One of the biggest problems in science (in general) is that your reputation and therefore funding is highly tied to a particular subfield. Everyone in a subfield knows each other and gives positive grant reviews and external tenure letters to other practitioners. If you try to move on to new areas of research, your reputation and funding are gone. The outcome is that areas of research interest become quasi-permanent, even when they are no longer interesting. I talk to the people today that still work in my specialty of nuclear physics (relativistic heavy ion physics) and I'm shocked at how little intellectual progress has been made. At the risk of offending people it's time to give up and declare victory, but the consequences would be dire (hundreds of professors all over the world without grants).
I think you are absolutely on the right track, but in my view the problem is less tightly coupled to the funding and more institutional.
As a professor it is simply extremely unnatural to just drop your main area of research.
First, your academic network will almost entirely stem from the subfield you have been working on. This affects the expectations of your PhD students, the recruitment of postdocs (who are often swapped between colleagues in the subfield), and the conferences you visit -- where you will see all the familiar faces of colleagues you have known for years.
Second, your mind has been shaped significantly by years of working in your own little subfield. It is easy to come up with ten projects in your area, rank them by difficulty as well as the interest they would generate amongst your colleagues, and help your students to execute them. It is significantly harder to do anything like that outside your subfield; for one, you will not have the mentoring that a typical PhD student has.
hundreds of professors without funding would not be dire consequences, imo. I feel like it would be a market correction. what will universities do? fire them and let the administrators teach?
I read you comment as another anecdote towards the general belief that higher education requires a refactor for many parties and the general growth of knowledge creation.
If there is funding, there is apparently a need for research.
The solution is never for the individuals to induce change. This doesn't work for consumers (i.e. you can't say "If everyone stops buying plastic bags, we do something for the environment", because well, nobody cares... You have to make selling plastic bags either illegal or add a significant surcharge that causes consumers to avoid them for reasons that actually affect them, like "too expensive")
And it doesn't work for anything else either. As long as there is funding, this will go on. The "solution" is to stop funding, but apparently since funding is still flowing, someone still values the research. So what is even the problem?
No progress has been made? Well, if funding is still there, whoever funds this seems to be beyond happy with the progress. This is a non-issue.
In computer science, researchers who had spent decades working on feature engineering for images got completely blown out of the water by deep learning. All those decades of papers would never get another cite. Everyone moved on.
String theory doesn't actually do anything though, so there's no way to say it's better or worse than anything else. It's like someone saying they're working on solving the halting problem or something and eventually they'll get there and they've been working on it for 20 years without any code that actually works. At some point, you just have to give up and do something else. They keep getting grants to work on this stuff though for some reason. Someone needs to interview the people who are giving out string theory grants and ask them why the heck they are still giving these people money.
There might still be some value in it. I think people will use tools like AdS/CFT correspondence for a while. And it is worth remembering that in terms of actual dollars, fundamental physics research is not that big of a spend. Like, part of the reason why these articles are important, is that the pie is so small to start with. So I don't worry too much about the string theory grant money, if anything I would not mind the absolute dollar amount going up if the relative fraction decreased with it.
The one thing that kind of irks me is this Kaku book “The God Equation.” I have only seen one equation that is so universally applicable that it could deserve that title, and even then I would be hesitant about that because it might give people the wrong impression. (It is the transport equation—it keeps appearing and appearing, a bunch of other equations are special cases of it, it is involved in one of the million-dollar Clay Mathematics prizes so there is clearly something hard/intractable about it, and it has a term which refers to creation and destruction. It says, a box flows downstream, the time rate of change of stuff in the box is equal to the flow J of stuff through the walls of the box plus the rate Φ of stuff being created/destroyed in the fluid. Or, ∂ρ/∂t + (v · ∇) ρ = - ∇ · J + Φ.)
> for images got completely blown out of the water by deep learning
Deep learning might be a good example. The underlying neural networks has been a “dormant science” for decades until its breakthrough.
I wouldn’t be so sure either that image feature processing won’t get another cite. More likely they will show up in preprocessing again as the boundaries of deep learning get pushed.
