I tried out for a group after the end of the first year of grad school that worked on the CMS detector at the LHC looking for SUSY signatures. The group was a well established group but felt super toxic: I attended a weekly meeting where the advisor demanded some analysis from a grad student and she literally froze up and started talking faster promising to finish it by the end of the week. As a part of the trying out period, they allowed us to skim one of their technical reports and they had I believe ~10+/-5 potential events matching their search for SUSY particles, this over the petabytes of data for a two or three years of the LHC runs at the time. At the time I really liked particle physics but I also liked essentially coding and thought I'd miss it, so I was conflicted. It didn't help this esteemed professor felt like such an jerk AND their search, despite all the sophistication of their search and the related physics chops, basically had a large "no" for an answer. I ended up chosing a smaller group doing computational laser-plasma physics. The CMS professor at the time retorted something along the lines of "someone shouldn't want to do particle physics and then do plasma physics, it's evidence that person isn't serious."
Fast forward 10 years or so and I haven't regretted that decision. Not only is my pay much better doing this sort of thing but I really did nope out at the right time. I mean, I felt so smug about the noble prize being won by the attosecond researchers, one of whom had an office down the hall from our group. The same grad student who decided to bear the brunt of the CMS prof at the time justified the dearth of working in the group (although perhaps not the abuse, I don't know) as it would be potential "noble prize winning research." I feel I made the right bet at the time and don't regret it.
> someone shouldn't want to do particle physics and then do plasma physics, it's evidence that person isn't serious
That’s such a stupid and harmful thing to say. People change and it takes some maturity to realise that what we wanted to do might not actually be a good idea. It’s completely unrealistic to expect even undergrads to actually know how research is done in a specific field, so how could they be sure that they’d like it?
One of the best PhD student I have seen in materials chemistry came from biochemistry. It’s much better to go and see somewhere else than persevere and go in an unsatisfying field anyway. That’s the best way of becoming an angry, bitter and resentful little professor. Now that I think of it, it might explain some of my lecturers…
I had a similar sort of thing. There I was, plowing away in physics, doing pretty well. I was enjoying myself. They let me, an undergrad, take some grad level courses because I was doing good work. But then I took a long, very hard look at the people who were teaching me and their lifestyles. Their cars that were always breaking down, their second jobs, how much their wives worked, their clothes, and so on. Brilliant people working for a pittance.
Some of them, once you got a drink or two in them, would tell you about the indignity of academia: teaching 101 classes to kids who would rather not be there, scrabbling for grant money, the bitter jockeying for resources. Sure, you get your true-blue types, but they were largely outnumbered by people haunted by the sunk cost fallacy. And it's not really about nice cars, it's about "being able to arrive at the class you are teaching on time because your car doesn't break down every five minutes."
Science is a lot like a cult, not in that it has dogma, but that the dream of doing something that's good attracts people to abusive relationships with leaders that do not come close to compensating them for the true value of their long and unresting labors. On top of it the positions where you work the hardest for the least are the most difficult to obtain - which makes people value them more! Its just like Sea Org in Scientology...
At least the stuff they do is actually good and not, you know, evil.
It boggles my mind that the top comments on HN are now mostly just someone shouting into the void about self-absorbed topics that are (at best) loosely correlated to the article. This one is a shining example.
My experience on HN for the last 15 years is that the tangential, loosely correlated, comments tend to not only be the most interesting but lead to the most interesting threads.
I would agree -- but this is not one of them. This is someone gratuitously patting themselves on the back at every turn. It feels like the kind of NPC dialogue you might find in an RPG
> It boggles my mind that the top comments on HN are now mostly just someone shouting into the void about self-absorbed topics that are (at best) loosely correlated to the article. This one is a shining example.
It's an inside view of something I'm curious about. It may be unrepresentative, but I'll take it over the repetitive high-level stuff you see all the time.
That reading doesn't make much sense though, because it was toxicity in a group working in a very different context: hep-th and hep-ex are such different fields by now they had to formally create positions for people bridging the two subjects.
He could just as well used the story about the PhD student in computer science studying in Florida that committed suicide because their supervisor was trying to force them to publish incorrect results. (And then added how smug they felt about that group not getting awards).
I don't understand your points. Obviously the person was stating their anecdotal experience and how it made them feel. We engage in similar reasoning. We make decisions and draw conclusions based on our experience. It's a not a mathematical proof where the person is proving that the entire field is toxic. They are glad they got out of there.
Maybe I missed something but I don’t see where they claim to offer anything, so I don’t see why they should try adhering to this (completely unreasonable) standard.
Besides, the anecdote actually offers something: a perspective from someone who escaped the grinder just in time. I don’t have a cohort study at hand, but I know both first- and second-hand that the situation described is not the norm, but all too common. In such cases, the correct response is what was described: jump ship whilst you can. You don’t need a double blind study to demonstrate this when simple logic is enough.
If I am a not responsible for other people’s life choices it is OK to revel in their misfortune. No one is responsible for other people’s actions. Therefore it is always OK to revel in other people’s misfortune?
Can't someone feel good that they dodged a bullet that another person was not willing to dodge?
That's whats going on here. OP isn't going to a buffet and mocking starving kids - both folks were intelligent people, one of whom is justifying their life trajectory, and the other is taking a different tack.
I bet you'd be able to conjure up instances where you go "whew I'm glad I didn't do what that person did". We all can. That's not reveling in their misfortune, it's learning.
This is quite pedantic at this point - A generous reading of my posts and OPs shouldn't trigger this kind of vitriol. I apologize if my statement came off as dismissive of others' misfortune. I maintain the spirit of my statement: There is nothing malign about being glad at avoiding misfortune that others could also avoid (not random things like shootings - jeez this is nuts to compare "choice of lab" to "random acts of violence").
> A generous reading of my posts and OPs shouldn't trigger this kind of vitriol.
It should not, and you should not have to defend yourself against this kind of behaviour. I would not have phrased it like that, but I agree with your message.
Could you help me understand which posts enjoy generous reading and which are not so lucky please? Can I always assume the generosity to ignore what’s written? There’s a post in this very thread that dismisses the parent comment as stupid of all things. I wasn’t sure how much generosity it warranted. Thanks.
I would argue that the difference in phrasing is what makes OP come across badly. "I'm glad I didn't do what that person did" just evokes satisfaction with your decision, perhaps relief that you made the choice you did. Saying you felt "so smug I didn't do what that person did", definitely comes off worse IMO. Now you are not just happy with your choice, there's this sense of self satisfaction/superiority that's a bit unsavoury.
Probably overdoing it to reply here, but I rewrote the above comment a few times. I felt smug about the nobel prize going to the attosecond guys last year because for after switching fields tenish years ago, my former particle physics co-eds and advisors seemed surprised that I absconded particle physics for such an "applied" field. There was a sort of a pecking order where a lot more of the resources and physics dept brass were from particle and astrophysics whereas our groups were considered the "applied" physicists, where "applied" was used as silent epithet. So the fact an "AMO" group very closely related to us (our group had collaborations and shared grad students with one of the winners) got the nobel and the LHC groups who were back 10 years ago were for sure expected a nobel prize for SUSY discovery by students and admins alike did make me feel smug at the time of the award last year.
