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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) 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