I’m not so sure; I think a _lot_ of people would be interested in advanced in non-ML image analysis tech. While ML has been effective for a recent period in industry, it has a number of issues such as intensive training costs, extreme difficulty in fully understanding the behavior of a model (since we can only do experimental verification, and only on behaviors we know to be interesting already), and ethical issues such as unintended gender/racial bias. Just off the top of my head.
I think what you are pointing is really the most toxic part of tech: marketers and investors have found that tech is a good way to aggregate money, and so they have a thrown a lot of funding at tech that can aggregate for them. However, we haven’t actually proven that that tech is the best solution or a sustainable solution. We don’t understand most of what we do with computers very well, we just approximate until it works well enough (for the marketers and investors, of course).
ML and deep learning are very valuable, of course, but their recent market dominance doesn’t indicate that they are the final or most correct solution to the problems they are being used for. It indicates that people want to spend money on it right now.
The halting problem is a poor example as there is already a simple proof showing that such a solution does not exist.
A much better example is P=NP. This is a very rich area of research with many closely related problems that has been worked on for decades and will continue to be worked on for the foreseeable future.
That String Theory continues to adhere to known results keeps it in the candidate pool. If it can make the same predictions as the current framework, then it makes sense to keep working on both because neither has a known advantage over the other in predicting unknown phenomena. The only way to find out is to continue exploring all such theories. Since human talent and research is limited, it becomes an economic problem. Is it worth having half of the brain power working on two equally plausible theories? Who knows... but what I do know is that diversity in this field is creating new ideas and new mathematical tools and that has to count for something.
I am just finishing up my MS in Statistics, and at my university they don't have any course(yet) that goes into deep learning. The only time the course briefly talk about neural net is in the context of Logit regression. And I have always wonder if the time spent proving Gauss Markov theorem is better spent somewhere else.
Do you know any source(book or otherwise) that continues to build on top of topics taught in a Regression and Linear algebra course(such as Multiple Linear, Weighted Least square, Logistic, generalized least squares, principle component regression, singular value decomposition) and slowly move towards the current state deep learning?
That's kind of true but also stuff like hessian noise filters are still useful and they existed and when written about prior to the application of neural networks to images.
1. Don't try too hard to make science funding more efficient / market lead or whatever - just fund more - double the science budget tomorrow And again every five years for a generation. We are about to go through a societal refactoring with solar / electric / digital / climate change hitting at once. Spending a few quid to help out the fundamentals won't hurt anyone.
2. The above might upset people but string theory is a good example - partly yes people are held hostage by funding (much like it's hard to avoid being typecast as an actor). But the solution to that is to fund lots more (experimental) movies, not to hope studio heads can pick better winners.
I am perfectly happy for a slice of my tax dollar to go on someone thinking about Pram theory (#) for a decade simply because we have no idea whatsoever how to tackle the big ones in physics, so spray and pray is going to be a lot better than most other options.
(#) Red Dwarf episode. worth watching episode just for this joke.
I would agree with funding more science, but you'll need some hoops to jump through or anyone can just come in and grab free money to "do research" with. I think you will necessarily end up not too far from where we are now because of that.
Could not agree more. If you see into most big discoveries, fundamentals were laid 50-70 years ago. F.e. math for string theory (twistor space) was in 1960s while theory itself gained traction in 1990s. Todays the new math developed under premise of string theory might be fundamental for future theories coming 50 year later, even if string theory would be proven wrong
In terms of dollars that’s fine. But on a societal level I think you have to think about alternative cost: The problem is not the money wasted on string theory. It’s all the other research that those researchers could have done.
Then, as now, there was a large body of entrenched individuals who would not budge until some ingenious experiments by the British and French (et al.) to entirely destroy the theory.
Except that string theory isn't exactly mainstream - there's a small group of people who do string theory, and a large number of physicists whose work has been completely unaffected by string theory.
That's what makes this so strange. Everyone outside string theory seems to think string theory is pseudoscience. Why is it still being funded?
I think of the closing to an essay by Martin Gardner on once mainstream scientific theories, eugenics, Freudism, etc. Which is when evidence is weak then scientific theory tends to exactly match scientists cultural biases.
With string theory there is no evidence to work off. To me it feels like with nothing better to do everyone in the field is just trying to out math everyone else.
