| Nobody can figure out a way to test string theory. Sure they can. Build a particle accelerator with one million times the power of LHC. Not knowing and not having the technology are two different things. Fifty years ago nobody knew how to test the Higgs boson theory either. That didn’t stop them from moving on and when the technology permitted it run the tests and solidify the hypothesis. String theory didn’t just popped out of the heads of physicists who had nothing better to do with their time. Parts of string theory are already tested, the discovery of the new particle that was semi announced last week at LHC was predicted by a model of string theory. That’s how science progresses, with little steps. So don’t get pessimistic, scientists have done huge progress in the last hundred years or so. Lastly, let’s not forget how little funding science gets these days and how many different areas they have to cover. It’s not just physics, you have cosmology, space exploration, biology, energy, just to name a few. It’s not science’s job to answer philosophical questions. If for example philosophers feel powerless because of the multiverse theory we should stop theorizing it? If it turns out that life and everything we know is just the result of a mere stroke of luck, one universe with the proper conditions popping out from a variety of trillions, what should science do about it? All those smart people hate to face the fact that what they're doing may be total bullshit. It’s funny saying something like that in Hacker News. Everything each and every one of us does has the potential to turn out as total bullshit. Every single day we write code that turns to be total garbage. And yet we’re doing it. You should watch the “Particle Fever” documentary. There you’ll see the reactions of physicists who favor supersymmetry in the possibility that it proves wrong. Everyone is devastated but they accept it. It’s part of the job. You make it sound like these guys are disillusioned. Scientists know perfectly well the consequences of following a wrong path in their career but they do it either way and we should be grateful to them, not despise them for it. |