I added the bit about the other more senior grad student in later but didn't remove the smugness bit. Of course you'll probably not believe me but of course I do not feel smug they faced abuse and I didn't. I do admit I feel smug about the so-called applied physicists getting the nobel prize first but that feeling is more directed at the senior professors and dept chairs and certainly that LHC professor, and not her the grad student who honestly was very bright and talented but just made a different choice which at the time seemed like a sure bet for doing high impact research.
I say I don't regret the decision, but really if I'm honest these were all justifications at the time. I partially decided to switch because of what I felt were bad results from their search, but it was a bet fundamentally, I didn't have some deep foresight that that other grad student didn't have and I was betting against the commonly held perspectives at the time including that which I held. Ironically, both the professor of the LHC group and the new professor who would become my PhD advisor both had the same first name, so it became the "choice between two Toms*" in my head, and I definitely liked the new Tom over the abrasive Tom, so I felt that deep down I was just following what was better for my heart (the lazy option) over for my career (the "work harder" option). But...I lucked out and it turned out to be better for my career too. There was luck in it too as she being more senior means she had already a incurred a sunk cost whereas I was fresh on my journey and could easy make one last switch before continuing the program.
I say I "feel I made the right bet" but that is only in hindsight. 23 year old me had no idea this would all work out this way.
* First name changed to protect privacy both of me and the related professors.
Thanks for the honest reply, rewriting a lot and missing the tone might come across weird is definitely a plausible explanation. And I really am glad you avoided the bad supervisor: I've chosen thesis advisor based on what seemed the coolest rather than carefully vetting them for capability and it cost me more than a year to recover after the crash and do a completely new thesis. That said I also chose a supervisor based on the "well, they offer" principle and it's worked out ok so far.
I get what you say about particle physicists viewing applied fields as lesser, that's a zoom in on xkcd:435, which especially in a school with emphasis on "fundamental research" will also mirror the allocation of resources.
But globally particle physics isn't the dominant actor budget wise: there was a fight in the US in the late 80's early 90's and they lost, which is why the Superconducting Super Colliders was cancelled. It's just not so obvious because applied fields usually don't need to build as big things as HEP and so don't need to concentrate the entire field in one experiment.
>But globally particle physics isn't the dominant actor budget wise: there was a fight in the US in the late 80's early 90's and they lost, which is why the Superconducting Super Colliders was cancelled. It's just not so obvious because applied fields usually don't need to build as big things as HEP and so don't need to concentrate the entire field in one experiment.
You're totally right about this. Especially at this point, a lot more money globally goes into other fields beyond fundamentals or particle physics, this might have really been localised to my alma mater.
When I was young I studied physics. The initial idea of string theory is kind of cute. It kind of answers the question what the quantum version is of a rubber band. But that does not really work out as a fundamental theory because it has to live in 24 dimensions, contains tachyons, and there are no fermions. To fix this people invented the fermionic string. Already at that point this seems a somewhat artificial thing to do. The thing is that ever since the question was posed it is still quite unclear how to bring general relativity and quantum field theory together. String theory was interesting for so long, I think, because it complicated enough to contains lots of interesting mathematics but not complicated enough to be completely intractable.
String theory had great marketing and so was able to convince politicians they would get answers in ten years if they just got money, which in turn meant those marketers had jobs. I call it marketing because regardless of the truth, a lot of money went into it for years with no useful results. Maybe a few more years of string theory research will discover it is right and makes some useful predictions - but so far it hasn't and most people outside have given up on it. (and it appears most in physics today expect it will never amount to anything - but since I'm not deep into physics that might be wrong)
None of the people involved in scientific funding decisions are politicians in the sense of being elected or caring primarily about public opinion. The pejorative you're looking for is "bureaucrat." :-) Although in most cases the ground-level decisions are made by peers (which means "professors.")
Meh, I am not buying this. String theory is not very expensive. Picture a guy writing down formulas on a large piece of paper. How much does that cost? Not very much, really. And, at the same time, you also get teaching out of the same person. Experimental high energy physics is orders of magnitude more expensive.
I would disagree about "no frontiers" and where the frontiers are.
The standard model is not complete in that we don't know what the mass term of the neutrino is, if it is Dirac or Majorana or some combination. There's the mysterious absence of the right-handed neutrino which is a good candidate for the "dark matter" particle. This is not "physics beyond the standard model" but "a missing piece of the standard model". There is at least one major secret inside the neutrino and Occam's razor makes that a good candidate for explaining the missing mass and maybe even the matter-antimatter asymmetry.
I don't see Woit saying that there are no frontiers. I see him saying that pushing the energy scale of our experiments higher, which is a frontier, is getting harder and harder, and leads to fewer and fewer discoveries--all the LHC has really done is confirm the Higgs and show zero evidence of supersymmetry.
> The standard model is not complete
I don't see Woit saying that the Standard Model is complete. He says it's "extremely successful", which is perfectly true. He also says there are "no hints from experiment about how to improve it", which is also perfectly true. Your statements about missing pieces of the Standard Model are also perfectly true, but the question is, what experiments do we do to figure them out? The LHC is not going to help us do that. Where else do we look? That's what Woit is talking about with "no hints from experiment".
Newton could not have made testable predictions about quantum mechanics. There is a good argument to be made that we’ve explored terrestrially accessible energy scales for the time being. It’s hard to make theoretical progress around such a backdrop.
20 years ago, I read "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene, as an introduction to string theory. I was initially impressed by the brilliance of the theories it presented. What really threw me for a loop, though, was realizing (as far as I understood or remember) that string theory isn't one neatly packaged theory. Instead, it's this colossal family of theories, with so many parameters that it's hard to make predictions, and to justify "why this one and not the other ones?".
Then, over the last 20 years, I read the 3 following books, which confirmed my initial impression.
- "Not Even Wrong" by Peter Woit, a deep-dive critique of string theory for the mathematically inclined. Woit's basically saying, "If we can't test it, can we even call it science?"
- "The Trouble With Physics" by Lee Smolin, which zooms out a bit. Smolin's beef with string theory isn't just about the science; it's about how this obsession is hogging resources and blocking other potentially groundbreaking ideas (including, but not limited to, his own). Think of it as a mix of a science critique and an insider's look at the politics and sociology of physics.
- "Lost in Math" by Sabine Hossenfelder, which asks if physicists' quest for beauty in equations and theories is leading them astray. This one's the most accessible, mixing in history, interviews, personal stories, and a bit of philosophy.
All three books are good, so if you have to chose one:
- Woit's book is for the math geeks.
- Smolin's is for those who like a side of sociology with their science.
- Hossenfelder's is for folks intrigued by the blend of science, philosophy, and human bias.
I've read a couple of those. My favorite more recent video that I think also provides some good context is a rant by Angela Collier that I found to be really interesting and more condensed than a book. It is called:
"string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard"
It does a good job talking about the collateral damage to the public. An entire generation read Michio Kaku and Brian Greene and many others and believed this was all legit when it seems like it's been a dud for a LONG time. If you couple that with the reproducibility crisis, you have a public that is far more skeptical of what scientists say now than in years prior.
I just wanted to second this recommendation - while the video is nearly an hour long, it feels much shorter and is well worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E
You can argue that science "worked" in the case of string theory in so far as it (eventually) came to be seen as a lot of untestable mathematical games with zero experimental evidence to support it.