I find that in big organizations, this is is a very frequent pattern. There is a commonly accepted approach that is obviously wrong to a subset of people. However, the people that are able to see the "wrongness" either don't have the political skills to accelerate a mental shift for the entire organization, or they choose to apply their limited "political leverage" to a different (often smaller and more tractable) problem instead.
Yes, it's true that string theory hasn't panned out in the same way as general relativity or the standard model, but it really bothers me when people criticize it without even tacit acknowledgement of the fruitful discoveries that came out of the research that has been applied to other fields. The AdS/CFT correspondence alone is worth the effort that was put in, not to mention mirror symmetry in algebraic geometry and everything that was discovered about Calabi-Yau manifolds.
String theory research isn't directly useful, but other fields of physics and mathematics reap the benefits.
Public grant making is a very political process. People imagine there is an apolitical body that makes grants to physicists based on the merits of their work ... but that's not the case.
In any resource allocation scheme where the grantors have no skin in the game, politics and cronyism will dominate in the long term.
That's probably what's happened here. String theorists get grants not because string theory produces practical results, but because there is now a network of string theorists and sympathizers in charge of the institutions that control professorships and grant making.
That's why resource allocation should be left to those with skin in the game. A market is one mechanism for forcing allocators to expose themselves to the downsides of bad investments ... but there are other mechanisms if people have an allergy to markets.
What is there around to replace string theory with? I predict that if there ever is a viable alternative available with even 0.001% more evidence supporting it, strings will vanish in a day. Presently all other approaches to quantum gravity are in a less developed state and make even fewer predictions.
A long time ago in a galaxy far away I entered U.C. Berkeley as a physics major. Then I dropped acid and became very interested in consciousness, but didn't see that being taught in the physics track, so I dropped it. Now I see that physics is coming around to talking about consciousness. I don't know why they stopped, because I learned later that early 2oth century physicists did talk about it. Max Planck among others. Materialism reigns supreme and I don't know why. No one has to start being a theist when they stop being a materialist.
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness
― Max Planck
"The tribalistic sociology that has led to a large group of people calling themselves “string theorists” when what they do has nothing to do with string theory is also something I would have thought impossible."
It's my personal bias but I see every group this way.
As someone intrigued by 'cults' early in life, I've come to see that all groups exhibit quite a lot of in/out group behaviour, the weird things is when it happens among those most socially unaware people (often science) - combined with a highly objective discipline (again science) ... people are just unwilling to accept that social artifacts can dominate their sphere.
Now, the existential issue of the fact that their 'entire worldview' and 'life-long work' is tied up in something, delusions can become very strongly internalized.
String theory is at least as interesting for the 'sociology' part as it is the 'string' part.
String theory, and the 'reproducability problem' has kind of shaken my faith in science. I grew up really 'believing' in Science, I view it much more differently these days - including those who have this unassailable faith in it as likely being a little deluded themselves.
> It's my personal bias but I see every group this way.
I have the same "bias".
What people seem to forget is that the scientific method was supposed to be a way to develop theories that made good predictions in spite of the fact that humans, both individually and in groups, are unreliable and do all sorts of crazy things for all sorts of crazy reasons. Calling oneself a "scientist" or having an advanced degree does not make one less susceptible to that. One has to set up institutions that will harness the craziness of humans and human groups in a direction that, on average and over the long term, is productive.
But what most people call "science" today is not such an institution. For example, the real message of the "replication crisis" is that most of what the average person is told is "science" is actually nothing of the sort. A sane institution of science would never have labelled that stuff as "science" in the first place; it would have said "sorry, we're still working on this, no results yet". And a lot of times it would say that and there never would be any results, and science would say "no results from this line of research; that's to be expected since many lines of research that initially look promising don't pan out".
I do not know what is your experience with science, but it is not how it works. In most cases research leads to unexpected results in grand scale. F.e. Research in string theory field led to developing new mathematics which eventually helped to calculate particle paths in LHS, which helped to make gathering data manageable and which lead to discovering Higgs boson.
>most socially unaware people (often science)
99% successful scientists are very socially aware. Usually socially unaware people do not become successful even in science.
