forum. I like the format here a bit better than the casschat list.

I saw a documentary on string theory a while back and the counter argument seemed to run along the same lines as is outlined in this review. In summary the primary problem the author has with the theory is that it can't be tested. From there he makes the rather enourmous leap to 'it must be a worthless theory'. Or if I might colour it with my own interpretation of his intended meaning 'it ain't true'.

Forgive my angst but this attitude seems punishingly short-sighted to me. If asked the question directly, 'could it be true?', he would have to answer 'yes' although more likley he would attempt to discredit that response by pointing out that there could also be purple elephants on neptune but we don't have the technology to measure it as true or false. It's little more than using a deficiency in technology or ingenuity as an excuse to stop thinking. I would think a challenge like that is what gets most scientists out of bed in the morning.

Although it seems to have been embraced by the scientific community I can't see how testability of a theory can be a criteria for truth. Might as well suggest that the earth was flat until the day a boat capable of crossing oceans was invented, at which point it became possibly spherical then later became definately spherical.

I think this debate is going to be an interesting one and one that's going to become more and more common as science approaches the limits of it's mandate and in continuing to expand finds that it cannot without redefining itself.

cheers

Steve

"A conclusion is the point at which one decides to stop thinking"

 

[highmystica]

I thought the short comings of string theory were addressed by m-theory. From what I understand of it, m-theory *seems* reasonable, and is certainly elegant ... but I'm not a physicist. I find it strange that some guy has taken up the challenge of debunking string theory when as it seems to me the main movers behind that thoery have adjusted for that theory's limitations into a way that even predicts those five different versions of string theory. I think it is very odd that once there were five "forces", then five versions of string theory, perhaps in time there will be five m-theories ... personly I would think that there are an infinite nuber of DIMENSIONS and universes - shruggs - I hope ark or at least some physicist who attends here has something to say on this - cause I find it all very interesting, but have no training in it ...

 

[ark]

I hope ark or at least some physicist who attends here has something to say on this - cause I find it all very interesting, but have no training in it ...

I think it is a good review below:

Nothing gained in search for 'theory of everything'
By Robert Matthews (visiting reader in science at Aston University, Birmingham)
The Financial Times: June 2 2006

They call their leader The Pope, insist theirs is the only path to enlightenment and attract a steady stream of young acolytes to their cause. A crackpot religious cult? No, something far scarier: a scientific community that has completely lost touch with reality and is robbing us of some of our most brilliant minds.


Yet if you listened to its cheerleaders - or read one of their best-selling books or watched their television mini-series - you, too, might fall under their spell. You, too, might come to believe they really are close to revealing the ultimate universal truths, in the form of a set of equations describing the cosmos and everything in it. Or, as they modestly put it, a "theory of everything".


This is not a truth universally acknowledged. For years there has been a concern in the rest of the scientific community that the quest for the theory of everything is an exercise in self-delusion. This is based on the simple fact that, in spite of decades of effort, the quest has failed to produce a single testable prediction, let alone one that has been confirmed.


For many scientists, that makes the whole enterprise worse than a theory that proves to be wrong. It puts it in the worst category of scientific theories, identified by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli: it is not even wrong. By failing to make any predictions, it is impossible to tell if it is a turkey, let alone a triumph.

It is this loss of contact with reality that has prompted so much concern among scientists - at least, those who are not intimidated by all the talk of multidimensional superstrings and Calabi-Yau manifolds that goes with the territory. But now one of them has decided the outer world should be told about this scientific charade. As a mathematician at Columbia University, Peter Woit has followed the quest for the theory of everything for more than 20 years. In his new book Not Even Wrong he charts how a once promising approach to the depest mysteries in science has mutated into something worryingly close to a religious cult.


It began in the mid-1980s with the emergence of so-called superstring theory, according to which all the particles and forces in the universe are linked to vibrations of tiny, multidimensional, string-like entities possessing something called supersymmetry (don't ask). By unifying so much so neatly, superstring theory seems to be a glimpse of the theory of everything that had eluded even Einstein himself. Many of the world's smartest theoreticians joined the effort to understand superstrings, including several Nobel Prize winners. But they soon ran into trouble. The mathematical elegance of superstring theory collapsed under a mass of messy facts about the real universe. Worse still, hopes that it would lead to a unique theory of everything evaporated, with ever more versions emerging and no obvious way of deciding between them.


By the mid-1960s superstring theory had been subsumed into something called M-theory. Not even its inventor - the charismatic Edward Witten of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton - knows what the M stands for. Nor has he, or anyone else, succeeded in persuading M-theory to make single testable prediction. As such, it has more in common with a religious conviction than science. Most theorists pay aat least lip-service to falsifiability, popularized by the philosopher Karl Popper, according to which scientific ideas must open themselves up to being proved wrong. Yet those involved in the quest for the theory of everything believe themselves immune from such crass demands. Mr. Woit quotes a superstring theorist dismissing the demand for falsifiability as "pontification by the 'Poperazi' about what is and what is not science."


Coming from a community that refers to Professor Witten as The Pope yhis is a bit rich. But it also suggests that the whole field is now propped up solely by faith. Mr Woit provides plenty of evidence for this: the insistence of M-theorists that, in the quest for ultimate answers, theirs is the only game in town; the lectures with titles such as The Power and the Glory of String Theory; the cultivation of the media to ensure wide-eyed coverage of every supposed "revelation".


Mr. Woit has shown that some very smart people in academia have lost the plot. But why should the rest of us care? The rerason is simple: the quest for the theory of everything has soaked up vast amounts of intellectual effort and resources at a time when they are desperately needed elsewhere. We can ill afford to let more brilliant talent vanish into the morass that is M-theory.


Those who have show signs of having fallen prey to the "sunk-cost fallacy", the huge intellectual effort needed to enter the field compelling them to plough on regardless of the prospects of success. It is time they were put out of their misery by being told to either give up or find funding from elsewhere (charities supporting faith-based pursuits have been suggested as one alternative). Academic institutions find it hard enough to fund fields with records of solid achievement. After 20-odd years, they are surely justified in pulling the plug that has disappeared up its Calabi-Yau manifold.