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by throwaway81523
1117 days ago
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I'm no insider but I haven't found Hossenfelder's stuff that impressive. Her reasoning tends to take the form "X is true, therefore Y", where "if X then Y" is a valid deduction, and X hasn't been proven false, so we can't say she's wrong on specific physics. But the presumption that X is true is unjustified even if X hasn't been proven false. Example: she likes superdeterminism instead of quantum mechanics with its various weird consequences. Ok, her version of superdeterminism hasn't been proven wrong, but that's a long way off from saying that it is right. It comes down to her saying "I believe X and I haven't been proven wrong, even though most other physicists believe not-X, but I like my theory better, so there". Perfectly fine and legit, but I'll take X seriously when I see more recognition for it from the rest of physics. The same goes for this stuff about tests of string theory. As far as I can tell, string theory is perfectly good physics whether or not it is experimentally testable. That is, there is a viewpoint called "naive Popperianism" that if something isn't experimentally testable then it it isn't science, but from what I can tell, that viewpoint is not truly decisive (thus "naive"), and its proponents don't have the authority that they wish they did. As a comparable situation, there is not much dispute that general relativity (GR) is perfectly good physics except at the center of a black hole, where it predicts a singularity which people consider non-physical. Particularly, GR makes predictions about the interior of black holes (points inside the event horizon) that are considered perfectly good except at the center. But, since there is no way to observe the inside of a black hole, those predictions of GR are also not verifiable. So I'm not bothered by unverifiability. Theory is good if it has explanatory or interpretive power, not just testable predictive power. |
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