>social artifacts can dominate their sphere
Because thats how world works. F.e. phd student does his own research, then he consults with his professor, who suggests how to add marketable layer to his research and with that layer his research becomes one for string theorists, though it was not his initial goal. This marketable layer helps him get the grant.
>Now, the existential issue of the fact that their 'entire worldview' and 'life-long work' is tied up in something, delusions can become very strongly internalized.
This is made by popular media, movies. Most scientists live normal life, create families, try separate work from life, therefore research does not come from worldview.
I would love to see a series of "20 years later" posts on a bunch of different fields. Where was the field at in 2000, where did they think they were going, where are they now? Related: what are the fields that did fade or have a major change where they may not even be around now.
1. 20 years ago the author wrote a paper asserting that string theory was a fruitless field of study.
2. The paper is written in a confrontational and snarky tone, for example: "The theory has been spectacularly successful on one front, that of public relations." Not a way to build bridges.
3. The author seems bitter that the paper wasn't accepted into Physics Today, and that the suggested rewriting into a letter to the editor did not result in publication either.
4. The author is sticking to their guns.
No matter how well-founded the idea that string theory is a dead end, this isn't likely to improve things.
The scientist saw BS, he called BS, and then 20 years later, the field he criticized turned out to be mostly BS.
If you're offended by the audacity of scientists criticizing pseudoscience, you may want to read about the concept of "polemics". It's an acceptable, longstanding form of rhetoric for when a respected figure publicly disagrees with a direction of another group of people.
Is there a popular science book that begins with Noether’s theorem (along with some biographical details and historical context in which her theorem must be understood) and traces developments from there down to the Standard Model and talks about what the standard model doesn’t solve and why new theories are interesting?
Preferably a book that doesn’t go off into the deep end with alternate realities and dead/alive cats in boxes.
I read Higgs by Jim Baggot, it did a good job of providing an overview - however I would like something that goes into a little more detail while still being a popular science book.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this subject (in fact, I studied string theory at Columbia which is where Peter Woit is). The main issue that people have with string theory is the lack of testability / falsifiability. I think there's definitely some issues there, but I think blaming string theory is not quite right.
There are two reasons why string theory is tough to test. One of them, and the most obvious one, is that the energy scale where the strings exist is super high (likely at or near the Planck scale). This means that if we wanted to detect the direct signatures of strings, we'd have to create an experiment that is sensitive to these energy scales. This seems to be completely infeasible (people talk about particle colliders having to be the size of our solar system etc.) Now, interestingly this is not actually only a problem with string theory but rather with any theory of quantum gravity. This is because the fundamental scale of a theory is usually determined by combining its fundamental constants in some way as to produce an energy scale, and any theory of quantum gravity must somehow contain Planck's constant, Newton's constant of gravitation, and the speed of light. Taking these together gives you the Planck scale.
So, in other words if the reason you don't want to study string theory is that it only is testable at the Planck scale, then what you're really saying is that you don't think we should study any theory of quantum gravity. This is, I think, way to extreme of a position.
Now, interestingly, string theory is actually more than a theory of gravity, so unlike something like e.g. loop quantum gravity which is only a theory of gravity, it's conceivable that string theory somehow within it contains information that "trickles down" to lower energies and thus could potentially be testable at something like the LHC. This leads me to the second reason why string theory is very difficult to test.
It turns out that the equations of string theory are more-or-less unique at high energies but that as you start lowering the energy at which you probe the theory, multiple distinct solutions emerge. These solutions turn out to have a very nice physical interpretation: they are the different ways in which we can compactify the extra dimensions of string theory. Regardless of this physical interpretation, the fact remains that there are many many distinct solutions of string theory at low energies, and in order to make predictions that are falsifiable, we need to know which of these solutions we're living in. This is where the crux of the problem lies. It turns out that there are so many solutions of string theory that we cannot even in principle go through them one at a time to see if they're feasible (people throw around the number 10^500).
Now, it turns out that the real problem is not actually in the number of distinct solutions to string theory (~10^500), but rather in the way their structure is poorly understood. In fact, any theory of physics contains an infinite number of theories within it. For example, consider the mass of the electron as a free parameter. Until I tell you what the mass is, you can't make a complete prediction for what the energy levels in Hydrogen are. In fact, you could argue that since the mass of the electron is a real number, there are in fact an infinite number of predictions to the energy levels. A bit sarcastically you could then say that at least string theory has "only" 10^500 different theories within it, unlike traditional physics that has this continuous infinite set of theories.
