[HN Gopher] Approaching 50 Years of String Theory
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Approaching 50 Years of String Theory
https://web.archive.org/web/20251220040318/https://www.math....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAbP0magTVY
Author : jjgreen
Score : 36 points
Date : 2025-12-20 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.math.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.math.columbia.edu)
| tuhgdetzhh wrote:
| An in half a century we still haven't found a single actually
| testable prediction.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| I think that's not quite right: it is reasonably certain that
| string theory can produce both the standard model and most
| extensions people have dreamt up, so the problem is rather that
| all the obviously "stringy" predictions are currently
| unavailable, while the string theory derived predictions for
| achievable experiments look like what we get from other
| theories we already have.
| atakan_gurkan wrote:
| To make this valuable, it should produce a limited set
| including standard model. If you produce pretty much
| everything one can dream of, that does not carry predictive
| power.
|
| What does string theory predict that (1) is within
| experimental reach in, say, 5 years (2) if not found, would
| prove it wrong. Was there ever anything satisfying these two
| simultaneously? AFAIK,the answer is "no".
| ecosystem wrote:
| Making a hard, arbitrary deadline is a pretty extreme thing
| to do. ie Higgs Boson was a lot longer between theory and
| experiment than this.
| tejohnso wrote:
| But we've discovered a number of useful tools and techniques
| that are applicable to other areas of research have we not? The
| billions of dollars spent on string theory hype might have
| unlocked a strategy or technique that ends up being useful in a
| civilization changing way that we just don't know about yet.
| Maybe string theory and the hype it was able to generate was
| just the catalyst that we needed.
| bluGill wrote:
| what didn't se develop because those people were working on
| string theory? That is an unanswerable question. It is also
| the important question.
| mtoner23 wrote:
| Compared to all the other useless endeavors we send our
| brightest minds to work on (optimizing ad sales, high
| frequency trading, crypto) I'd say physics research has the
| highest chance of being useful
| mkw5053 wrote:
| I thought Brian Greene did a great job interviewing Edward Witten
| (Fields Medal winner) on the World Science Festival Youtube
| channel [1].
|
| I also just really enjoy Brian Greene, his books, and the World
| Science Festival Youtube channel.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAbP0magTVY
| Levitating wrote:
| You might not like Angela Collier's video on string theory[1].
|
| [1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E
| mkw5053 wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for sharing!
|
| I definitely don't walk away from any of Brian Greene's
| content thinking that String Theory is anything close to a
| confirmed fact at all.
|
| It's been some times since I read his earlier books, possibly
| his tone has changed?
|
| I'll also say, I'm far from a professional physicist. I'm
| reading and watching for fun and intellectual curiosity, not
| to learn physics with the goal of doing my own research. I
| always thought of String Theory as being more of a study of
| math where many people have unsuccessfully tried to apply it
| to physics. And, that it's lead to some really interesting
| ideas. I just find him and his work really enjoyable.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Thanks for posting that; as soon as I saw the title here I
| was going to look that up if no one else had already. Sabine
| Hossenfelder too, though there's far too much content from
| her on this to put a list, but anyone interested might like
| some of her takes.
|
| A few debates between Brian and other notables; Hossenfelder,
| Eric Weinstein, and Roger Penrose to name a few; have popped
| up in my youtube feed lately which are typically also
| engaging.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Hossenfelder is not really comparable to Collier. Collier's
| video is critical of string theory as a testable framework
| but she ultimately still supports people who do research in
| string theory. Most of her criticism is with media coverage
| of string theory, not the research or the researchers.
|
| Hossenfelder has gone off the "the physics establishment is
| all idiots and they are suppressing the real physics" deep
| end and has converted specific complaints into trashing the
| entire field.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| I'm not a fan of Hossenfelder, especially for casting
| quacks like Weinstein, but AFAICT she isn't about
| "suppressing the real physics" but more of a
| "establishment physics is wasting money and time, and a
| lot is equally bad/good as some alternative physics."