Of course, "follow the science" is more commonly interpreted as the scientific community consensus ~= the truth. So having a generation of physics that essentially ended up as "never mind" doesn't instill a lot of public faith that scientists know what they're talking about in general.
Its all very messy. The scientific method is about the best system we have. But the scientific method and academia are not the same thing. I've yet to find anyone besides some weird philosophers and contrarians who actually doubt the scientific method. But I find more and more people every day who doubt academia. And yeah. Its and industry made up of fallible people with incentives that are not aligned with the stated goals of said industry. We've had scandals. We've had falsified data. We've had falsified careers. And then there's the replication crisis where its possible an entire discipline is built on a foundation of slop. And then you have people who aren't technical themselves but chant trust the science as some kind of religious mantra. Which helps nothing frankly. And this mess leaves plenty of room for bad actors who take advantage of the situation and push their own warped agendas.
IMO public is generally critical of science unless they get some shiny toys out of it (and the causation is fairly immediate and obvious).
And, honestly, can you blame them? Nerdy places such as HN have a fascination of fundamental science that is nearly religious in some aspects - not in a sense of dogmaticism, but in a sense that pursuit of abstract knowledge is seen as noble and desirable in and of itself, with any justifications distinctly secondary. But from the perspective of your average person on the street, today, scientists are those people who ask for a lot of money, and use it to build those giant things that run some incomprehensible experiments which occasionally translate to some equally incomprehensible headlines in the news. And that person can think of many ways in which said money could be used to make their lives better instead.
Now, you can reasonably argue that long term, benefits are there regardless, even if they are not obvious, and thus the people actually in charge of allocation resources should disregard such simplistic takes and focus on that long term. But, either way, one cannot be surprised at the discontent.
Ehhh, that's a poor take. The indirect benefits of fundamental research like particle physics are massive.
We all know about how the web — which turned out to have a few commercial applications — was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in order to facilitate better collaboration and data sharing among researchers.
There's the advances in high-performance computing and data processing, medical imaging innovations like PET scans, fundamental tech for touchscreens, and so on.
And don't get me started on the motivational and inspirational value of science and how it encourages people to pursue engineering and other technical endeavors. Hard to measure, sure, but it's damn important. There's a reason the moon landing was the most watched event in the history of television.
It's difficult to overstate these indirect impacts.
I think there are many layers between the people who read Brian Greene's books and watched the reproducibility crisis unfold, and the public that has "lost faith in science". When I hear the latter, I think of vaccine skepticism and flat earth theories, not students who decided to switch to engineering. I think clickbait headlines and internet bubbles are, relatively speaking, a much bigger problem than string theory and bad statistics.
Off-topic, but I think we should stop calling them bubbles as they are getting larger and longer-lasting. It's more like they are domes, which don't pop easily. You've got people lying to poll-takers, rage-bait videos of people pretending to believe things they don't, trolling as a lifestyle, shared culture based off of weird beliefs... people can get away with avoiding truth and reality for longer than they used to. They can have happy lives doing it. It's a huge societal shift that I don't think has been properly analyzed yet.
PBS Space Time is great but you can't just drop in with a random video, they often build on top of or expand on concepts explained in earlier videos. And that's just fine.
I just tried that: Right away he was talking about the possibility of the universe being "infinite".
Yup, in physics courses, that one word was time to lose respect for the course, f'get about it, think about some of the pretty girls on campus, and get back to math, e.g., my paper on group representations, apparently of some interest in physics.
From the outside, this seems to rhyme with epicycles. You’re missing a core concept, so you pile on complexity to paper over the failed predictions.
The industrial organization failure is understandable. It’s all well and good to say “they should have recognized it wasn’t working and stopped” … but even if that’s true at the macro level, it’s very hard on an individual level.
An established physicist working on string theory has every incentive to keep building on that line of research. They have no competitive advantage switching to a new line. The specifics about how much expertise translate how far is beyond me, but it seems that nearby better ideas would have been found given the resources poured into this.
This is exactly The Innovator’s Dilemma. It’s even worse in academia than industry because the whole sector is so insular. I look forward to the reinvention of higher education and theoretical research…
> It’s even worse in academia than industry because the whole sector is so insular. I look forward to the reinvention of higher education and theoretical research…
I went back for another degree a few years ago and from my perspective there's a "here's what the old people think" line drawn in conversations the old people aren't invited to. I don't know if a reinvention is in the cards but there are a lot of folks on their way up who don't seem to be particularly impressed with the current state of affairs.
Well, and add to that the fact that it's probably not clear what all these expensively-trained and equipped physicists should be working on. That may not be totally fair but you essentially have a large subset of scientific academia that has very little idea of how to go forward.
I think you might overestimate how fungible people exceptionally talented at physics might be towards other ends. I was an exceptional physics student and I've frankly never been all that productive at more prosaic tasks.
The fact is there just aren't that many people out there interested in string theory for you to get up in arms about. People don't complain nearly as much about mathematicians, who spend their time on much less practical areas of endeavor.
Frankly, the fact that some people get to make their living working on marginally-productive things that they like makes me feel a bit warm and fuzzy inside, in a way not unlike the experience I get giving my cat cat food and a place to sleep.
Is it? The world only needs a handful of physics every year. However the world needs a large number of people who are trained in the things you need to be good at complex tasks - they type of training you get when working on string theory.
True. And at least some of them would probably be doing pure math if they weren't doing physics. Some of their toys are, but again probably not that much really in the grand scheme. I think there's just a generalized frustration that a cadre of mostly very bright people seem to have largely spun their wheels for 20 years.
> I think there's just a generalized frustration that a cadre of mostly very bright people seem to have largely spun their wheels for 20 years.
Otoh: very possible their work produced spin-offs that were useful in other fields (math advances, thought experiments, practical research tools & equipment, people in other fields having a look at their work from a different angle, etc)
AND having bright people chew on a subject for decades & come up (mostly) empty, is a good hint there's nothing there. 'Unknown' vs. 'we've tried hard & not found much' is a useful result by itself. Think of it as reducing the search space.
The problem with this argument is that it's very hard to quantify or even to test in general. And, of course, the obvious next question then is: if they were working on something else, could that have produced a lot more useful spin-offs?
Oh man, what a shame all these people spent 20 years building tools in math, don't they know they could have been building advertising systems instead, and made a few people enormously wealthy!
I think it actually runs the other way. Because Physics is in the doldrums, intelligent people trained in Physics show themselves out and start building those advertising systems.
Personally I know many people who abandoned Physics to reinvent themselves as data scientists. Good for them that they were able to re-purpose their training; that doesn’t mean physics training is the best way to become a data scientist. My bias is that quantitative social science is a better route, although some of what it gains from focusing on people is often lost through less rigorous mathematics and software development requirements.
If that's the book I'm thinking of I was also initially impressed until like chapter 6 when, after spending the book talking about how simple and elegant this theory was, it opens with "what if there wasn't just one string but lots of strings, and they were n-dimensional etc etc..." and threw it all out the window. I put the book down.
(I'm also not a theoretical physicist).
Not entirely true, I was looking at proton decay recently and one model of string theory model apparently predicts 10^36 yr lifetime [1] which is within experimental reach.