The distinction between these two cases is then that for traditional theories, we can go the other way. If we measure the energy levels of Hydrogen, we can infer the mass of the electron. Then, knowing the mass of the electron, we can make other predictions. It's this last step that's currently missing in string theory. Currently we only know how to move in one direction: give me the solution you're talking about and I might be able to make predictions, but give me observational data and I can't work backwards to determine which solution I'm in. It's almost like a one-way hash.
I would say that this last objection is a roadblock that we're currently facing, and it's not perfectly clear that it's not solvable, nor is it clear that it is. I think that until we solve this problem, string theory will be stuck and people will be pointing fingers at the theory calling it a fool's errand. I personally think this criticism is misguided.
The upshot of this is that most people who work on string theory work in areas that are not plagued by this bifurcation to low energies. For example, you can use string theory to study the structure and behavior of black holes and holography, something called AdS/CFT, an area that has been incredibly successful.
I wonder if a similar moment of reckoning will ever come for modern macroeconomics. I remember working on differential equations on the economy one night and having the sudden insight that the data was far too skimpy and uncontrolled to be at all pretending to do science. and yet there I was going through the motions of doing math on the economy.
ditto, of course, goes to holding accountable the economic beliefs of politicians and talking heads of all persuasion. the people conscious of how much we don't know get drowned out by the people who don't care.
It may be true that, "Lubos Motl is still arguing that string theory is the language in which God wrote the universe"; but it has been several years since I last encountered any text he wrote. So, that seems like progress, of sorts.
I gather that Alzheimer's research is still almost exclusively about amyloid plaques and tau tangles, despite absolutely negative results and disastrous drug trials for decades.
And, of course, magnetic confinement fusion is still 20 - 30 years off, and always will be.
Incidentally I've just read the book "Lost in Math" by Sabine Hossenfelder, and it really goes down into the problems of modern science, its funding, its "publish or perish", its fashions... A really excellent (and quite funny, too) book.
[+] [-] hardtke|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prof-dr-ir|5 years ago|reply
As a professor it is simply extremely unnatural to just drop your main area of research.
First, your academic network will almost entirely stem from the subfield you have been working on. This affects the expectations of your PhD students, the recruitment of postdocs (who are often swapped between colleagues in the subfield), and the conferences you visit -- where you will see all the familiar faces of colleagues you have known for years.
Second, your mind has been shaped significantly by years of working in your own little subfield. It is easy to come up with ten projects in your area, rank them by difficulty as well as the interest they would generate amongst your colleagues, and help your students to execute them. It is significantly harder to do anything like that outside your subfield; for one, you will not have the mentoring that a typical PhD student has.
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobRivera|5 years ago|reply
I read you comment as another anecdote towards the general belief that higher education requires a refactor for many parties and the general growth of knowledge creation.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|5 years ago|reply
Sounds like a textbook groupthink environment.
No one is going to lead a scientific revolution in that environment.
[+] [-] marta_morena_9|5 years ago|reply
The solution is never for the individuals to induce change. This doesn't work for consumers (i.e. you can't say "If everyone stops buying plastic bags, we do something for the environment", because well, nobody cares... You have to make selling plastic bags either illegal or add a significant surcharge that causes consumers to avoid them for reasons that actually affect them, like "too expensive")
And it doesn't work for anything else either. As long as there is funding, this will go on. The "solution" is to stop funding, but apparently since funding is still flowing, someone still values the research. So what is even the problem?
No progress has been made? Well, if funding is still there, whoever funds this seems to be beyond happy with the progress. This is a non-issue.
[+] [-] narrator|5 years ago|reply
String theory doesn't actually do anything though, so there's no way to say it's better or worse than anything else. It's like someone saying they're working on solving the halting problem or something and eventually they'll get there and they've been working on it for 20 years without any code that actually works. At some point, you just have to give up and do something else. They keep getting grants to work on this stuff though for some reason. Someone needs to interview the people who are giving out string theory grants and ask them why the heck they are still giving these people money.
