The trouble with string theory.mp3

Do you agree with Eric that we need more great science rather than just good science? Watch Eric debate string theory with Brian Green at 

https://iai.tv/video/the-trouble-with-string-theory?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=pinned+comment&utm_campaign=we-need-a-scientific-revolution-eric-weinstein

https://iai.tv/video/the-trouble-with-string-theory?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=pinned+comment&utm_campaign=we-need-a-scientific-revolution-eric-weinstein

The trouble with string theory.mp3

The trouble with string theory | Roger Penrose, Brian Greene, Tasneem Husain, Eric Weinstein (iai.tv)

The trouble with string theory

Is string theory doomed?

24th July 2023

String theory, heralded as a potential theory of everything, has been dominant in theoretical physics for thirty years with more scientific papers arising from it than any other theory. But critics argue the theory has held undue influence and it is an error to pursue it. String theory proposes 11 dimensions and a vast landscape of possible universes without any evidence. Moreover, a theory of everything has not been forthcoming, and predictions of supersymmetry particles have not been confirmed.

Is it time to move on from string theory, recognise that the search for supersymmetry has failed, and seek alternative accounts of the universe that are supported by observation and experiment? More fundamentally should we see mathematics without a connection to the physical world as little more than fantasy? Or is the continued dominance of string theory justified by its potential to unify our understanding of the universe once and for all?

• Donald Palmer

  Posted 9 months ago

  It would seem it should not be called a 'Theory' until it has provable criteria. Until then it should be an 'Hypothesis' or 'Conjecture' (or, as Eric mentions, a 'Framework'), rather than a Theory.

• Neil Sore

  Posted 13 months ago

  I found moments of this debate difficult to watch as it was so authentic and frank. Great debate exploring the underbelly of physics - genuinely great panel! I think some periodic summary of the 'Conclusions so far' would be helpful to prevent repetition and blockage in the debate.

• Luke Edge-ford

  Posted 14 months ago

  my god eric in beast mode, when will they see the green machine is a old trap.

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伟大的科学常常因为需要超越主流公认的科学而被嘲笑

https://blog.sciencenet.cn/video.php?mod=vinfo&pid=3499

伟大的科学常常被主流科学所嘲笑

The trouble with string theory.mp3

String theory, heralded as a potential theory of everything, has been dominant in theoretical physics for 30 years, with more scientific papers arising from it than any other theory. But critics argue the theory has held undue influence and it is an error to pursue it. String theory proposes 11 dimensions and a vast landscape of possible universes without any evidence. Moreover, a theory of everything has not been forthcoming and predictions of supersymmetry have not been confirmed. Is it time to move on from string theory and recognize that the search for super symmetry has failed and seek alternative accounts of the universe that is supported by observation and experiment? More fundamental Should we see mathematics without a connection to the physical world as little more than fantasy? Or is the continued dominance of string theory justified by its potential to unify our understanding of the universe once and for all? So onto our speakers.

 Roger Penrose is a world renowned mathematician and Nobel laureate in physics.  He is best known for his work on general relativity and sharing the Wolff Prize for physics with Stephen Hawking for his work on black holes. Erik Weinstein is an American podcast host. Managing director of Teal Capitaland a doctor of mathematical physics. Bryan Green on the screen. He is a professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Columbia. He is famous for his groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory. Tasnim Hossein is a theoretical physicist, writer, educator and author of Only The Longest Threads. But first, going to start off with Roger, who's going to tell us about his kind of three minutes pitch on whether it's time to move on from the dominance of string theory in our accounts of the universe?

 Well, I wasn't sure it was still dominant and when I first heard about it in,I guess the early 1980s, I found it a very exciting idea. It looks as though you could use these sort of released surfaces, Riemann surfaces as a replacement for things like Feynman diagrams in talking about quantum field theory. And it looked very like an exciting idea to me, but then it rapidly became released. The story was and I didn't understand it well enough to see why it had to be like this. There's only worked originally in 26 dimensions, so it meant that space had 25 dimensions and time and one dimension. My reaction was, okay, that's the end of it as far as I'm concerned, because space doesn't have that many dimensions. Of course, I understood that the idea somehow that several of these dimensions are tied up into little knots and things like this, but it just never struck me that this worked because one of the arguments was somehow you could never excite the degrees of freedom which are involved in these tiny little extra dimensions and just didn't seem to me that was correct, because even though it would take a lot of energy to excite these degrees of freedom, that amount of energy was as far as the whole universe was concerned. I mean, you don't just do it locally. It would affect the whole universe and the amount of energy that here over the whole universe, which amounts to say, a Planck scale energy, which is the sort of thing that we're talking about,is ridiculously small. So I didn't see why this would, why you wouldn't be noticed that the number of space dimensions was wrong. I just never took it seriously for that reason. But then it became very much an end thing, and so I had to pay some attention to it and make critical remarks, which are probably too naive, I expect, in my various books. But I've never been a fan of the idea. As I said initially, I thought it was a very beautiful idea, but since it seemed to require all these unreasonable extra degrees of freedom, it's not just extra dimensions, that is, there's all this stuff which you can't get hold of and it doesn't affect the physics. So it didn't make too much sense to me, I'm afraid. Okay. Thank you. Next. Brian GREENE. Is it time to move on from the dominance of string theory in all kinds of the universe?