If there are an infinite family of parameterized string theory models, it's basically guaranteed that you can pick one that predicts anomalous data. In other sciences you would adjust the P value for the probability that you can reject the null hypothesis given the number of experiments you're performing, which in the case of infinity is going to drop the probability of rejecting the null to zero.
Well, String Phenomenology is a thing [1]... although more recently they appear to have to switched away from studying the frankly gargantuan set of viable vacua in favour of examining the even larger set of non-viable models [2]. And the choice to take research in that direction is just somehow just so quintessentially string theorist.
> it's about how this obsession is hogging resources and blocking other potentially groundbreaking ideas
My understanding was that a unique virtue of string theory was that (for better or worse) it was playing out with pencils and paper, and not demanding billion dollar funding projects for particle colliders or other such infrastructure and thus was relatively harmless as far as competition for resources is concerned.
Not requiring billion dollar funding projects could be good or bad, depending on the reason.
If the reason is that the theory is making experimental predictions that can be tested more cheaply (as in a number of areas in condensed matter physics, where you can do tabletop experiments to test things), that's good.
If the reason is that the theory makes no predictions that are testable at all by any experiments that are doable now or in the foreseeable future, as with string theory, that's bad.
Totally agree. I tried to account for this by saying "for better or worse." But what are its actual, real-world claims on our major experimental infrastructure in the present?
> what are its actual, real-world claims on our major experimental infrastructure in the present?
At present, now that the LHC has failed to show any of the evidence for supersymmetry that string theorists were confidently predicting it would show, string theorists appear to be pushing for the next more energetic collider, confidently predicting that it will show evidence of supersymmetry.
I accept this as at least somewhat responsive. But (1) it's pretty vague and speculative as a statement about how resources have in fact been allocated thus far. And (2) it seems like no matter how much I try to clarify, you just can't resist making this into a matter of how bad string theory is, which is all well and good but is not the point of my question.
I was hoping for something along the lines of "Yeah, check out chapter 4 of Peter Woit's book where he gets into the crazy things he witnessed at his campus during the 2010s" or something like that.
I guess I'll just try Peter Woit's book and peruse his blog a bit to see what he means.
Um, you specifically gave "not demanding billion dollar funding projects" as an advantage of string theory. So pointing out that string theory is in fact demanding such projects is exactly to the point. And it's not just right now; as my comment should have made clear, string theorists were promoting the LHC for the same reasons they are now promoting the next collider.
Not remotely true.
The predictions theoreticians make guide what experiments are made. If the predictions are of low quality the experiments are unlikely to give us any valuable data.
Let's say I agree to that. How does that translate into an argument that string theory is hogging resources (e.g. funds, infrastructure, colliders, space telescopes) that are now no longer available to alternative projects?
Yours sounds like an argument that it's not making good or testable predictions, certainly an indictment but not (so far as I can tell) responsive to my Q.
Agreed, I think this is the strongest counterpoint. But it effectively requires restating the point to clarify that it's tying up minds, time, energy, which are non-trivial things; but not infrastructure.
For those who have seen these critiques of string theory (and other issues in modern physics) and are wondering why so many physicists have bought into string theory, Sean Carroll recently presented a pretty full throated defense of the physics "orthodoxy":
> Keep in mind that a string theorist would probably just flip all of this on its head by pointing at the total lack of progress from their detractors.
This is just the Politician's Syllogism[0], though:
> its a self-consistent theory that fits existing data, its competitors apparently cant.
My understanding of string theory is that there isn't even a proper string theory variant of the Standard Model, and that most of the models people are trying out are basically toy models that kinda resemble, say, QED. This means it's not even coherent enough to ask the question if it fits existing data, which is part of the premise of it being "not even wrong."
Nobody knows this since there is no exact mathematical formulation of "the theory" to begin with.
> that fits existing data
Nobody knows this either since nobody has derived either General Relativity or the Standard Model of particle physics as an approximation to any string theory model.
That's entirely true, but the problem is ST gobbled up a large share of resources and personnel in theoretical physics for decades. Smolin in particular is arguing that other ideas should get a fair shake.
I like Loop Quantum Gravity, if only because I really enjoy reading Carlo Rovelli's stuff and listening to his talks, but it's really not going any better than String Theory is. Smolin's not wrong in ST getting too many resources, but every indication we have is that the competitors seem to have all of the exact same issues. We have no idea how to test them, their predictions are often wrong and require bolting on revisions, etc. If anything, that grant money and brainpower should likely be redirected to totally different fields where we can actually make progress.
Particle physics is in a really weird place. I'm a layperson, but it seems to me we're in a position where either our technology is extremely far off from being able to collect the data we need, or we've missed something very fundamental in our approach, and it's going to take a major rethinking to figure anything out. I am not optimistic that we're going to make any significant headway here in my lifetime.
Though, as a layperson my opinion on all of this isn't worth the electricity used by my computer when writing it.
Disclaimer: I’m a total outsider, not in physics or even academia, so what do I know? But threads like these make me think that some entire branches of science are less and less about the search for truth, and more and more about establishing a “personal brand” made up of a bundle of research and papers, recruiting supporters, and defending that bundle from detractors. It sounds exhausting and not what comes to mind when I think “science.”
I'd like to push back on this sort of gently but in a few ways.
1. Scientists are entirely human. Sometimes I think people expect more from both science and scientists. In the end, getting knowledge is hard. I have a copy of the Oxford Handbook of Epistemology which I keep on my night stand and every once and awhile it amuses me to read the first few chapters the upshot of which is "Fuck, we don't know how we know anything, really." Science works by having lots of unfruitfrul research programs. I won't say that research programs don't get "pathological" from time to time, in the sense that more energy is invested in them than it should be, but this is often only really discernible in retrospect. Even if a naysayer turns out to be right after a program has been explored, it doesn't mean that the naysayer was justified before the cards were all on the table.
2. Whether we like it or not, the search for truth is a practical matter, involving courting reputation, earning research money, winning war of ideas. This isn't so much new as it is profoundly more democratic than it used to be. Newton was famous for aggressively defending his reputation, to the point of arguably claiming to have invented things that he did not. Now we just have many, many, many more humans involved in science.
Broader sociological problems aside for a second (academia does have issues for sure), one should keep in mind here that string theory is just a small subfield of physics and is not at all representative of physics as whole (or even theoretical physics). So don't let the pathologies that have developed there colour your view of physics or science generally.
Same as it ever was, I think. It's just that when you look back in retrospect, you spend all the time talking about the paths that turned out to be successful. The history of science is littered with now-forgotten theories that, in their day, dominated their fields.
Textbooks and encyclopedias on physics that I'm familiar with do go there, though. I distinctly recall reading a lot about the fight between proponents of light-as-particles vs light-as-waves (and various experiments along the way that moved consensus), including various aether theories. Or, say, how the model of the atom evolved from simplistic solar-system-like stuff to probabilistic electron clouds etc. Even in middle school textbooks there was discussion of the originally dominant theories of gravity ("heavier things fall faster" etc) and how they were disproven. I'm not a science historian, and it may well be that various important details there were wrong, but nevertheless you did get a very clear impression that scientific progress involves a lot of loops, detours, and dead-ends.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it" - Max Planck
> But threads like these make me think that some entire branches of science are less and less about the search for truth, and more and more about establishing a “personal brand” made up of a bundle of research and papers, recruiting supporters, and defending that bundle from detractors. It sounds exhausting and not what comes to mind when I think “science.”