[+] [-] crdrost|5 years ago|reply
The one thing that kind of irks me is this Kaku book “The God Equation.” I have only seen one equation that is so universally applicable that it could deserve that title, and even then I would be hesitant about that because it might give people the wrong impression. (It is the transport equation—it keeps appearing and appearing, a bunch of other equations are special cases of it, it is involved in one of the million-dollar Clay Mathematics prizes so there is clearly something hard/intractable about it, and it has a term which refers to creation and destruction. It says, a box flows downstream, the time rate of change of stuff in the box is equal to the flow J of stuff through the walls of the box plus the rate Φ of stuff being created/destroyed in the fluid. Or, ∂ρ/∂t + (v · ∇) ρ = - ∇ · J + Φ.)
[+] [-] lixtra|5 years ago|reply
Deep learning might be a good example. The underlying neural networks has been a “dormant science” for decades until its breakthrough.
I wouldn’t be so sure either that image feature processing won’t get another cite. More likely they will show up in preprocessing again as the boundaries of deep learning get pushed.
[+] [-] wwright|5 years ago|reply
I think what you are pointing is really the most toxic part of tech: marketers and investors have found that tech is a good way to aggregate money, and so they have a thrown a lot of funding at tech that can aggregate for them. However, we haven’t actually proven that that tech is the best solution or a sustainable solution. We don’t understand most of what we do with computers very well, we just approximate until it works well enough (for the marketers and investors, of course).
ML and deep learning are very valuable, of course, but their recent market dominance doesn’t indicate that they are the final or most correct solution to the problems they are being used for. It indicates that people want to spend money on it right now.
[+] [-] russdill|5 years ago|reply
A much better example is P=NP. This is a very rich area of research with many closely related problems that has been worked on for decades and will continue to be worked on for the foreseeable future.
[+] [-] anyfoo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonytrary|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamcreasy|5 years ago|reply
Do you know any source(book or otherwise) that continues to build on top of topics taught in a Regression and Linear algebra course(such as Multiple Linear, Weighted Least square, Logistic, generalized least squares, principle component regression, singular value decomposition) and slowly move towards the current state deep learning?
[+] [-] mnky9800n|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] posterboy|5 years ago|reply
Imaginably, given the field's topics, they think in different dimensions than on a 20 year scale.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|5 years ago|reply
2. The above might upset people but string theory is a good example - partly yes people are held hostage by funding (much like it's hard to avoid being typecast as an actor). But the solution to that is to fund lots more (experimental) movies, not to hope studio heads can pick better winners.
I am perfectly happy for a slice of my tax dollar to go on someone thinking about Pram theory (#) for a decade simply because we have no idea whatsoever how to tackle the big ones in physics, so spray and pray is going to be a lot better than most other options.
(#) Red Dwarf episode. worth watching episode just for this joke.
[+] [-] read_if_gay_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kestonis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjornsing|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory
Then, as now, there was a large body of entrenched individuals who would not budge until some ingenious experiments by the British and French (et al.) to entirely destroy the theory.
[+] [-] twic|5 years ago|reply
That's what makes this so strange. Everyone outside string theory seems to think string theory is pseudoscience. Why is it still being funded?
[+] [-] soneca|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gibbon1|5 years ago|reply
With string theory there is no evidence to work off. To me it feels like with nothing better to do everyone in the field is just trying to out math everyone else.
[+] [-] Forge36|5 years ago|reply
It's it possible string theory will create an experiment which finds something else?
Three theory of Phlogiston appears to have lasted 100 years. Our understanding still has plenty of time to change
[+] [-] Scene_Cast2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zinclozenge|5 years ago|reply
String theory research isn't directly useful, but other fields of physics and mathematics reap the benefits.
[+] [-] TheMagicHorsey|5 years ago|reply
In any resource allocation scheme where the grantors have no skin in the game, politics and cronyism will dominate in the long term.
That's probably what's happened here. String theorists get grants not because string theory produces practical results, but because there is now a network of string theorists and sympathizers in charge of the institutions that control professorships and grant making.
That's why resource allocation should be left to those with skin in the game. A market is one mechanism for forcing allocators to expose themselves to the downsides of bad investments ... but there are other mechanisms if people have an allergy to markets.
