[unixbeard1337]

I find it difficult to believe that most theoretical physicists are wrong and one guy in the math department at Columbia + the comments section of a venture capital link aggregator are right. It could be; it just doesn't seem very likely.

[ncmncm]

Yet, it is true.

It is theoretically possible that the "string theory landscape" explorers are onto something. But so long as they are not predicting results of experiments, they are not doing science.

Nobody is obliged to be a scientist; they could move over to the philosophy department, if it would take them. Or the mathematics department. Likewise, nobody is morally obliged to pay people claiming to be scientists to do something that is not science. But our institutions don't have an "in case of emergency break glass" red button, so these scientists no longer doing science still get to teach classes, attend conferences, and publish vacuous papers, and appear to be doing their job. They also get to award (or not award) doctorates, gatekeep journals and conferences, and control tenure-track appointments.

A similar process is going on among Alzheimer Syndrome researchers. They still publish papers on amyloids and taus and stuff to block making them, despite it having been demonstrated to anybody's satisfaction that this is a dead end. They still approve those papers, and still teach and award doctorates. They even, somehow, got the FDA to approve an extraordinarily expensive drug that does nothing, but that Medicare will be obliged to subsidize. (At worst it's harmless? Must we go there?)

In academia we are disinclined to nip apparent dead ends in the bud, because so often what some thought unpromising lines of work turned out to lead somewhere important. But when nobody is even trying anymore to get to anywhere important, it eventually comes time to pull the plug. The alternative is to end up with a department writing commentaries on commentaries on the writings of figures who were close to the Prophet.

[pa7x1]

Quantum Gravity is relevant at an energy scale that is completely out of our current technical capabilities. That's hardly the fault of string theory or any other theory of quantum gravity. It's just a consequence of the fundamental constants of our universe and our technical capabilities at this point in time.

String theory makes testable predictions, it is falsifiable. It's just not something we can falsify with our current technical means. That doesn't make the theory unscientific.

Would Quantum Field Theory be unscientific if it had fallen in the hands of the ancient Greeks? The theory falsifiability is an intrinsic property of the theory, irrespective of our technical ability.

[scotty79]

I just read that string theories are all supersymmetric and attempts at formulating non supersymmetric ones pretty much failed to the point noone is interested in attempting to make them.

And LHC experiments ruled out super symmetry in our universe. Does that mean quantum string theory pretty much got falsified?

[pa7x1]

> I just read that string theories are all supersymmetric and attempts at formulating non supersymmetric ones pretty much failed to the point noone is interested in attempting to make them.

This is correct.

> And LHC experiments ruled out super symmetry in our universe. Does that mean quantum string theory pretty much got falsified?

This is not correct. LHC hasn't ruled out the existence of supersymmetry because it doesn't have a sufficiently high energy to do so. It's like having a ladder to look for socks in the drawers of a very tall closet. With the LHC we get to look at the first 5 drawers, we haven't seen the socks in there, we found some panties (the Higgs boson) but there are still drawers higher were perhaps there are some socks.

Nevertheless, the idea stands, we can use accelerators to test the theory and falsify it which comes to show that the theory makes predictions and is falsifiable.

[scotty79]

Ah, so LHC ruled out some supersymmetries, but not all of them?

Is there a finite number of possible supersymmetries? So that with high enough energy you can rule out all of them? Or can you just make up new ones with ever increasing energy needed to rule them out?

[pa7x1]

Supersymmetry must be broken in some way. The way it's broken is just an accident of this universe, in much the same way the radius of the orbits of our Solar System cannot be derived from first principles but they are just an accident of the evolution of our galaxy.

This means that the masses at which supersymmetric particles are found cannot be predicted from first principles, although we can constrain the range based on other observations. Like the mass of the Higgs, for example, as supersymmetric particles should interact with it and if they were too light or too massive this would have consequences that we could see.

To summarize, we cannot get from first principles the masses at which the supersymmetric particles are found exactly, as this is just an accidental feature of our universe. We do have some bounds. The LHC is not enough to discard the entire range. ncmncm is talking his ass off.

[ncmncm]

The latter. There will never be a point when we can say we have ruled out supersymmetry. They can always say, oh, you just haven't looked hard enough yet—keep looking!

[ncmncm]

> Would Quantum Field Theory be unscientific if it had fallen in the hands of the ancient Greeks?

Yes. Falsifiability is not an abstract property. Something not, today, might be tomorrow. Today, idle speculation; tomorrow, maybe science.

Gravitational frame dragging and gravitational waves were both speculative until recently. Both are implied by General Relativity, which had been tested in many other ways already, so they were far less speculative than strings. That one does not, to my knowledge, predict literally anything at all, and cannot, because the mathematics is still wholly intractable.

Warp fields are speculation, but could become science or even engineering someday. I won't be holding my breath.

[pa7x1]

String theory predicts the existence of supersymmetric particles, predicts the exact number of dimensions of our universe (something that by the way no other previous theory is able to do). Correctly predicts the Black Hole thermodynamics (Hawking radiation, BH temperature and BH entropy) from microstate counting and gives quantum corrections to the semi-classical formula. Predicts a bunch of higher and higher energy particles in a tower whose mass ratios are well defined. They are essentially higher energy excitations of the fundamental modes of the string. So on and so forth.

All this is testable and falsifiable, if we had the technical means to access the energies that are relevant for Quantum Gravity. In the meanwhile, scientists can keep trying to derive lower-energy consequences of the theory or devise smarter experiments that can allow us to test the consequences of the theory at the energy scales that are applicable to us.

[ncmncm]

If, every time we look where the theory says and don't find any supersymmetric particles there, you say, oh well they must be somewhere else, that is no sort of prediction at all.

It cannot be said to predict black hole numbers if those were known, and dictated which subset of the 1e500 possible string theories are still under consideration.

Predicting a number of dimensions is no good if there is no slight indication of any extras at all, and no conceivable way to discover any.

There is no circumstance in which no doubletalk can be conjured to prop up the empty tent. Deliver actually measurable consequences, or GTFO.

[throwaway81523]

> But so long as they are not predicting results of experiments, they are not doing science.

I don't think we denizens of the mentioned link aggregator get to decide what is not science. And calculating that QED has a Landau pole at 10**286 eV is perfectly good science, even though no experiment will ever observe it.

Also, Penrose just got a physics Nobel for theories about the interiors of black holes, which by definition can never be observed. If the Nobel committee says it's physics and you say it isn't, I'm going to have to believe the Nobel committee, I'm afraid.

[ncmncm]

Your Landau pole could be implied by a current QED, but if it has no discernable consequences, it is idle speculation.

The committee that awards Nobels in Physics are identically the same individuals who are failing to do science anymore. If the Alzheimer's researchers get together and make up an award to give to Alzheimer's researchers, of course it will go to an amyloid chaser. In other words, you are using a circular argument: begging the question.

[throwaway81523]

Sounds good, we will have to put you in charge of everything. Besides Landau poles not being science, maybe you can also arrange that set theory isn't mathematics, that free verse isn't poetry, and that hip-hop isn't music. Let those cosmologists with no chance of actually observing the big bang go into hiding! We will show them a thing or two. Heh.

[ncmncm]

Physics, uniquely in your list, is about something outside itself, but you would prefer for it to be just like the others. Noted.

The Alzheimer's amyloid plaques crowd is with you 100%.

[aeternum]

Your logical fallacy is appeal to authority

[perl4ever]

I'd still rather read something called "not even wrong" than something called "less wrong".

[raincom]

If one studies the history and philosophy of sciences, Woit's criticism is on the mark. Make predictions, and test them out. Or explain novel phenomena.