Indeed, this is exhausting and many scientists do hate this, but in the existing system, if you don't play by these rules, you will have difficulties collecting funding and/or a tenured position.
I think you've accurately described academia in general, and (if abstracted slightly further) the human condition. It's astonishing we've made any progress at all.
AFAIK part of the problem is that the experiments needed to provide evidence for these theories either require insane energies, particle accelerators the size of Earth's circumference or even larger, or convenient access to a black hole.
This seems like a fundamental problem. If data is out of reach, we're left with nothing but noodling around with mathematics and simulation.
I think it's funny that Woit manages to this day sound exactly like he's some sort of underdog fighting the big corp despite having lived to see the death of string theory.
Just because grandpa is dead doesn't mean anyone has filled his job position. Nothing useful has come from string theory in a very long time. Or are you still stuck in infinite tiny dimensions that can predict anything and everything, except something testable?
Oh don't misunderstand I am fully against String Theory. I just was not aware anyone considered it dead as in literally no longer controlling the Theory field. I'd challenge you to find good postdocs in High Energy Theory that aren't String related as a gauge of what the field is still focused on.
I took undergrad quantum physics with Prof Greene and it was a great time. I definitely could have chosen a better professor for the math, but the theory and his banter was fun.
Yes. Basically you can track how physics went astray very easily. Physicists were grappling with the philosophical ramifications of some of their discoveries at the same time that experimental data was starting to get much much more expensive to generate and the success of QCD and the standard model created a culture of "shut up and calculate" where physicists put on horse blinders and just tried to make the math work without any real consideration for anything beyond fitting the data. That was fine for a while but now physics is at a crisis point where our models are elegantly accurate to a point but clearly wrong, and physicists as a group have mostly forgotten how to imagine, so the only tool left in their box is pushing numbers around.
This blog changed my life. I was on a path of going into research in physics, and I remember somehow finding this blog as an undergrad. It was like I was a soviet reading western news. After another year of courses where I began to notice exactly what the author mentioned, string theorists controlling purse strings and research directions, I gave up and left. Finished in applied math and went into programming. Everything I've seen has made me happy I made the switch. I'm boggled that string theory is still as big in the public's mind as it was in the 90s. I'm boggled that instead of listening to Ed Witten himself, now I'm hearing a lot of requests for AI driven applications to help researchers "make sense" of things. I help build tools for them to do these things, but I'm nervous. It reminds me of maps from the not-so-great-ages. No new real detail or information added, no new territories or topographical data, but they certainly became more elaborate and difficult to actually use and understand...but boy did they _look_ impressive.
Anyway that's awful and bad analogy is something I wonder about when i look at some modern physics...and math actually but i'm just some dumb guy. Maybe Grothendieck's ideas will save us, maybe we need another, either way it sure feels like we are in a dead zone intellecually and has for about 15-20 years to me.
All that's to say, I loved this blog and it had a bigger influence on me and my mind than about 90% of the classes I paid a bunch of money for which I now think were a waste of time, capital, intellectual effort, and overall energy.
> He is critical of string theory on the grounds that it lacks testable predictions and is promoted with public money despite its failures so far,[1] and has authored both scientific papers and popular polemics on this topic. His writings claim that excessive media attention and funding of this one particular mainstream endeavour, which he considers speculative, risks undermining public faith in the freedom of scientific research. His moderated weblog on string theory and other topics is titled "Not Even Wrong", a derogatory term for scientifically useless arguments coined by Wolfgang Pauli.
I'm sure he is expressing a valid principle. By funding one area excessively, you can soon build up reams of scientific literature and interest, but this area needs have nothing or little to do with genuine scientific interest. Funding determines the interest. It's all about money unfortunately, even science.
I had the same feeling doing a phd two years ago. I think there is an unpopular opinion in science about the limits of what we can look at and what is required to achieve that. My conclusion was that the requirements are an economy of infinite growth and a society based on consumption. I did a parallel in my mind between the idea that "knowledge will always grow" and "economy will always grow".
The limits are heavily related to social stability/agreement, and the tools we can have given the money(=social and environmental)/physical constraints.
I have the opinion that the FCC is the example of such bias: we don't really know what to look for, but we (the scientific community) have to survive so we'll build a political argument to keep getting funds.
I think the proposal was during a severe heatwave, and I also though "where is the social goal in that science? What does it will bring to society? Do we really need to know that far those things?". I think it's at this moment that I started loosing motivation too.
What is he in favor of? He seems to be criticizing both further experiments in string theory due to being not even wrong, and further experiments with the standard model, since it's either expensive or not getting anywhere. (I'm not a physicist and understand very little.)
It's not necessary to be in favor of anything, in order to criticize what's already out there. You can point out fatal flaws in an idea without needing to have an alternative in mind.
Woit himself is working (pretty casually to my eyes) on some mathematical reformulations of the Standard Model. He's not advocating aggressively for these ideas, and I'm pretty sure if you asked him, he'd say there's no evidence that any one idea should dominate the research landscape the way string theory did. None of what exists out there is particularly compelling. (This is one of the reasons people worked so much on strings. It's the best of a bad lot.)
- "...and is promoted with public money despite its failures..."
The amusing thing for me* is this is just coffee budgets for pen-and-paper theorists. What they say about academic disputes: the lower the stakes, the more intense the politics.
It’s not just coffee and blackboards and hoarded Japanese chalk: the goalpost slalom around supersymmetry drives discussions about what colliders to build and how to operate them [1]. Before scalar field excitation at 125 GeV it was predicted by many that the power and luminosity of that run would show weak bosonic superpartners in the first run. With Higgs at 125 GeV it gets really tortured as an argument.
This is also the subtext with the really aggressive public branding of “dark matter”, when it should really be called something like “large scale apparent gravitational anomaly” or some dry thing like that, it’s not an MCU franchise: positing a bunch of mass that has none of the other properties of matter is a perfectly fine line of inquiry, but the verbal capitalization of Matter is because weakly-interacting massive particles are another way to argue that maybe, just maybe maybe, this is indirect evidence for supersymmetry.
But most of all the damage is in attacking the definition of science: if you envelope-math metastable vacua consistent with compactified Calabai-Yau dimensions at (last I checked) order of 10^250 what you’re left with is “it’s strong anthropic, there’s no explanation”, which is exactly where Susskind and that lot have ended up.
There's also a hidden component in these budget calculations: it is hard for people doing more "traditional" physics to find tenured positions, since many faculty hires went to string theory. So the salary that went to string theorists at the expense of other subareas of physics is quite a large hidden component. Crushed academic ambition is as real-world as it gets, since it involves years of extremely hard toil, wasted.
Totally wild assertion. Most physics departments in the world have only one or two theorists and most of them are not in string theory. And most young physicists don't have the inclination to pursue string theory (even if they had the capability, which many do not).
Taking criticism of string theory hogging all the budget as "it's literally taking over the entirety of physics budgets" instead of "in the field of fundamental high-energy physics, there's no budget left over for alternative ideas to be developed to a similarly detailed level" is strawmanning.