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah I think most of what (negative) people attribute to
| her is mostly her being hopelessly German.
|
| Most, but not all
| Levitating wrote:
| Don't agree, she spreads misinformation, she's
| disrespectful to other scientists and basically has
| resorted to just claiming that everything in academics is
| wrong. YouTube fame has completely radicalized her.
| Levitating wrote:
| I think here more recent takes are not nearly as nuanced.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| A year ago that might have been the case. Her more recent
| stuff is fairly dire. I believe that the algorithm
| encourages her and channels like hers to become more and
| more conspiratorial and less and less nuanced.
| tejohnso wrote:
| I thought her rant about bullshit papers was pretty
| convincing and poignant.
| 20k wrote:
| The problem with sabine is that she's become the worst
| person to make a correct point for the wrong reasons
|
| If you do research it becomes pretty apparent that a high
| number papers are not great. There's varying issues, but
| a big one is that the funding model incentivises pumping
| out papers which are often of low quality, researching
| whatever happens to be in vogue at the moment
|
| Literally everyone I've ever talked to in research as a
| frank conversation knows that this is a massive problem,
| but nobody wants to talk about it publicly. Research
| funding is already completely screwed as it is, and
| researchers are incredibly aware of how fragile their
| livelihoods are
|
| Its clearly leading to a big reduction in the quality of
| the literature. I went on a replication spree recently
| and found that a pretty decent chunk of the field I was
| working in was completely unreplicable by me, with a few
| papers that I strongly suspect 'massaged' their results
| for various reasons
|
| I wish someone would talk about this who wasn't also in
| bed with right wing grifters, and was actually credible.
| We need someone more like ben goldacre for physics
|
| Sabine's most interesting content is the paper reviews,
| and where she sticks to actually examining the evidence -
| but it makes up a tiny fraction of what she produces
| these days, and her support for some truly grim figures
| is just gross
| Levitating wrote:
| Collier made a video fairly recently where she showed
| disappointment that her videos are watched by people who
| also watch Hossenfelder.
|
| https://youtu.be/miJbW3i9qQc
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Most of her criticism is with media coverage of string
| theory, not the research or the researchers.
|
| I pretty strongly disagree with that categorization of
| Collier's video, as it makes it sound like string
| theorists were innocent bystanders and "the big bad
| media" just ran overboard.
|
| I think she puts the blame squarely on string theorists
| (e.g. "celebrity string theorists who wrote all these
| books") as constantly hyping up the field with promises
| of "in a decade it will be amazing" - a phrase she uses
| to great dramatic effect throughout the video - despite
| _never_ acknowledging the fact that it fails miserably at
| making testable predictions.
|
| When she says "they lied to us", the "they" she's clearly
| talking about are specific researchers in the field
| (which she names), and the string research community more
| broadly, who are hyping up their field, not just "the
| media".
| dang wrote:
| The OP is about that video, though one wouldn't know it from a
| web page that won't download. I've put an archive.org link in
| the toptext now.
| grunder_advice wrote:
| I wonder what Ed Witten would have accomplished if he had gone
| into another field instead of choosing to dedicate his life to
| mathematical physics.
| tome wrote:
| Not sure if you're making a joke about this, but Ed Witten
| tried a number of fields before settling on theoretical
| physics.
| r721 wrote:
| You reminded me about this Abstruse Goose comic:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230202225744/https://abstruseg...
| greenavocado wrote:
| The Planck scale where string theory's distinctive physics should
| appear is around 10^19 GeV. The LHC operates at about 10^4 GeV.
| That's a factor of 10^15 which is a million billion times too
| weak. No foreseeable accelerator technology can bridge this gap.
| The proposed Future Circular Collider (FCC) would reach maybe
| 10^5 GeV. Still 14 orders of magnitude short.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| So the grift can continue
| ecosystem wrote:
| Non-Euclidean geometry (geometric axioms in which one
| postulate is rejected such that the 3 angles of a triangle
| are not exactly 180 degrees) was considered a meaningless
| word game and fundamental mistruth.
|
| Later, non-Euclidean geometry was actually essential to
| modern physics.
|
| It's intellectually sketchy to judge future value by the
| present.
| cess11 wrote:
| I imagine that elliptic geometry had some use before modern
| physics.
| saghm wrote:
| Yeah, even just trying chart a course on a ship across a
| reasonable distance will cause you to need to reevaluate
| some "obvious" things (like "what path is the shortest
| between these two ports" being a curve rather than a
| line).
| emil-lp wrote:
| In the 1700s, perhaps. But we have come a long way since
| that.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Might as well fund someone researching whether quantum
| theory run on little gnomes, if there is no serious path to
| verification after 50 years, why not quantum gnomes?
| Elextric wrote:
| Ideally, one should explore all possibilities. It is
| remarkable how far "merely" predicting the next word has
| taken us.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| That was constant progress with measurable goals, not
| "big things are coming decade from now" every decade.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| > We should stop funding research into prime numbers.
| They're stupid and useless. Who cares about them, if they
| will never be used for anything? Number theory should be
| stopped, you may as well research gnomes.
|
| I imagine this is what you would have sounded like 100
| years ago.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| you are mixing up gambling spend vs whole industry spend.
