Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by andrewflnr 698 days ago
Is it just because it hasn't gotten as far as making physical predictions yet? To put it charitably it's very abstract, but I wonder exactly where the holes are that real physicists see.
2 comments

Physicists won’t take a look at a new theory unless the person pushing it can demonstrate very good reasons for physicists to do so. Generally those have to be quite concrete reasons: for example explaining a known phenomenon in a much clearer or more intuitive way, or allowing the explanation of systems that weren’t easy to conceptualise of before, etc.

But ultimately it’s up to Wolfram to come up with those things. I don’t think most physicists feel he has done that, especially since the standards increase as the idea becomes more different to existing physics

> Physicists won’t take a look at a new theory unless the person pushing it can demonstrate very good reasons for physicists to do so

So why did all the string theories get popular?

FWIW, by my reading string theory is, incredibly, a lot closer to being testable than this thing, which is more like a proposed formalism in which to expess a theory than a theory itself.
Because it did do those things
A "theory" without predictions is just a bunch of words and numbers hanging out together.
> A "theory" without predictions is just a bunch of words and numbers hanging out together.

A famous example in Physics is String Theory. It has been around since at least 1980s and still no definitive way to prove or disprove it.