It has exactly none of the problems of string theory, and I am not sure why it's clumped with a physics paper in the blog. How is it a problem to say "hey they used string theory tools!" in a press release? If anything it might get other people to look at the math and get something good out of it...
“My nervousness was perhaps at its greatest because the illustrative area that I had elected to discuss, namely string theory and some of its various descendants, had been developed to its heights in Princeton probably more than anywhere else in the world.”
“Moreover, that subject is a distinctly technical one, and I cannot claim competence over many of its important ingredients, my familiarity with these technicalities being somewhat limited, particularly in view of my status as an outsider.”
“Yet, if only the insiders are considered competent to make critical comments about the subject, then the criticisms are likely to be limited to relatively technical issues, some of the broader aspects of criticism being, no doubt, significantly neglected.”
The fact that Penrose felt nervous criticizing string theory has made me think less of string theory (or rather, the humans behind it) ever since.
That's from 2003, when the string theory theorists were riding high and attacking string theory was bad for a physicist's career. Now, "with string theorists now virtually unemployable unless they can figure out how to rebrand as machine learning experts...", the situation has reversed.
String theorists understand high-dimensional math, so maybe they can do something for machine learning theory. Probably not, but we can hope. It's frustrating how much of a black box machine learning systems are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAbP0magTVY
I think it is a great watch for anyone with an interest in the field.
I knew a someone who was a temp visitor at the Institute for Advanced Studies who was given temp office next to Witten. And he said he wouldn't hear a noise, and the one day he starts typing and doesn't stop until 100 pages of paper are written, like he has it finished in his mind before he starts typing. Somehow I'm inclined to believe it can't be far from truth.
Yet, no one knows how to turn it into an actual theory in physics. It feels like we had QFT but weren't able to create the Standard Model.
It is, obviously, possible that the String Theory framework is just too broad. Or that it is in principle true, but we reached a level where it is too hard. Or it is just a step in the right direction, but we are missing something.
Given the effort of the smartest minds and still no progress (I do not think there is any hype left), it is possible that we need to wait for something more. Like the revival of artificial neural networks in the 2010s, after decades of slumber.
rbanffy•49m ago
qoez•41m ago
qarl•35m ago
Has it been rigorously shown that it can never be tested? Or is that your prediction?
bluGill•30m ago
But yes, not rigorous.
ekjhgkejhgk•28m ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336655
AnimalMuppet•19m ago
ekjhgkejhgk•16m ago
The TLDR is that you can never expect the same level of certainty when you don't have direct experiments, but you can still rule out _some_ hypothesis, and see how far other hypothesis take you. This is called theoretical physics. Just because you can't make an experiment doesn't mean you can't do anything.
queuebert•11m ago
ekjhgkejhgk•8m ago
Certainly internal self-consistency will take you a long way if you don't have experiments. Some people find beauty in this :-)
Tazerenix•8m ago
- Albert Einstein
Animats•16m ago
Meanwhile, there's interesting experimental action in low-energy physics, down near absolute zero. Many of the weirder predictions of quantum mechanics have now been observed directly. Look at the list of Nobel laureates in physics since 1990. A big fraction of them involve experiments with very low energy states, where thermal noise is small enough that quantum effects dominate. Some of that work led to useful technology. That's forward progress.
watersb•1m ago
Astronomers can observe extremely energetic environments from a great distance.
It's not a controlled experiment, but sometimes they get lucky and see something that suggests new physics.
I have no idea what might be needed to provide astronomical evidence for string theory.
slashdave•2m ago