This is just false, string theory only competes in the theoretical physics sub-area; condensed matter, astrophysics, lasers, all that stuff have their own pots of money.
That research budgets are split by subjects many times before arriving to a node where "string theory" is a possible leaf is not a controversial statement, it is reflected in basically all budget documents you will find.
For example, string theory funded by the NSF that "steals" money from laser research is plausibly only found in the "elementary particle physics - theory" program, which is part of the Physics division, which is part of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate.
sadly the page is pretty shit so the filter selection is probably reset, and they don't label by division program so you'll have to mouse over each one and categorise yourself. As a guide to how much work it is, there was 350 awards in the physics division and about 30 of those in the theory program.
> The amusing thing for me* is this is just coffee budgets for pen-and-paper theorists
Unfortunately not. From his website [0], the extent of the grant funding involved is much more than just coffee budget:
> The Black Hole Initiative that features this on its website: $16 million from the Templeton Foundation, $3.6 million from the Moore Foundation.
> The Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography: $8 million from the Simons Foundation.
> NSF Grant: $400,000 from the NSF.
> DOE Grant: $3.5 million from the DOE.
This kind of money could fund a whole lot of other theory. Hell, it even could fund a lot of experiments (albeit not in high energy physics).
In my view, those are very trivial amounts, for an entire subfield of research. I can think of individual federal grants no one on HN has heard of or cares about that are are larger than all of those put together, which are outright fraudulent—those are dime-a-dozen.
Also, note that your first three examples aren't public money, rather private philanthropy. No one can speak against where Jim Simons gifts his billions (and in point of fact Simons is an expert in quantum field theory himself—no one's scammed him, if he's decided string theorists are worth donating to. He reads and understands the papers they write).
It's a fair anchoring point, isn't it? It's the theory and experiment side of the same field. We're just spending 0.01% of the experimental budget on some (possibly wrong and possibly dead-end) theory ideas, and the coffee that produced them.
In context, those are not shockingly high sums. The real problem seems to be what Woit summarizes in this 2004 (!!) comment on his blog:
> It takes a non-trivial amount of time and effort to absorb new mathematical ideas and by so dominating the mathematical end of particle theory for twenty years, string theory has monopolized the time of the mathematically sophisticated members of the community. It has also quite literally driven out of the field a lot of people who were interested in other sorts of ideas about how to apply mathematics to questions in particle theory.
Well, its not true that people only worked on string theory during these last 20 years: notably Woit himself didn't. That there's loads of people in Brazil, Russia (or frankly any place except Princeton and IAS) trying weird approaches sums up to nothing in his telling.
Honestly, I get the impression that what Woit is really upset about is that people like his idol Witten didn't switch to work on his ideas, because only the genius of "towering intellects" like Witten's could solve this very hard problem. 0
The sad thing about that funding is how small it is. To billionaires and governments this is pocket change. Simons (personally, not the foundation) could spend ten times that to fund research into alternative models and not even notice.
A global anything-goes-if-you're-qualified frontiers research program would cost a few hundred million dollars. The odds of it finding some game changers are likely pretty good.
Instead we're getting a $17bn revamp of the LHC to turn it into a "Higgs factory".
It points to string theory having no predictive capabilities due to multiple-universe issues, we just happened to have evolved in a universe where the (randomly selected) parameters allow for element formation and life:
> "Thus, there is no point in trying to understand the world order: the mass hierarchies, the smallness of the cosmological constant, the absence of the fourth generation, you name it. Nor such attempts will be meaningful in the future. All this is an environmental coincidence. Just take it as is and live happily ever after. This is nothing else than the anthropic principle in its extreme realization, with a religious (or philosophical, if you put it milder) flavor."
> "Indeed, even if this is true, we will never know. All “extra” universes are causally disconnected from our, so there is no physical way to confirm their existence of non-existence in experiment. So, this part of the landscape paradigm is the act of belief in today’s string theory, not supported by any evidence, and not to be supported by evidence in the future."
> I think it is always good to have some people working on weird, unverifiable ideas.
The problem is, for 40 years theoretical particle physics was working only on this one single weird unverifiable idea. Pretty much all other ideas were brushed aside.
People's egos, careers, reputations and funding are dependent on keeping up the façade, so you can't just reboot and start over. You have to keep paying lip service to the emperor with no clothes. Theoretical physics used to be the "king of sciences", but now it more and more appears as a dead end, intellectually and career-wise, for the next generation of physicists.
This overstates things. There are many, many, theoretical physicists who worked on regular old quantum field theory in both a fundamental and material science vein. I'd guess that if you got all the theoretical physicists in the world together, string theorists would make up less than 30%.
I hope you mean all the theoretical physicists working on the high energy theories of physics, because 30% is a sadly high figure even for that subfield. If 30% of all theorists would actually be of no use to any other physicists, that would be horrendous.
Agree but very much with your caveat. If you study the mathematics of some sort of abstract structure you are doing research in pure maths. That is a worthy and completely legitimate pursuit and a ton of stuff started life as pure abstract mathematical research and ended up having real-world benefits way down the line that noone could have forseen.[1]
If on the other hand you say that abstract structure is a fundamental building block of the universe and, say, unifies the standard model with gravity etc but actually your theory isn't explaining anything observable I would say that isn't theoretical physics[2] but is just "making shit up".
So far string theory has failed to produce any sort of verifiable prediction[3], so I just don't see how it's physics (you could say "yet" perhaps).
I enjoyed the video "String Theory Lied to Us and Now Science Communication is Hard"[4] by Angela Collier, who is a computational astrophysicist[5], because it gives a sense for how these things impact other physicists and the popular perception of science.
[1] And Ed Witten for example is without doubt a very impressive mathematician - he won the Fields medal.
[2] Which is the science of matter, energy, space, time etc all the stuff which makes up the natural world.
[3] In particular, the one that has been tried is supersymmetry and the LHC, as I understand it as a non-physicist, brought about an experimental result that called supersymmetric extensions of the standard model into serious doubt https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3068
The core hypothesis of string theory is unfalsifiable, at least if we find another theory at the same scale that is then verified by experiments.
If it turns out that there is nothing significant "beneath" the Standard Model (ie that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics can be unified with only minor extensions), then string theory may remain unfalsifiable forever.
> So first of all, correct,
the beautiful ideas came out of string theory.
But that was not the original promise of string
theory. The original promise was to describe the
physics of this universe, unify all forces of
nature, the three forces, electromagnetic, strong
and weak described by the standard model and
quantum theory of gravity. This has not happened.
And now we hear that actually was not such a big
deal. It's actually such a big thing. We've
learned so much more.
> It's like, you know,
I tried to think of a good analogy. It's like,
remember Moses? He took Israelites out of Egypt.
Mm hmm. And he told them that he
will lead them to the promised land.
Yes. So imagine Moses after 40
years of wandering in the desert,
you would say, you know, guys, you know, this
idea of a promised land is not such a big thing.
Look how much we've learned. We've learned about
the desert. We've learned so much about the sand.
> [Interviewer: That's a great analogy.]
> Who cares about the promised land?
What do you think would people say to him? And
yet here we are. This is called, by the way,
you mentioned this expression, moving the
goalposts. This is not moving goalposts. This
is going to a different stadium.
It's starting to play a different
game. Like you used to play soccer
at one stadium. Then you go to another stadium.
