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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: 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?)