I hate to do it but I have to do it, the "String" phenomenon is an out-growth of the academic (industrial?) complex. When you have a group of closely knit scientists from a handful of universities who have a steady stream of cheap labor and fed by a media that bedazzles their untestable hypotheses, when you're propped up by that hype and prestige, the fumes that academics at the top feed off, then you can plunge further into the deep, while offsetting the externalities and opportunity costs onto governments and broken graduate students who eventually find themselves unemployable after about 5 to 6 years.<p>I smelled the stink early on when a project at the LHC I was joining found 6 (plus or minus 4!) possible supersymmetry events in the two years of PBs of LHC data(!) in their specific search. I made the bet against supersymmetry and went for a less hyped field, and now that their funding is drying up, I'm happily taking almost double (or more) the salary compared to other graduate students since I'm in another field. Haven't regretted since.<p>The hype behind string theory and HEP in general needs to die. There are so many interesting problems worthy of investigation that are not High Energy or Quantum Gravity. Yes, few things beat the fun math of HEP and string theory (although there are close contenders in the condensed matter world), few things--except perhaps validation in experiment...you know, the entire point of science in the first place.
The case for string theory<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ccXzM3x8A" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ccXzM3x8A</a><p>tl;dr - Nobody theorized strings. They were trying to solve the scattering problem of w-bosons and came up with a solution. The interpretation of the solution is strings.
> The significance of these negative results is not that they disconfirm a strong prediction of string theory, but that they pull the plug on the last remaining hope for connecting standard string theory unification scenarios to anything observable.<p>The reason String Theory first became so popular in the mid-1980's was because of its prediction of a massless chargeless spin-2 particle (the graviton) which behaves like gravity in a quantum setting. Surely this could be called a proven observation of String Theory?
It's very sad how so many bright physicists have made this their life's work, and yet:<p><i>the problem with string theory is that, in its landscape version, it has a hugely complicated and poorly understood high energy scale behavior, seemingly capable of producing a very wide range of possible observable effects, none of which have been seen</i>
Why doesn't pure math get similarly attacked? Clearly math has generated lots of economic and scientific value, but it seems to me that there isn't much difference between string theory and, say, math work on the Monster Moonshine group or whatever.
One reason why theories need to be testable is for checking out which of two theories is correct. If both theories fit with what has been observed so far, you think of a situation where they make different predictions, and then collect some new data and then see which theory turns out to be correct.<p>String theorists seem to think their theory is so beautiful that there is no need for it to be able to pass this sort of test.
If I understand the post correctly, it is not just that ST has not been verified, but that the way the theory has developed over time has made it harder to verify.
<i>I think the comparison to EM or GR is pretty much absurd. For one thing it’s comparing two completely different things: tests of a particular prediction of a theory (EM or GR) that made lots of other testable, confirmed predictions to the case of string theory, where there are no predictions at all. More relevant to the argument over how long to wait for an idea to pay off is that the real question is not the absolute value of the amount of progress, but the derivative: as you study the idea more carefully, do you get closer to testable progress or farther away? I don’t think anybody can serious claim that, 33 years on, we’re closer to a successful string theory unification proposal than we were at the start, back in 1985. I’d argue that the situation is the complete opposite: we have been steadily moving away from such success (and thus entered the realm of failure).</i><p>The problems string theory are attempting to answer are many magnitudes more complicated than general relativity and electromagnetism and hence require tests many magnitudes more precise and complicated. It's possible such tests may never be developed and that there may be many competing theories of everything with no way to ever ascertain which one is correct.<p>New theories take not just decades, but centuries to develop. There was at least a three-hundred year gap between the development of Newtonian gravity and general relativity. Much of string theory is only a couple decades old. If physicists and mathematicians decide that string theory is untenable, they will gradually abandon it, similar to how in capitalism products become obsoleted in favor of newer, better ones. There is no need for someone to determine which theories are worth pursuing or or not; the ‘marketplace’ of ideas does that automatically, gradually nudging the natural progression of research towards better ideas as old ones are discarded or modified. For example, 120 years ago aether theories were conjectured the propagation of light and gravitation, but these theories were later were supplanted by special relativity.<p><a href="http://greyenlightenment.com/falsifiability-string-theory-and-policy/" rel="nofollow">http://greyenlightenment.com/falsifiability-string-theory-an...</a>
String Theory succeeds because it offers a means that is logically consistent to bridge gravity and quantum mechanics, and the strings themselves are building blocks for all particles. If someone can come up with a logically consistent theory that is as encompassing as string theory and can be tested and verified with existing technology, the physics community is all ears.<p>The tyranny of verificationism impedes scientific progress. Let string theorists do their thing/string.
This is just a link to Peter Woit's blog. I'm assuming you meant to link to the most recent entry (as per the title): <a href="https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9375" rel="nofollow">https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9375</a><p>(Could we get a mod to fix this? Thank you!)