[nradov]

A lot of the complaints here about physics have to do with focusing so heavily for decades on string theory (or M-theory) which hasn't produced much in the way of practical results. At some point we have to quit throwing good money after bad and redirect funding towards other lines of inquiry.

[OccamsMirror]

Is the purpose of life purely to seek a monetary return on investment?

[nradov]

Is the purpose of theoretical physics purely to seek mathematical innovations with no connection to objective reality?

[Yossarrian22]

Define objective

[nathan_compton]

Yes, but this is cartoon shit. String theory was a major research program in theoretical physics for a few decades but theoretical physics involves quite a lot more than string theory and physics involves quite a lot more than theoretical physics and if you stacked up all the budgets you'd find that string theory is a minor footnote. And also, its been a few decades since people took it very seriously as a strong candidate for a TOE.

I really don't get it. As a total amount of any budget from any perspective, string theory has always been a blip whose cultural impact is much wider than its actual budgetary one. Like this critique about string theory is just a thing that people who are physics "enthusiasts" say and even to the extent that it is true, its really been more than a decade since it was a problem.

[bluGill]

The problem is string theory was pushed by people who were really good at getting attention and so they appeared to be outsized. Eventually everyone realized they were never making good on their promises and it was time to quit given them money - but most people who are not physics insiders don't really understand the other parts and so the total budget was cut to punish string theory - but by more than just the string theory part.

There is a warning above about something, but I'm not sure exactly what.

[nathan_compton]

I actually think that for the most part string theory and its detractors and its rise and fall have had little effect on total physics budgets in the last 30 years.

I will say that theoretical physics is in a hard spot, but the problem isn't string theory. It is that we are short experimental data because the domain of validity of our theories is currently somewhat larger (in most obvious ways, anyway) than the domains we can reach with experiment.

I don't think any amount of clever budget allocation is going to make progress in theoretical physics go faster, nor do I think we'd be in a different position if we had allocated the resources differently. Notably, LQG and similar approaches (of which there is hardly any shortage) have not made noticeable progress either.

My perspective is this: string theorists are cheap. We may as well have a few for some long shot research, and while we fund them they teach kids math and physics. Seems like a good trade.

[bluGill]

> My perspective is this: string theorists are cheap. We may as well have a few for some long shot research, and while we fund them they teach kids math and physics. Seems like a good trade.

We need kids learning math because it is useful for engineering and other parts of life. However there are large parts of math that are useless in the real world and we don't need to each at all. (we need enough to teach rigorous logical thinking because that is useful in the real world - but there are lots of ways to get there)

Is there value in more theoretical physics - at what point do we know the constants to enough values? This is a reference to just before relativity was discovered when it was thought refining the constants was all that was left - it turned out that some major things were left, but is there anything more? This is an unanswerable question, but what if we redirected those working on string theory to a hobby if they want to and made their day job either teaching math (which they are already doing part time), or some engineering type job? If we distribute the workload that implies everyone could work half an hour less every day, is that a bad trade?

[nathan_compton]

> However there are large parts of math that are useless in the real world and we don't need to each at all.

The way I see it is thus: life is objectively pointless. There is no god and time will erase everything anyone ever builds one way or another. Human life is predicated on doing work to survive, but that isn't the point of life. Instead of asking how we can only do what is useful, we should be asking how we can do more and more useless stuff while still providing for our bodily needs. Show me a mathematician working on pure math and I see a person at the absolute peak of human potential. I do not resent the mathematician. On the contrary, I aspire to their place. I guess you see one and you think they are useless and should be writing code for an ad company somewhere.

What a dogshit world.

[bluGill]

> I do not resent the mathematician. On the contrary, I aspire to their place

Those two do not follow. I resent the mathematician because the world can only afford to pay a small number of them (we need to eat and that consumes far more people), not to mention shelter and such - I'm not one of those society has chosen to do math all day (for good reasons - I'm not that great at math - my math minor makes me a better choice than average, but still not anywhere near good enough). Even those who do math all day are mostly professors who do math between teaching classes and advising students. The time / taxes that are spent from my paycheck to pay someone to do math is time that I'm working for someone else to achieve a peak that I cannot and without them I could work less (we are talking a second per year or something, but still...)

Yes I'm admitting to jealousy here. I aspire to their place.

> . I guess you see one and you think they are useless and should be writing code for an ad company somewhere.

You picked a bad example. I'd call most ad work useless too - they are not informing me of something new that I need but trying to get me to buy something either I already know about or worse things that would make my life worse.