[ecosystem]

Non-Euclidean geometry (geometric axioms in which one postulate is rejected such that the 3 angles of a triangle are not exactly 180 degrees) was considered a meaningless word game and fundamental mistruth.

Later, non-Euclidean geometry was actually essential to modern physics.

It's intellectually sketchy to judge future value by the present.

[PunchyHamster]

Might as well fund someone researching whether quantum theory run on little gnomes, if there is no serious path to verification after 50 years, why not quantum gnomes?

[ecosystem]

On this topic (parallel postulate), it took ~2000 years from Euclid and then 3 people all came to the same conclusion independently within ~10-20 years.

Progress is weird.

[utopiah]

Is it so weird? See Multiple discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery and Zeitgeist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist namely that there might, or might not, be objective knowledge out there describing properly an objective World but we as a specie do chip at it with itself over time. When a new discovery in any field is made it propagates through our social network and tools we have for it, e.g. cafes, scientific journal, Web. As soon as something is discovered most of us connected enough get the new tool or perspective, update our Worldview and chip it at it again. IMHO this way it seems pretty normal that things hitherto unknown, no matter for how long, become knowable to seemingly independent discovers.

[Elextric]

Ideally, one should explore all possibilities. It is remarkable how far "merely" predicting the next word has taken us.

[PunchyHamster]

That was constant progress with measurable goals, not "big things are coming decade from now" every decade.

[Tadpole9181]

> We should stop funding research into prime numbers. They're stupid and useless. Who cares about them, if they will never be used for anything? Number theory should be stopped, you may as well research gnomes.

I imagine this is what you would have sounded like 100 years ago.

[dgfl]

You may be understating how much 15 orders of magnitude are.

The only truly exponential technological progress we’ve ever had, transistors, only scaled by ~5 orders of magnitude in feature size. Thermal engines went from maybe 0.1% to ~50%, less than 3 orders of magnitude, in about 200 years. There’s very fundamental physical laws that suggest that engines are done, and transistor scaling as we have known it for 30 years is also done. Perhaps very clever things might give us 5 more orders of magnitude? E.g. truly 3D integration somehow? Then we’re still 5 orders of magnitude off from our target. I can’t think of any technology that ever improved by more than 10^6, perhaps 10^9 if you count some derivative number (like “number of transistors on chip”, rather than actual size), and that’s from literally zero to today. Not from already-pretty-advanced to Death Star scale.

Another perspective is that, to get to those kinetic energies, we need accelerators as large as the solar system. Possibly the galaxy, I can’t quite remember. Will you concede that galaxy-wide objects are so far from current reality that there’s no point seriously talking about them?

[Tadpole9181]

Are you seriously insinuating that string physics are asking for this collider you alone entirely made up? As if people who actually do study string theory are too stupid to know primary school math and this criticism is somehow high-brow and novel?

Not to mention you entirely missed the point of what I said. There is research into the most niche, useless fields imaginable, because not every endeavor taken by every human being needs to be profitable or applicable. Sometimes people are just really good at making jigsaws or want to make a stinky chemical or get fascinated with properties of prime numbers.

And then, sometimes, those turn out to be the fundamental underpinnings of an entire generation of economic and military strategy. You can't often know what spurs what in that sense.

[dgfl]

I didn’t make it up, it’s a well known talking point around string theory. I think it was first mentioned by a practicing string theorist. Of course it’s not a novel critique, but I’ve read about putting data centers in space on this website, so I think it’s worth trying to teach people how to do these sort of Fermi problems quickly.

I did indeed miss your point, it was well hidden under a lot of sarcasm. I think it is of course completely valid. People should be free to research what they want, and I’m sure string theory must be beautiful mathematics.

But if your goal is unifying QM and GR, and/or achieving a theory of everything (as is for most theoretical physicists), then me and a growing fraction of physicists think that it’s not a promising avenue. I’m not advocating for only working on “useful” things, because such a theory is not likely to yield much profit to anyone in the foreseeable future anyway. But if you state that a unifying theory is your goal and seek funding for that goal, then string theory should move to the backstage. The mathematics department would rightfully be happy to house you otherwise.

[constantcrying]

>Non-Euclidean geometry (geometric axioms in which one postulate is rejected such that the 3 angles of a triangle are not exactly 180 degrees) was considered a meaningless word game and fundamental mistruth.

This is just a lie though. Non-Euclidean geometry is a mathematical model of how distances behave on non-linear spaces. Nobody ever believed it to be a "fundamental mistruth", even suggesting it would look ridiculous. It would be akin to denying linear algebra, even the meaning is unclear.

That the physical reality of space is not linear was a shocking revelation, since all human experience and basically every experiment done up until that point indicated otherwise.

[ecosystem]

This is a generally known part of the history of mathematics.

> Nobody ever believed it to be a "fundamental mistruth"

https://math.libretexts.org/Courses/College_of_the_Canyons/M...

"Lobachevsky [mathematician contemporary of Gauss, who claimed parallel postulate was unnecessary] was relentlessly criticized, mocked, and rejected by the academic world. His new “imaginary” geometry represented the “shamelessness of false new inventions”"

Further, many claimed premature success in finding logical contridictions in geometry lacking parallel (Euclid's 5th) postulate; which meant they believed a 4-postulate geometry to be fundamentally false.

[snapplebobapple]

you are mixing up gambling spend vs whole industry spend. If string theory was a small handful of people making up a small m*nority of physics departments like non-euclidea geometry research was that would be fine. Its huge swaths of most physics departments and a huge suck on research funding. For that kind of spend you better show results because you are in production phase at that point not lotto ticket moonshit phase. If we are buying lotto tickets with the money bey lots of different lotto tickets not a whole bunch of one lotto ticket

[Tadpole9181]

I think you are vastly overestimating the number of string physicists and how much their non-experimental research costs.

There's maybe a couple or few hundred-ish in the whole world that focus on it. And they don't need much money because it's pretty much all math.

[boznz]

As a percentage of theoretical physicists it is probably significant though. A Better question is how much love/money/attention is going into rival theories ?

[snapplebobapple]

It is basically this. People arguing for string theory have no concept of how to maximize return with uncertainty. The thing had 50 years of substantial funding and substantial mindshare and pushed us nowhere. Any rational person with basic risk understanding would know at this point its a fail and we are in the not knowing what to pursue phase so we should be supporting small investments in dicerse options &ntil something promising happens then we can concentrate funding there &ntil that times out or gices us the understanding to achieve something new and great. The lifecycle of increasingly aupporting string theory s=ould have turned 2 to 3 decades ago instead of just recently. We lost atleast 20 and more like 30 years of progress we didnt have because a bunch of very smart people captured the physics funding aparatus to enrich thselves.

[karmakurtisaani]

> m*nority

Is this a typo? I see a lot of words being censored these days and I assumed it's because of some algorithms and visibility. That shouldn't be the case here tho..

[snapplebobapple]

Its a spelling mistake from responding from my phone because my life is busy...

[kentm]

They do the same thing with the i in “doing” in another post. It seems like just a typo this person sometimes makes.

[cess11]

I imagine that elliptic geometry had some use before modern physics.

[saghm]

Yeah, even just trying chart a course on a ship across a reasonable distance will cause you to need to reevaluate some "obvious" things (like "what path is the shortest between these two ports" being a curve rather than a line).

[ecosystem]

The specific controversy was whether without the parallel/5th postulate, there existed a logical contradiction, i.e. proving the parallel postulate

[emil-lp]

In the 1700s, perhaps. But we have come a long way since that.

[ecosystem]

Yet, OP is repeating the same logical fallacy: the absence of a result is not a result of absence.