I also just really enjoy Brian Greene, his books, and the World Science Festival Youtube channel.
I definitely don't walk away from any of Brian Greene's content thinking that String Theory is anything close to a confirmed fact at all.
It's been some times since I read his earlier books, possibly his tone has changed?
I'll also say, I'm far from a professional physicist. I'm reading and watching for fun and intellectual curiosity, not to learn physics with the goal of doing my own research. I always thought of String Theory as being more of a study of math where many people have unsuccessfully tried to apply it to physics. And, that it's lead to some really interesting ideas. I just find him and his work really enjoyable.
A few debates between Brian and other notables; Hossenfelder, Eric Weinstein, and Roger Penrose to name a few; have popped up in my youtube feed lately which are typically also engaging.
Hossenfelder has gone off the "the physics establishment is all idiots and they are suppressing the real physics" deep end and has converted specific complaints into trashing the entire field.
Most, but not all
If you do research it becomes pretty apparent that a high number papers are not great. There's varying issues, but a big one is that the funding model incentivises pumping out papers which are often of low quality, researching whatever happens to be in vogue at the moment
Literally everyone I've ever talked to in research as a frank conversation knows that this is a massive problem, but nobody wants to talk about it publicly. Research funding is already completely screwed as it is, and researchers are incredibly aware of how fragile their livelihoods are
Its clearly leading to a big reduction in the quality of the literature. I went on a replication spree recently and found that a pretty decent chunk of the field I was working in was completely unreplicable by me, with a few papers that I strongly suspect 'massaged' their results for various reasons
I wish someone would talk about this who wasn't also in bed with right wing grifters, and was actually credible. We need someone more like ben goldacre for physics
Sabine's most interesting content is the paper reviews, and where she sticks to actually examining the evidence - but it makes up a tiny fraction of what she produces these days, and her support for some truly grim figures is just gross
I pretty strongly disagree with that categorization of Collier's video, as it makes it sound like string theorists were innocent bystanders and "the big bad media" just ran overboard.
I think she puts the blame squarely on string theorists (e.g. "celebrity string theorists who wrote all these books") as constantly hyping up the field with promises of "in a decade it will be amazing" - a phrase she uses to great dramatic effect throughout the video - despite never acknowledging the fact that it fails miserably at making testable predictions.
When she says "they lied to us", the "they" she's clearly talking about are specific researchers in the field (which she names), and the string research community more broadly, who are hyping up their field, not just "the media".
Later, non-Euclidean geometry was actually essential to modern physics.
It's intellectually sketchy to judge future value by the present.
Energy to vaporize Earth's oceans: ~4 x 10^27 J
For a Planck-scale linear collider at LHC-like collision rates (~10^8/sec):
Beam power requirement: ~2 x 10^17 W
With realistic wall-plug efficiency of ~1%: ~2 x 10^19 W
Annual energy consumption: ~6 x 10^26 J
At 1% efficiency, one year of operation would:
Vaporize about 15% of Earth's oceans
Or vaporize the Mediterranean Sea roughly 50 times
Or boil Lake Superior every 5 hours
Or one complete ocean vaporization every 6-7 years of operation
It's about 1 million times current global power consumption
Or about 50,000 Suns running continuously
Or 170 billion Large Hadron Colliders operating simultaneously
Even accepting the premise that string theory is wrong I can list hundreds of ways the US budget spews money down black holes orders of magnitude bigger. The spending on string theory isn’t even a rounding error compared to the way my tax dollars are allocated to special interest pork.
But only string theory impinges on a generation of cranks who are convinced they alone have the insight into the true ToE and would be recognized as the new Einstein were it not for some entrenched cabal. Maybe I shouldn’t reflexively trust “big science” or something but it’s also not great to evaluate science by who is more charismatically narcissistic on a podcast.
Again, I don’t have a big axe to grind on the merits here. But it’s hilarious that folks with zero science background past middle school hear some of these cranks on YouTube and feel worthy to decry Witten as an enemy of the people. Between the podcast bro who was just told his ToE was right by ChatGPT and Witten I’ll take Witten.
how the government wastes money elsewhere is irrelevant to the conversation. Its about proper management of research funding and how string theorists managed tp trick us into funding failure for whole academic careers.
In short, there is no known single real world experiment that can rule out string theory while keeping general relativity and quantum mechanics intact.
More accurately, string theory is not wrong (because it just cannot be wrong), but it does not help to advance our understanding of how to integrate general relativity and quantum mechanics.
One day some unusual observation will come along from somewhere, and that will be the loose end that allows someone to start pulling at the whole ball of yarn. Will this happen in our lifetimes? Unlikely, I think.
Your implicit point is a good one. Is it sensible to have a huge chunk of the entire theoretical physics community working endlessly on a theory that could well end up being basically useless? Probably not.
tuhgdetzhh•2h ago
SiempreViernes•1h ago
atakan_gurkan•1h ago
What does string theory predict that (1) is within experimental reach in, say, 5 years (2) if not found, would prove it wrong. Was there ever anything satisfying these two simultaneously? AFAIK,the answer is "no".
ecosystem•1h ago
tejohnso•1h ago
bluGill•1h ago
mtoner23•1h ago