You start playing baseball and you say, no,
we are playing soccer. We're still playing soccer.
Yes, yes, yes. Stating that your original goal
is not meaningful.
> It did not work out. It did
not work out. How about just starting with that?
It did not work out unequivocally, not
by saying the next 10 years [it will].
PS: It's probably one of the best podcasts I've ever watched. It made me realize the obvious thing: that scientists are also psychological humans, each of who has subjective personal preferences, even if they don't realize or admit them. Case study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_oPMcvHbAc&t=8712
What Woit could never explain properly was why some of the very best theoretical physicists, who were entirely free to work on whatever they wanted, continued working on string theory for so long.
I am pretty sure that all these people simply kept thinking that string theory was the most promising way to understand quantum gravity and even (to some extent) 'just' quantum field theory.
So why do people decide to trust the opinions of Peter Woit over those of, say, Edward Witten?
I don't know if Woit explained it, but there are multiple attempts at explanation by other people who have been pointing out the self-serving nature of string theory publicity. Lee Smolin's "The Trouble With Physics" mentions access to funding and the absence of experimental pressure to divulge of unproductive theories: by dint of the hype in the 80s and 90s, many theoretical physics departments were staffed mainly with string theorists. This means that if you want to earn money doing theoretical physics, there are many people who won't complain too loudly if you choose string theory, and many people advising grants be written for string theory research. Other fundamental theories don't have this lobby, not because they are in any measurable way more wrong than string theory, but by historical happenstance and perhaps pure mathematical sexiness (as opposed to actual physical reasons). Usually, in a natural science, we can fall back on empirical data to correct such "intellectually nepotistic" networks that all humans are wont to fall into, but since the standard model is so frigging successful, this is missing.
But no matter the actual reason, I think anyone with a post-graduate science education can agree that it's a pretty big howler to call string theory an A+++ physical theory, when it so far hasn't predicted a single thing. That's a clear sign that the people talking are engaged in empty PR, not in informing the public in any meaningful way.
For those that have the time and interest, Angela Collier is a somewhat newer science communicator, and covers everything described in this reply (and more) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E. I don't have the knowledge needed to criticize or defend Dr. Collier's arguments, but Woit linked to her video at https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13482, so he at least seems to appreciate it.
Thank you for your reply but I do not think you really engaged with my reasoning?
First, I was explicitly talking about the handful of brilliant people who literally no longer have to apply to grants, or, if they do so, they are all but guaranteed to get funding for whatever topic they want to work on.
And in your second paragraph you repeat the usual talking point. But why do you think it did not convince those people?
> why some of the very best theoretical physicists, who were entirely free to work on whatever they wanted, continued working on string theory
Historically, it is not unusual for intellectual wrong turns to persist for decades or centuries. On the flip side, brilliant insights can also be abandoned too early.
The problem here is that data has dried up and cannot guide us. Some future tech will open up new data and then progress will resume. Without data, physics becomes theology.
__________________________________________
Feynman's talk "Seeking New Laws" excerpt:
"But the age that we live in is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature. And that day will never come again. I don’t mean we’re finished. I mean, we’re right in the process of making such discoveries. It’s very exciting and marvelous, but this excitement will have to go.
Of course, in the future there will be other interests. There will be interests on the connection of one level of phenomena to another, phenomena in biology and so on, all kinds of things. Or if you’re talking about explorations, exploring planets and other things. But there will not still be the same thing as we’re doing now. It will be just different interests.
Another thing that will happen is that if all is known– ultimately, if it turns out all is known, it gets very dull– the biggest philosophy and the careful attention to all these things that I’ve been talking about will have gradually disappeared. The philosophers, who are always on the outside, making stupid remarks, will be able to close in. Because we can’t push them away by saying, well, if you were right, you’d be able to guess all the rest of the laws. Because when they’re all there, they’ll have an explanation for it.
For instance, there are always explanations as to why the world is three dimensional. Well, there’s only one world. And it’s hard to tell if that explanation is right or not. So if everything were known, there will be some explanation about why those are the right laws.
But that explanation will be in a frame that we can’t criticize by arguing that that type of reasoning will not permit us to go further. So there will be a degeneration of ideas, just like the degeneration that great explorers feel occurs when tourists begin moving in on their territory."
Without getting into what it means to "trust" Woit or anyone else, whether we're talking about specialists or domain outsiders like myself: if experts disagree, it's up to them to explain why. I can't guess why their superior knowledge has led them to reject the line of argument unless they tell me.
What I meant by "trust" is evidenced by this entire comment section, which is full of laypeople who appear convinced by Woit's arguments but seemingly do not wonder why the physicists in question were never swayed.
Witten has given quite a lot of interviews over the years, but his more mainstream views are unlikely to make it to the front page.
I think mainstream views would deserve attention if they're directly answering these criticisms. If such point by point responses exist, and if they're compelling, then that's what we should be talking about right now.
No one is ever free to work on whatever they want unless they can support themselves with their own funds. Researchers, even theoretical ones, apply for grants to pay for labor and resources to conduct research. Grants have specific scopes and objectives.
> What Woit could never explain properly was why some of the very best theoretical physicists, who were entirely free to work on whatever they wanted, continued working on string theory for so long.
As I understand it, they have stopped working on a string theory of quantum gravity or theory of everything, and instead shifted to trying to apply string theory to other areas such as cosmology. Which, frankly, looks to me a lot like researchers whose research didn't pan out trying to salvage their research rather than admit that decades of work didn't pan out.
It should also be pointed out that string theory has had a fairly hefty juggernaut of popular science PR behind it. That means being honest about your failures--especially towards a popular press, to whom your allies have been touting that you are the most important discoveries ever made--is going to invite a popular press backlash, up to and including accusations of fraud.
That's probably true and my association of the two is probably subjective since at the time I was learning about Chern-Simons and saw it used in both contexts https://www.math.purdue.edu/~ebkaufma/RMP.pdf
There is more to Not Even Wrong than criticizing string theory, there are great posts about theoretical developments, and great great discussion in the comments. Woit’s own interests of twistors and spinors are very interesting to me and seem very promising.
20 years of wasted time. Woit's alternative to string is to try to approach unification from looking at some of the open questions in the Standard Model, particularly why weak charge is only possessed by left-handed spinors.
But I just don't think he's serious enough about it, and there is the risk that - yes - superstring has dominated the scene for 40 years, yet the "chief defender of objectivity" for half that time has been Woit, who is too elitist to host any blue-skies open debates on short-cuts, anomalies and epicycles in the standard model (yes, its full of them), and how to simplify the mathematical framework to allow physical intuition to grasp new physical approaches. Instead, Woit seems - as a math instructor - to assume the standard model is 100% kosher (apart maybe from chiral electroweak symmetry breaking details). That's precisely where superstring goes wrong. If the correct theory is simply a logical superset which includes the standard model, then progress and unification would have been rapidly achieved 40 years ago. It's clearly more subtle than existing efforts have assumed. It's time to go back to basics and question everything.
D. Gross, Nobel Prize winner in physics for his work on the standard model, became a formidable fighter for string theory, but recently said: "We don't know what we are talking about."
