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It's one of the most brilliant, controversial and unproven ideas in all of physics: string theory. At the heart of string theory is the thread of an idea that's run through physics for centuries, that at some fundamental level, all the different forces, particles, interactions and manifestations of reality are tied together as part of the same framework. Instead of four independent fundamental forces -- strong, electromagnetic, weak and gravitational -- there's one unified theory that encompasses all of them. In many regards, string theory is the best contender for a quantum theory of gravitation, which just happens to unify at the highest-energy scales. Although there's no experimental evidence for it, there are compelling theoretical reasons to think it might be true. A year ago, the top living string theorist, Ed Witten, wrote a piece on what every physicist should know about string theory. Here's what that means, translated for non-physicists.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:34AM
String theory:
It's an unproven theory that just seems to work out OK, but doesn't really make any useful predictions. In other words, it doesn't change everything. In fact, it doesn't change anything. It's a lot like the marketing department where you work.
Speaking of which, get back to work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:34AM
uhm, no.
string theory works perfectly.
its only problem is that it's so general, it's (for the moment) practically impossible to get anything useful out of it.
using string theory to describe the universe is like using quantum mechanics to describe a lion stalking and then attacking a zebra.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:30AM
If you cannot use string theory to describe the universe, it does not work as a physical theory. It is no more useful than the theory that the universe behaves how it does because god told the universe to behave as it does.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:41AM
there is a difference.
the fact that right now we cannot make effective use of string theory does not mean that it will forever be useless (unlike the god theory).
I'm not advocating for piling on the funding for string theorists.
but I certainly think it should receive some funding, certainly more than is given to the high frequency trading crooks.
by the way.
I taught a math class to people who wanted to work on WallStreet.
I know why I call them crooks.
(Score: 2) by dlb on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:00PM
the fact that right now we cannot make effective use of string theory does not mean that it will forever be useless (unlike the god theory).
Agreed. It took a bit before Einstein's theories showed their practical side.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:30PM
His theories were always testable, it's just that in many cases the technology to actually test them had to come along after the fact. But, much of the really important stuff was tested during his lifetime and quickly enough that people knew there was merit to it in reality.
It's been how many decades now without any meaningful progress along those lines with string theory? The testing is what tells us that something is science, right now all it is is a set of fancy math formulas that may or may not ever come to anything, but we don't know, because they still aren't being tested with any sort of regularity. Even the incredibly complicated and difficult area of quantum mechanics had made far more progress in the first few decades of its existence.
(Score: 2) by dlb on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:46PM
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:27PM
The fact that we can't use it now doesn't make it useless. What makes it useless is that we're decades into this and there is still a distinct lack of testable hypotheses. I can't think of any other area of study that's been less productive in recent times. Sure, we've got some fancy math out of it, but that's not science.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:45AM
If you cannot use string theory to describe the universe, it does not work as a physical theory. It is no more useful than the theory that the universe behaves how it does because god told the universe to behave as it does.
So let me get this straight: string theory is how God told the universe, but string theorists, being those that understand God, can change the parameters so that we do not need God. God damn, in more ways than one.
But, yeah, not predictable experimental outcomes, and it is all dark matter from there on out. And of course this is the universe, since god would only have created the most perfectly perfect universe that was perfect. ( Spinoza channeled through Leibniz here) Thus, this is the most perfect universe, and everything in it is a vibrating string! (OK, original quote, from F. H. Bradley, everything is a necessary evil, close enough?)
(Score: 1) by Ramze on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:52PM
Well... String theory, M theory, and p-brane theory (yeah, they actually named it that. lol) are all frameworks for possible realities. No one has yet discovered which derivation of the theory actually fits our universe best, so it can't make proper predictions about unknowns.
Quantum mechanics makes predictions, and string theory basically uses particle physics discoveries and quantum mechanics predictions to narrow down which formulas describe our universe in string theory. String theory itself isn't actually useful for anything yet other than parroting quantum mechanics. It may never be. Or, maybe we'll get lucky and figure out which parameters for string theory correspond with our universe (if any) and literally discover everything.
String theory is short for superstring theory... which itself is short for super-symmetric string theory. We don't even know if super-symmetry exists, and if it doesn't, at least our explanation of it collapses. It's possible the whole thing is hogwash as it was constructed to make the quantum mechanical math more elegant, but hasn't really shown much otherwise.
Well... I take that back -- the Higgs Boson was predicted long before string theory, but the Higgs field is what allowed string theory to look so elegant to begin with -- by separating out the mass terms to make a lot of the equations more unified. In a sense, the Higgs verified string theory was on the right track. It could still be wrong, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @04:54AM
Armchair physicist here.
I've always been confused by popular accounts of "string theory". Specifically, I believe the original string theory, and even other variants are not necessarily supersymmetric, and yet I see popular accounts saying string theory means superstring theory means supersymmetric string theory. The first part of that seems invalid if string theory is not synonymous with supersymmetric string theory.
Not quite sure what I'm missing here. What would a non-SUSY string theory be called in the literature, and are there reasons it's not really viable?
Thanks
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:23PM
No. String theory work fine at describing the universe. It just has so many places where it requires empirically derived values that it isn't useful as a general theory. It can describe a number of universes so large as to make the EWG multiverse look small. I don't know if it could match the theory used in Heinlein's "Number of the Beast", but it's not far short of that. (That theory was, basically, anything anyone can thing of it out there somewhere.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:40PM
using string theory to describe the universe is like using quantum mechanics to describe a lion stalking and then attacking a zebra.
You mean doing many pages of calculations and then still not know if the zebra is alive, dead or both?
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.