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Originally Posted by RedLeader /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Okay... but to believe that you have to accept string theory. I wish the physics community weren't so utterly draconian in their squashing of alternative theories. One of the reasons I never bothered with that line of work, if you don't buy into string theory, you pretty much can't make it today. And come on... if you've done the research how can you possibly take string theory as anything other than a whimsical farce?
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I'm almost finished reading the excellent book
The Trouble with Physics -- the Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science by Lee Smolin, which addresses exactly this problem.
This is a sobering and provocative book at the same time: Smolin is alarmed by his observation that theoretical physics has stopped -- in the sense that there is no new, fundamental theory that makes experimentally confirmable predictions -- since the early 80s. Smolin attributes this crises, which has never occurred ever since the days of Newton, to the physics community being caught up in a wild-goose chase called String Theory.
Smolin, who has himself spent years on String Theory research, recounts how the theory initially won the collective enthusiasm -- including his own -- of the physics community. Reading the pages, you can almost share his own bright-eyed excitement in those days: at long last, we have a theory that asks for so few assumptions, has such an elegant formulation, and promises solutions to age-old puzzles. It seemed that the final act of theoretical physics was upon us.
Yet, as more brilliant minds are being dedicated to string theory, it became apparent to Smolin (and a small handful of others) that string theory is getting nowhere. Two of the most important problems are:
1. We're not talking about one string theory. Depending on such things as how those funky extra spatial dimensions are "coiled up", there are at least 10 to the power 500 possible string
theories -- and that's not counting renegade theories which says that matter doesn't exist or that the universe degenerate into a black hole soon after it was born. There is no way to put so many theories to test: if one theory doesn't agree with experiment, you can always fall back on another. Hence, string theory is virtually unconfirmable, virtually unfalsifyable, and has no predictive power -- and that is bad science.
2. One of the greatest insights of General Relativity is that space and time are not fixed; the mere presence of matter and energy distorts space-time. The current formulations of string theroies, however, tacitly assume that the fundamental entities (be they strings or higher-dimensional "branes") move and interact in an unchanging, classical space-time. String theories initally promised to unite General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and it is ironic that it pays no heed to something so essential to General Relativity.
Smolin also reasons that appeal to the
Anthropic Principle, fashionable among physicists, is a lost cause: anthropic principle has never explained anything (contrary to what has been claimed by many authors), nor it ever will.
In the final part of the book (which I'm still reading), Smolin investigates the "sociology" of the physics community, and the psychology behind. He states that, in the US, a graduate of theoretical physics has basically no hope of getting a job unless he or she specialises in string theory. String theory have monopolized the brightest of minds, and alternate theories -- Smolin recounts a few: unsurprisingly, all originated in Europe -- has no chance to develop.