Happy to say a few words on it. Again, apologies that I couldn't join you in person. It looks like a wonderful gathering. I would suggest at the outset that the framing of the question suggests a radically incomplete understanding of how science actually works. I mean, I'm happy to engage in these kinds of discussions. I think they can be illuminating for the general public, and they're enjoyable to have. So I've nothing against them. But the idea that we would sit here and pronounce how science should or should not move on from this or that idea misses the point of how science actually works. Science is an endeavor carried out by scientists who generally have an enormous amount of training, an enormous amount of experience. Like Roger and others in the discussion here, and the choice of what to work on by design is left to the individual. What they find interesting, what they find exciting. So people will continue to work on any given subject so long as it continues to bear fruit and give interesting results that inspire yet other avenues of research. And that's what's happened in string theory and that's why people have continued to work on it. And when the theorya nd the ideas begin to dry up and they're no longer bearing fruit, then individuals will move on. And certainly some string theorists of the past have moved on to other ideas because they lost interest in this or that avenue of research and they do other things. And that I applaud. That's a wonderful way in which science can be rich and self propelling in order that the endeavor of trying to underst and the universe will continue. You when it comes to string theory itself, where have we gotten? I think that's a conversation that we will continue to pursue in our discussion here. But briefly put in 30 seconds. String theory is the most potent and powerful approach that we have discovered as a species for blending general relativity and quantum mechanics and putting these two pillars of scientific understanding together is vital to understand things like black holes and the Big Bang. And indeed, string theory has made its greatest mark in understanding black holes. So is it something that is worthy of pursuit? I think the answer is yes.Obviously,thousands of others around the world think the answer is yes, but it's not for us to pronounce. It's for the marketplace of ideas to decide. And scientists will vote with the most precious resource they have, which is their time and so as long as scientists think that it's worthwhile to work on string theory, they will. And when they don't think it's worthwhile,they won't. That's about it. 

Thanks very much, Brian. 

Tasnim

So I find myself in complete agreement. I feel like I'm almost taking up where Brian left off in the sense that I do think science is a self-correcting mechanism, and especially for theoretical physics, when all you're doing is, you know, you're sitting down and writing these equations and thinking about things in your head. It's very hard to put that kind of work into something if there's no pull in it for you. So there has to be something that appeals to you. And to that point, I just want to say that one of the criticisms leveled at string theory is that it was supposed to be the theory of everything and it hasn't turned out to be that. And it's had for two years. And, you know, it's not we don't have this one coherent theory of everything to which I say, you know, it's been 40 years and the theory is still talking to us. It's very hard to explain what it feels like when you're when you're doing math and the equations are talking to you. The closest they can get to anything. It's like you, you know, you wrote the theory, you wrote the equations, but they have consequences that seem to have an intelligence of their own. It's like if you programed a computer,you would expect it to do calculations much faster than you, you know, much more efficiently than you, which is probably why you built it. But you don't expect it to have this innate intelligence that is different to yours. The thing with string theory is that we may have misinterpreted did in the beginning how much work was required, but the theory is still telling us things. Yes, it's been for decades, but it's built a lot in that time. It's a very robust, consistent mathematical framework. And I think it's very easy to underestimate what a feat that is, because something this huge and just structurally coherent, it doesn't collapse in on itself that, you know, that in itself is something what's looking at string theory has led to many new ideas along the way. Sometimes I feel like we criticize it because it's still called string theory, but that may just be an accident of history. I mean, it's not a theory of only strings anymore, you know? Is it a theoryif it doesn't have testable predictions? But then again, when we call atoms atoms, right, we know they're not indivisible. So maybe it's just called that as a historical accident. But whatever this framework is that's developing, it's giving us a lot still. It's telling us a lot of things. And while the equations are still talking to you,I think it's very hard to stop listening. And I don't see why we should.

