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by jamesrcole
4027 days ago
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The article fails to clearly distinguish two issues: what we take to be true, and what we choose to work on for the moment. We need evidence backing up what we take to be true. But we can and must be able to work on ideas without evidence for their truth. We must be given time to flash them out, to try and find ways to get evidence for them. Wanting to pursue a possible explanation is not the same as believing that it's true. |
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Many of the people who work on string theory obviously believe it to be true in one way or another; it's hard to stay motivated otherwise. But the rest of the world need not care whether it is true or not. For the time being, it's just one untested hypothesis among many.
It can take years (or even decades) for a theory to grow to the point where it can produce testable hypotheses, and more decades (sometimes even centuries) to test those hypotheses. This is especially true for theories that deal with extreme scales of space and/or time, such as cosmology, geology, paleontology, and (at the other extreme) anything that deals with subatomic particles.
Gravitational waves [1], for example, have been predicted for almost a century now, but we still don't seem to know how to build a machine to detect them.
The last time this topic came up, I wrote a response titled "Why so impatient?" I'll leave the link below [2] in case anyone is interested.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave
[2] https://www.kijinsung.com/post/why-so-impatient