Who cares if it's not even wrong?

Comments (15)

• 1 andreicio May 7, 2008 4:48 PM

  With the excruciatingly slow approach to the start of the LHC (which will probably be delayed yet again given Mr. Aymar's embarassing track record), all the institutional parasites who proposed quasi science malarkey like string thory are feeling rather nervous. Job security is in the ballance. So parasites like Emam have to somehow justify their existence by finding some value in string theory. Expect more reports like this one to come.

• 2 Gary Ansorge May 9, 2008 1:15 PM

  andreicio: Referring to people doing cutting edge research as "parasites" indicates to me you have never done any research of value yourself.
  Basic research, in math or physics is just that:basic.
  It is what leads to new knowledge and I guarantee there will be many more wrong efforts than right ones. We cannot learn if all our efforts must be constrained to only that which is "right". Mistakes are absolutely necessary, so we can know WHAT DOESN'T WORK.

  That's the essence of the scientific method.

• 3 neil pegg May 9, 2008 1:17 PM

  String theory will never be of enduring interest
  to mathematicians as it is non-rigorous and hence not part of their discipline. As far as physics is concerned it sheds no light whatsoever on long-standing problems such as the infinite self-energy of the electron or the infinities that continue to plague quantum field theory. String theory appears to be ad hoc and ugly and certainly not an 'elegant universe' theory of everything.

• 4 amer husain May 9, 2008 2:27 PM

  As someone who started his career as a Physicist and ended up in Finance (and yes it is definitely a regressive step !) I wonder if the antagonism I see here between proponents and opponents of string theory is more about economics (i.e. competing for scarce resources - human and money) than science?

• 5 Andrei Kirilyuk May 9, 2008 2:35 PM

  But that kind of reality-"independent" research is exactly what all the officially imposed, mainstream "exact" mathematically driven) science is doing for a long time already, many decades at least and basically since the "new", "mathematical" physics occupation of science as a
  "contradictory" result of the 20th century "scientific revolution". This kind of not only reality-"independent", but reason-independent research readily postulating supernatural mysteries as a basis of its "rigorous" constructions and actually accepting arbitrary deviation from elementary consistency dominates everywhere in modern physics, where such applications as string theory, quantum gravity, any field theory, quantum computation, and cosmology are but most obvious examples of those arbitrary manipulations with arbitrary symbols obeying arbitrary, subjectively "postulated" rules (supernatural mysteries including). Any "inexplicable", purely abstract magic can be evoked there at any moment to replace ever missing consistent understanding of reality, including the dominating strangely "invisible" (or "dark") matter and energy species, any number of "hidden dimensions", and other abstract - but now accepted as most real - "possibilities" forming their own esoteric "landscapes", etc. It's but another "computer game" (of the whole official science size), with its own "virtual reality", where not only everything becomes possible, but ever larger deviations from "ordinary" consistency and logic are ever more encouraged. The cited article simply expresses that actually dominating practice (in all applications!) in a more explicit form. They find it's just "more interesting" like that, irrespective of all the crazy billions of hard-earned dollars of unaware taxpayer contributions wasted thoughtlessly on those senseless "mathematical fantasies" and related very expensive experiments with REAL entities (designed specifically to "confirm" the reality-"independent" exercises of math-physical sages!). But who cares, indeed? Is it Peter Woit? But what is he doing himself beyond his popular "criticism" of string theory? He and all other "mathematical physicists" are practising exactly the same profession of knowledge and intelligence destruction, simply their preferred particular, detailed applications vary... Their so-called "mathematics" is as increasingly logically perverted and broken as its so-called "physical" applications, and how could it ever be otherwise? Much better, realistic science perspectives certainly exist (including new, reality-based mathematics) and are confirmed by real problem solutions (absent in reality-"independent" games of official science), but are subjectively rejected without discussion by the dominating regime of "mathematical physics", simply because it's a real totalitarian regime that wants to dominate without any competition and irrespective of anything (forget about them "leaving furtively through the back door"!). But who cares? This is the main "scientific" problem today...

• 6 Zephir May 9, 2008 6:25 PM

  ..."discipline independent of physics and mathematics".. no materialism, no platonism - it looks like third time independent form of existence...;-) Hopefully the Aether theory will return the physics into reality again.

• 7 Paulo gotac May 9, 2008 10:36 PM

  The so-called "theory of everything", if it ever comes to existence, has to be beautiful and elegant? Elegant universe? What means that?
  String theory must go on with no worries about elegance and beauty, even though there must be a fight for survival of the activity. It`s natural.

• 8 James May 10, 2008 12:56 AM

  My favorite theory is that an experiment shows something.

• 9 Andrei Kirilyuk May 10, 2008 12:39 PM

  Gary Ansorge said: "Mistakes are absolutely necessary, so we can know WHAT DOESN'T WORK". That's right, and as a result we do know now, after SO many wasted years and efforts, what it is exactly that does not work: the whole official science doctrine and totalitarian practice maintaining its own super-expensive support and totally excluding different approaches, irrespective of its own inability and their ability to solve real, well-known problems.