One of those articles I'll upvote here but not reshare, because it's too niche in my social media presences and people won't read it. But damn, this stung because I think it reads true not only for a 66 year old but for a 40 year old as well. The mountains ahead both politically and scientifically seem insurmountable right now! There is a bittersweet beauty in this article though, in the spark that drives people to greatness all the way into old age, just out of a pure reason as childish curiosity.
Someone needs to defend string theory here. For one thing, it really is the only step beyond quantum field theory (the theoretical framework of the standard model) that actually works mathematically. And it contains gravity, along with all other types of force and particle observed. So it is still the best candidate for a theory of everything.
Part of what derailed string theory was actually an event in experimental particle physics - the discovery of the Higgs boson without any accompanying particles. Up until that point, theoretical physics had built up a certain paradigm for how to think about physics beyond the standard model. The nongravitational interactions would be unified in a "grand unified theory", and (slightly broken) supersymmetry would protect the Higgs boson mass from being massively increased by virtual particles. This paradigm is logically independent of string theory, but it was integrated into how string theorists think about reality, and in particular how "string phenomenologists" (the kind of people trying to identify which Calabi-Yau provides the shape of the extra dimensions) approach the task of applying string theory to reality.
The experimental evidence now tells us that this paradigm is almost certainly wrong. But there is no consensus on what should replace it, and there is very little attempt to identify new paradigms that would naturally find a home in string theory. String phenomenologists are still mostly looking at supersymmetric grand unification, and the string theory elders are pursuing topics in quantum gravity which are unlikely to yield empirical payoffs any time soon.
This comment section indicates that skeptics of string theory have won the battle for Internet public opinion. But smart money should bet on a revival of string theory once fruitful new paradigms are found.
Woit's blog is a real treasure, and that extends to the comments section. Much of the technical material he writes about is far past my understanding, but he writes so cogently that it's still a pleasure to read when I'm far over my head. Like others here I also highly recommend his book of the same title.
Well, it's not that he is the dark lord but rather that he is so far ahead of the curve in the craft of mathematical modeling in physics (he won the Fields Medal) that he can easily solve a lot of actual mundane problems but he chooses not to. Incidentally this seems to be the legacy of String Theory after 50 years, a powerful tool for mathematical modeling in physics and not a direct road to the ToE.
So, when you come up to him as a fellow theoretical physicist and criticize his "platonic" stance his reply would be - if he is bothered at all to answer: "Ah, so the thing you are working on, did you try ... gives essentially an elegant mathematical solution to your theoretical problem that you were trying to solve for months."
Of course this is embedded in an institutional failing - namely funding throughout the 50 years.
But as Planck - who found himself reluctantly in the middle of a turning point - remarked on how insurmountable institutions and the persons associated with it can become: Science progresses funeral by funeral.
On this note: Ed Witten's dad a theoretical physicist himself, still lives at the ripe age of 102.
> I remain mystified why anyone thinks it’s a good idea to discuss complex issues of theoretical physics in the Twitter format, flooded with all sorts of random stupidity.
Communicating science to the general public on public forums is extremely important, and probably should be considered a job requirement for all scientists. Several reasons:
1. Obviously it may affect how the public perceives science and its social and economic value, and thus how we vote, which can affect public funding for basic research necessary for advancing science.
2. More importantly, the antidote to chaos is reason and knowledge. We live in an era of increasing emotionalism, irrationality, and a flood of sophisticated disinformation strategically exploiting and amplifying those two to sew general chaos. Science communication on public forums gives the public an alternate perspective to consider. Without that alternative perspective, the battle is already lost.
These things are necessary even if it requires suffering being flooded with all sorts of random stupidity.
"Physicists are like lemons, you squeeze them dry then toss them away."
--- Carlo Rubbia
Started my Ph.D. in particle physics about the same year as the "first superstring revolution". Left the field post-PhD not due to any great foresight, but due to boredom.
With the benefit of hindsight, I was lucky to have done so. As it turned out I was on the tail end of the "Golden Age" of particle physics.
Woit is spot on. Find it remarkable that "string theory" and its various mutations still dominates the field after 4 decades of not being able to make testable predictions.
One almost feels sorry for the current generation of "the best and the brightest" theorists who have devoted most, if not all, of their careers to supersymmetry and string theory. Their predecessors built the Standard Model [SM], whereas their work has not lead to anything.
There are still open questions in the SM: neutrino mass, CP violation [a parametrization], QCD confinement [a Millennium Prize awaits], nature of the Higgs boson phase transition, why three generations, etc.
Someone one asked me, surprised, why I would leave the field that "investigates the fundament forces of nature".
I'm someone who once aspired to be a physicist but who dropped out when I couldn't figure it out. Most string theory always seemed kind of dumb. It started out fairly sensibly modeling the nuclear forces that keep protons from fly apart as them being connected by something string like. We now think gluons basically do that job. But having not got anywhere there it took on a life of it's own trying to be a theory of everything or something like that. Say you try to explain everything as strings and your bit of universe contains two electrons a mile apart. We know they repel. How does that work with strings? Do they ping billions of strings at each other trying to hit each other. It just doesn't seem to really work for anything other than grant applications.
Maybe I'm too dumb to get it but I kind of suspect the theory is just wrong.
Those are unrelated uses of the word string. The first (nuclear physics) is still used today as a classical model of a quantum force. The latter (particles) ultimately grew out of the late work of Einstein.
Sometimes your youthful common sense appraisal of something in the face of overwhelming consensus with orthodoxy was always the right one, but it takes your whole life to be proven out.
I try to think like, It's not that I think I know better. I know I don't have the facts. But I do have the ability to reason, and so you can explain a thing to me in a way that holds water, or fail to.
Reading between the lines, I see the great institutions are doing the same things the small universities that I worked at also do... do not admit failure. It is amazing that proverbially across campus in the psych or history or sociology departments, I bet they can tell the uni a thing or two about admitting failure and moving on, making you (or the institution) better. Truly I tell you, this makes me feel sad.
The view is that progress isn't because the established old guard changes opinion, it's because the next generation has better values.
More soberly, we see this in other aspects of the economy. The famous China Shock study [2] looked at the effects from ramping up trade with China on rural factory towns in the US.
The finding is dark: People who lost their living from "economic displacement" didn't move to a new city: they simply settled into their misery. However, the research shows their children do move to greener pastures.
Last one: home technology and feminism [3]. In the first half of the 20th century, many technologies drastically lessened the household workload - refrigerator, indoor plumbing, washing machine, etc.
The biggest effect was on the 2nd generation of women after WW2 - the women's children saw that they had more time, and started working en masse rather than aspiring to being homemakers.
"the program discussed here" links to https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13770, where by far the biggest of the listed grants is "$16 million from the Templeton Foundation". Templeton Foundation is basically a religious organization, or well, they promote "the intersection of religion and science"... Unsurprising that intellectual honesty went out the window in that funding drive.
Fast forward 10 years or so and I haven't regretted that decision. Not only is my pay much better doing this sort of thing but I really did nope out at the right time. I mean, I felt so smug about the noble prize being won by the attosecond researchers, one of whom had an office down the hall from our group. The same grad student who decided to bear the brunt of the CMS prof at the time justified the dearth of working in the group (although perhaps not the abuse, I don't know) as it would be potential "noble prize winning research." I feel I made the right bet at the time and don't regret it.