| If string theory was a small handful of people making up a
| small m*nority of physics departments like non-euclidea
| geometry research was that would be fine. Its huge swaths
| of most physics departments and a huge suck on research
| funding. For that kind of spend you better show results
| because you are in production phase at that point not lotto
| ticket moonshit phase. If we are buying lotto tickets with
| the money bey lots of different lotto tickets not a whole
| bunch of one lotto ticket
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| I think you are vastly overestimating the number of
| string physicists and how much their non-experimental
| research costs.
|
| There's maybe a couple or few hundred-ish in the whole
| world that focus on it. And they don't need much money
| because it's pretty much all math.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| > m*nority
|
| Is this a typo? I see a lot of words being censored these
| days and I assumed it's because of some algorithms and
| visibility. That shouldn't be the case here tho..
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Non-Euclidean geometry (geometric axioms in which one
| postulate is rejected such that the 3 angles of a triangle
| are not exactly 180 degrees) was considered a meaningless
| word game and fundamental mistruth.
|
| This is just a lie though. Non-Euclidean geometry is a
| mathematical model of how distances behave on non-linear
| spaces. Nobody ever believed it to be a "fundamental
| mistruth", even suggesting it would look ridiculous. It
| would be akin to denying linear algebra, even the meaning
| is unclear.
|
| That the physical reality of space is not linear was a
| shocking revelation, since all human experience and
| basically every experiment done up until that point
| indicated otherwise.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Planck energy: ~10^19 GeV is approx 2 GJ per collision
|
| Energy to vaporize Earth's oceans: ~4 x 10^27 J
|
| For a Planck-scale linear collider at LHC-like collision
| rates (~10^8/sec):
|
| Beam power requirement: ~2 x 10^17 W
|
| With realistic wall-plug efficiency of ~1%: ~2 x 10^19 W
|
| Annual energy consumption: ~6 x 10^26 J
|
| At 1% efficiency, one year of operation would:
|
| Vaporize about 15% of Earth's oceans
|
| Or vaporize the Mediterranean Sea roughly 50 times
|
| Or boil Lake Superior every 5 hours
|
| Or one complete ocean vaporization every 6-7 years of
| operation
|
| It's about 1 million times current global power consumption
|
| Or about 50,000 Suns running continuously
|
| Or 170 billion Large Hadron Colliders operating
| simultaneously
| gnfargbl wrote:
| People often say that the problem with string theory is that it
| doesn't make any prediction, but that's not quite right: the
| problem is that it can make almost any prediction you want it to
| make. It is really less of a "theory" in its own right and more
| of a mathematical framework for constructing theories.
|
| One day some unusual observation will come along from somewhere,
| and that will be the loose end that allows someone to start
| pulling at the whole ball of yarn. Will this happen in our
| lifetimes? Unlikely, I think.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Or, that day will never come, because string theory isn't
| reflective of the actual world, or because there are so many
| theories possible under the string theory rubric that we can
| never find the right one, or because the energies involved to
| see any effect are far beyond what could be reached in
| experiment.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| It isn't _completely_ implausible that a future civilisation
| could perform the experiments to gather that data, somehow;
| but it is hard to envisage how we do it here on Earth.
|
| Your implicit point is a good one. Is it sensible to have a
| huge chunk of the entire theoretical physics community
| working endlessly on a theory that could well end up being
| basically useless? Probably not.
| tlogan wrote:
| I am old enough to remember when string theory was expected to
| explain and unify all forces and predict everything. Sadly, it
| failed to deliver on that promise.
|
| And there is no known single real world experiment that can
| rule out string theory while keeping general relativity and
| quantum mechanics intact.
|
| More accurately, string theory is not wrong (because it just
| cannot be wrong). Because it does not predict anything and
| cannot invalidate anything, it does not help to advance our
| understanding of how to integrate general relativity and
| quantum mechanics.
|
| It should not be called theory - maybe set of mathematical
| tools or whatever.
| giardini wrote:
| Hasn't ChatGPT solved string theory yet?
| tim333 wrote:
| String theory has always seemed intuitively wrong to me. From
| Wikipedia:
|
| >In theories of particle physics based on string theory, the
| characteristic length scale of strings is assumed to be on the
| order of the Planck length, or 10E-35 meters
|
| Yet electrons repel each other over distances of many meters by I
| think the virtual exchange of photons. How on earth would that
| work? How does your photo string know to head to an electron
| string trillions and trillions of times it's length away?
|
| As far as I can tell the field became popular for sociological
| reasons that you could get grants for it and the like rather than
| any connection to reality(?)
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