[+] [-] whatshisface|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boxmonster|5 years ago|reply
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness ― Max Planck
[+] [-] renox|5 years ago|reply
How are you going to do experiments which test whether 'consciouness is fundamental' or not?
[+] [-] ryan93|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
"The tribalistic sociology that has led to a large group of people calling themselves “string theorists” when what they do has nothing to do with string theory is also something I would have thought impossible."
It's my personal bias but I see every group this way.
As someone intrigued by 'cults' early in life, I've come to see that all groups exhibit quite a lot of in/out group behaviour, the weird things is when it happens among those most socially unaware people (often science) - combined with a highly objective discipline (again science) ... people are just unwilling to accept that social artifacts can dominate their sphere.
Now, the existential issue of the fact that their 'entire worldview' and 'life-long work' is tied up in something, delusions can become very strongly internalized.
String theory is at least as interesting for the 'sociology' part as it is the 'string' part.
String theory, and the 'reproducability problem' has kind of shaken my faith in science. I grew up really 'believing' in Science, I view it much more differently these days - including those who have this unassailable faith in it as likely being a little deluded themselves.
[+] [-] pdonis|5 years ago|reply
I have the same "bias".
What people seem to forget is that the scientific method was supposed to be a way to develop theories that made good predictions in spite of the fact that humans, both individually and in groups, are unreliable and do all sorts of crazy things for all sorts of crazy reasons. Calling oneself a "scientist" or having an advanced degree does not make one less susceptible to that. One has to set up institutions that will harness the craziness of humans and human groups in a direction that, on average and over the long term, is productive.
But what most people call "science" today is not such an institution. For example, the real message of the "replication crisis" is that most of what the average person is told is "science" is actually nothing of the sort. A sane institution of science would never have labelled that stuff as "science" in the first place; it would have said "sorry, we're still working on this, no results yet". And a lot of times it would say that and there never would be any results, and science would say "no results from this line of research; that's to be expected since many lines of research that initially look promising don't pan out".
[+] [-] kestonis|5 years ago|reply
I do not know what is your experience with science, but it is not how it works. In most cases research leads to unexpected results in grand scale. F.e. Research in string theory field led to developing new mathematics which eventually helped to calculate particle paths in LHS, which helped to make gathering data manageable and which lead to discovering Higgs boson.
>most socially unaware people (often science)
99% successful scientists are very socially aware. Usually socially unaware people do not become successful even in science.
>social artifacts can dominate their sphere
Because thats how world works. F.e. phd student does his own research, then he consults with his professor, who suggests how to add marketable layer to his research and with that layer his research becomes one for string theorists, though it was not his initial goal. This marketable layer helps him get the grant.
>Now, the existential issue of the fact that their 'entire worldview' and 'life-long work' is tied up in something, delusions can become very strongly internalized.
This is made by popular media, movies. Most scientists live normal life, create families, try separate work from life, therefore research does not come from worldview.
[+] [-] interestica|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l0b0|5 years ago|reply
1. 20 years ago the author wrote a paper asserting that string theory was a fruitless field of study.
2. The paper is written in a confrontational and snarky tone, for example: "The theory has been spectacularly successful on one front, that of public relations." Not a way to build bridges.
3. The author seems bitter that the paper wasn't accepted into Physics Today, and that the suggested rewriting into a letter to the editor did not result in publication either.
4. The author is sticking to their guns.
No matter how well-founded the idea that string theory is a dead end, this isn't likely to improve things.
[+] [-] hitekker|5 years ago|reply
If you're offended by the audacity of scientists criticizing pseudoscience, you may want to read about the concept of "polemics". It's an acceptable, longstanding form of rhetoric for when a respected figure publicly disagrees with a direction of another group of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemic
Incidentally, the author even noted his article was a polemic in the original abstract https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0102051
[+] [-] meowkit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
If string theory is in fact a flub - and the field can't take a basic article of this 'tone' without flinching - the science has a problem.
[+] [-] sgt101|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dilippkumar|5 years ago|reply
Preferably a book that doesn’t go off into the deep end with alternate realities and dead/alive cats in boxes.