 我完全同意布莱恩的观点。我接着布莱恩的观点进一步阐述，

我确实认为科学是一种自我修正机制，尤其是对于理论物理学来说，

当你所做的一切就是，你知道，你坐下来写这些方程式，在脑子里思考问题，

如果对你没有任何吸引力，你就很难投入这样的工作。

所以，必须有吸引你的东西。

关于这一点，我只想说 弦理论受到的批评之一 

就是它本应是万物理论 但这个结果并没有得到验证 

这种观点已经有两年了 

你知道，这并不是说弦理论不是一个连贯的万物理论，

对此我要说，你知道，已经40年了，这个理论还在和我们对话。

很难解释当你在做数学运算的时候 

公式在跟你说话是什么感觉 

数学最接近包罗万象的任何事物 

你，你知道，你写了理论，你写了方程， 

它们产生的结果似乎有自己的智慧。

就好比你给电脑编程，

你希望它的运算速度比你快得多，比你有效率得多，

这可能就是你造出它的原因。

但你没有料到它有与生俱来的智慧，

与你的不同的智慧。

弦理论的问题在于，我们可能在一开始就误解了需要做多少工作，

但该理论仍在告诉我们一些事情。

是的，它已经存在了几十年，但在这段时间里，它建立了很多东西。

它是一个非常稳健、前后一致的数学框架。

我认为这很容易让人低估它的壮举，因为如此巨大的东西在结构上是连贯的，它不会自我坍塌，

你知道，这本身就是弦理论的东西，它一路上引发了许多新的想法。

有时我觉得我们批评它 是因为它还叫弦理论 

但这可能只是历史的偶然 

我的意思是，它不再是弦的理论了，

你知道吗？如果它真的没有可检验的预言，那它还算是理论吗？

但话又说回来 当我们称原子为原子时 

我们知道它们并不是不可分割的 

所以也许叫原子只是历史的偶然 

但不管这个发展中的框架是什么 

它还是给了我们很多东西 

它告诉了我们很多东西。

当方程式还在跟你说话的时候，我想你很难不去倾听。

我想不出理由我们为什么不去倾听。

Thank you very much,Eric.

It's a rather depressingly I very much agree with Brian because it is a marketplace of ideas,at least in theory. And as long as there are equations and ideas and people who wish to explore them, the ideal of the scientific community is that we should do exactly that. And the problem is, is that that is not exactly how science works. And in particular, this ignores the entire political economy of science, which has to do with jobs, claims, public relations, and effectively diverting the resources of the community, which are never particularly generous after the Cold War era towards string theory. And it's not just a question of, let's say, delivering better pizzas, but also slashing the tires of the opposing pizza parlor. And so the real problem is, is that we keep talking about what we're comfortable with, which is the nature of the ideas. What I'd like to do is I'd like to lead use most of the 3 minutes for debate. So I'm just going to say one thing about this. String theorists often say that's not how science works. And I'm concerned about string theory is that string theory works like no other science. And so the biggest complaint that many of us have is that string theory sets itself up as the judges and referees. Who is winning, who's losing, What's the best leading theory and finding themselves virtuous in almost all contests. So it's like playing a team of referees who may not necessarily be better footballers, but tend to find that they always win the game. So let's save the time for debate and let's get into it.

我非常同意布莱恩的观点，因为至少在理论上，应该是一个思想的市场。只要有方程式和思想，

只要有人想探索它们，科学界的理想就是允许我们去探索。但是问题是，科学已经完全不是这样运作的。

尤其是，科学受到整个政治经济学的影响，它与工作、利益诉求、科学家与学界的人际关系有关，

这些因素有效地转移了科学界的资源。冷战时代之后，科学界的资源从来都不是特别慷慨地用于弦理论。

这不仅仅是提供更好的披萨的问题，这更是削掉对方披萨店的支柱轮胎的问题。

因此，真正的问题在于，我们一直在谈论我们愿意接受的东西，这是思想的本质。

我想做的是，我想引导大家利用这三分钟进行辩论。所以我只想说一件事。

弦理论者常说科学不是这样的，而我对弦理论的关注在于 弦理论的运作方式是其他科学无法比拟的。

 所以我们很多人最大的抱怨就是弦理论把自己当成了裁判和裁判员。谁是赢家，谁是输家，

什么是最好的领先理论，并发现自己在几乎所有比赛中都是良性的。

这就好比一队裁判，他们不一定是最好的足球运动员，但往往发现他们总能赢得比赛。

因此，让我们省下时间进行辩论吧。

Thank you very much. So it's often said that mathematics is the language of physics, but physics also answers to experiment. How do we balance these two different factors?

非常感谢 

人们常说，数学是物理学的语言，但物理学也是实验的答案。

我们如何平衡这两个不同的因素？

That's kind of the way the mathematics leads us and the way that we find things out to experiment, Watch it. But I think the trouble with string theory is that there isn't any connection with observation as far as I'm probably taking too strong a view here. But the math, I mean, it's largely driven by the mathematics, as far as I know, which is in itself is not an objection as far as I'm concerned. A lot of what I do is driven by the mathematics. But the trouble with string theory is it's supposed to be a theory of the way the world operates and if the number of dimensions of space is just wrong, I can't take it seriously. And I, I mean, there are arguments why all these extra dimensions are hidden, and I don't think those arguments are right either. So I'm just left in a position where I don't the problem is not so much, you know, how much mathematics or how much physics or what.