On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 8:29 AM, Nicholas Leippe <[email protected]> wrote:
> And yet these same physicists still manage to get millions of dollars > to continue funding "science" and "research" into the ideas coming > from string theory--one of the most extraordinary claims of all modern > physics. Where's the 'extraordinary evidence' supporting its > foundations justifying further pursuit of anything related/derived? > > That's only one example. Some of the current theories still fall under > "extraordinary claims", but pursuit of the extraordinary evidence to > support them has all but stopped--they are just accepted. My impression of the reception of string theory among physicists is that it is viewed with a great deal of skepticism by most, but that its model has some compelling features that would resolve some of the conflicts between relativity and quantum mechanics, so it continues to be researched. But string theory is still investigated because it agrees with the current models where we know they work well, not because it "questions underpinnings". It will certainly require extraordinary evidence to justify the predictions it makes that are outside of the realm of relativity and quantum mechanics, but there's already a good deal of skepticism in the scientific community about that, or at least that's my impression from what I've heard and read. String theory seems like a big deal because 1) it's a new model that unifies gravity and quantum mechanics, which is a big open problem in physics, 2) it has good PR -- it makes interesting predictions that have had a lot of media attention, especially thanks to Brian Greene, and 3) there's not a lot of competition in the unified theory market right now. M-Theory, which is the other prominent model, is not so much a unified model as it is a collection of scoped models, at least as far as I understand it. I have no idea where you get the idea that people have stopped pursuing evidence to support current theories. The scientists who work on string theory would like nothing better than a test to verify that their theories correctly predict things that are outside the scope of quantum mechanics and relativity. The fact is, though, that quantum mechanics and relativity are extremely good models, and it's very hard to actually find and measure things that disagree with them. We don't have the means to build tests that we suspect would show the differences (the particle accelerators would have to be many, many orders of magnitude more powerful than the LHC, which is already ridiculously expensive and difficult to run) and so more research must be done to find other potential tests. Anyway, string theory isn't really that "extraordinary" in the way that quack theories are. String theory agrees with and unifies quantum mechanics and relativity. Quack theories generally conflict with one or the other. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