I read Higgs by Jim Baggot, it did a good job of providing an overview - however I would like something that goes into a little more detail while still being a popular science book.
[+] [-] pontus|5 years ago|reply
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this subject (in fact, I studied string theory at Columbia which is where Peter Woit is). The main issue that people have with string theory is the lack of testability / falsifiability. I think there's definitely some issues there, but I think blaming string theory is not quite right.
There are two reasons why string theory is tough to test. One of them, and the most obvious one, is that the energy scale where the strings exist is super high (likely at or near the Planck scale). This means that if we wanted to detect the direct signatures of strings, we'd have to create an experiment that is sensitive to these energy scales. This seems to be completely infeasible (people talk about particle colliders having to be the size of our solar system etc.) Now, interestingly this is not actually only a problem with string theory but rather with any theory of quantum gravity. This is because the fundamental scale of a theory is usually determined by combining its fundamental constants in some way as to produce an energy scale, and any theory of quantum gravity must somehow contain Planck's constant, Newton's constant of gravitation, and the speed of light. Taking these together gives you the Planck scale.
So, in other words if the reason you don't want to study string theory is that it only is testable at the Planck scale, then what you're really saying is that you don't think we should study any theory of quantum gravity. This is, I think, way to extreme of a position.
Now, interestingly, string theory is actually more than a theory of gravity, so unlike something like e.g. loop quantum gravity which is only a theory of gravity, it's conceivable that string theory somehow within it contains information that "trickles down" to lower energies and thus could potentially be testable at something like the LHC. This leads me to the second reason why string theory is very difficult to test.
It turns out that the equations of string theory are more-or-less unique at high energies but that as you start lowering the energy at which you probe the theory, multiple distinct solutions emerge. These solutions turn out to have a very nice physical interpretation: they are the different ways in which we can compactify the extra dimensions of string theory. Regardless of this physical interpretation, the fact remains that there are many many distinct solutions of string theory at low energies, and in order to make predictions that are falsifiable, we need to know which of these solutions we're living in. This is where the crux of the problem lies. It turns out that there are so many solutions of string theory that we cannot even in principle go through them one at a time to see if they're feasible (people throw around the number 10^500).
Now, it turns out that the real problem is not actually in the number of distinct solutions to string theory (~10^500), but rather in the way their structure is poorly understood. In fact, any theory of physics contains an infinite number of theories within it. For example, consider the mass of the electron as a free parameter. Until I tell you what the mass is, you can't make a complete prediction for what the energy levels in Hydrogen are. In fact, you could argue that since the mass of the electron is a real number, there are in fact an infinite number of predictions to the energy levels. A bit sarcastically you could then say that at least string theory has "only" 10^500 different theories within it, unlike traditional physics that has this continuous infinite set of theories.
The distinction between these two cases is then that for traditional theories, we can go the other way. If we measure the energy levels of Hydrogen, we can infer the mass of the electron. Then, knowing the mass of the electron, we can make other predictions. It's this last step that's currently missing in string theory. Currently we only know how to move in one direction: give me the solution you're talking about and I might be able to make predictions, but give me observational data and I can't work backwards to determine which solution I'm in. It's almost like a one-way hash.
I would say that this last objection is a roadblock that we're currently facing, and it's not perfectly clear that it's not solvable, nor is it clear that it is. I think that until we solve this problem, string theory will be stuck and people will be pointing fingers at the theory calling it a fool's errand. I personally think this criticism is misguided.
The upshot of this is that most people who work on string theory work in areas that are not plagued by this bifurcation to low energies. For example, you can use string theory to study the structure and behavior of black holes and holography, something called AdS/CFT, an area that has been incredibly successful.
[+] [-] kkwteh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swyx|5 years ago|reply
ditto, of course, goes to holding accountable the economic beliefs of politicians and talking heads of all persuasion. the people conscious of how much we don't know get drowned out by the people who don't care.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ncmncm|5 years ago|reply
I gather that Alzheimer's research is still almost exclusively about amyloid plaques and tau tangles, despite absolutely negative results and disastrous drug trials for decades.
And, of course, magnetic confinement fusion is still 20 - 30 years off, and always will be.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wazoox|5 years ago|reply