  "I guarantee there will be many more wrong efforts than right ones". If it's true for your efforts, it means only that it's time for you (and other similar "professionals") to change profession. It doesn't mean that it should be like that in science in general. Where would your "developed" world ever be if such "guarantees" and related, unconditionally positive, self-estimates dominated in other, practical spheres of (equally complex) human activity? It is precisely personally disinterested science amateurs, as well as all tax-payers, that can and should provide the most objective and correct estimate of science development, as it fortunately happens in material production (there where it is successful!). Knowledge should belong to people that support and use it, not to self-interested, practically uncontrollable oligarchy of professional liars. And there IS a sound, scientifically substantiated
  alternative of professional but open science content and organisation , providing much better guarantees...
  

• 10 andreicio May 12, 2008 2:12 AM

  Thanks Andrei. I was going to respond to Gary but you hit the nail on the head so well . . .

  Gary's position reflects the "mainstream" science' arrogance and lack of professional ethics, and utter belief that they can do no wrong.

  Physics today is in a sorry state, regardless of all the "milestones" and "breakthroughs" published every day in magazines such as this one and forgotten 2 or 3 hours after publication.

  I was reading the LHC webpage and aparently the operations team is very nervous because the cryogenics team is about to give them a green light. They already began to come up with statements like "if it does not work, then it is the best piece of modern art . . ."

  I sand by my statement Gary. they are parasites and what they are doing is not science. The Curies, Einsteins, and Higgs types are about to be extinct. Even Peter Higgs himself was beeing coustically sarcastic when he said that he will ask his doctors to keep him alive until the LHC starts. I bet the incompetent slime at the LHC wish Higgs would live 1000 years following this statement.

• 11 andreicio May 12, 2008 2:14 AM

  Oh and Gary: I may not have done any valuable reearch. But given your answer, it seems you have been blundering in the dark. And at least I did not make a career out of it as you seem to have done.

• 12 Miguel Gregori May 13, 2008 11:50 AM

  I think amer husain is right. Otherwise I do not really understand the hate between proponents and opponents of the theory. I do not know much about string theory, so I am completely in neutral grounds, but I think there is nothing wrong with trying to understand the world at a fundamental level, even if it is currently impossible to test the predictions of a theory experimentally, especially if it is mathematically beautiful and gravity comes out of it naturally, as I believe it does in string theory. It would be unwise, however, to trust such theory blindly and treat it as the ultimate truth, although I guess this point applies to any theory developed by man so far, even the experimentally tested ones.
  The reason I would like to defend string theorists is that I feel modern science, that used to be called natural philosophy, has completely lost its philosophical part and has become a purely technical subject. I was in Hamburg working in the H1 experiment at the HERA collider for a year and a half. There I tried to talk about the interpretations of QM and modern cosmology with many people. I was very sad when I found that almost everyone thought cosidering those matters was a waste of time. The only thing most of them cared about was to get a better calibration and resolution for the detector, i.e. a technician job. I understand the importance of their work. What I do not understand is that that is the only thing for them. I suppose the reason why I found so many people like this is because I was in an experimental physics environment, but I have also found many theorists which believe that if a theory cannot be proven it is worthless. Do they notice about the passage of time and the improvement of experiments and techniques??? Perhaps it will not be possible to prove anything today, but what about tomorrow?
  Please do not get me wrong, I completely understand the scientific method and agree with it, even though I do not think we can take even the most tested theory as the ultimate truth or the ultimate description of reality. Of course we must trust such theory much more than one which has not been tested at all, as an untested theory is complete speculation. What I find the greatest mistake of modern science (i.e. of the point of view of the majority of modern scientists), is the opinion that speculation is a waste of time.
  I think speculation IS what has brought science to where it is today. Of course it is great if you can test something, but there are some aspects of reality that cannot be tested today and now, but that does not mean we must not think about them. We must make a clear division between what has (apparently) been tested and what has not, NOT keep the former and abandon the latter...

• 13 Andrei Kirilyuk May 13, 2008 3:54 PM

  Miguel Gregori said: "The reason I would like to defend string theorists is that I feel modern science, that used to be called natural philosophy, has completely lost its philosophical part and has become a purely technical subject." This is a self-contradicting statement because its last part ("the reason") just directly contradicts the starting purpose ("to defend string theorist"). The real problem with string theory and ALL other fields of modern, "mathematical" physics is not that their results cannot be verified experimentally (as it is often stated), but that they have precisely become PURELY TECHNICAL disciplines absolutely concentrated on development of purely abstract, mathematical TOOLS (totally replacing tangible, physical reality and its consistent understanding, or "speculation"). It's not only material things that can be "technical", mental constructions also contain their "technical tools", in addition to "speculation", "purposes" and "objects" of study. But in the official, positivistic science doctrine and uniquely supported practice the whole richness of natural intelligence is just reduced to over-simplified, "linear" mathematical tools, or "models" (including their imitations of "nonlinearity"!). And what is really bad is that the effectively totalitarian system of modern science organisation (closely related to its over-simplified content!) invariably and ruthlessly rejects all other elements, your desired "speculation" including. "Shut up and calculate!", such is the basis of paramilitary theoretical "discipline" artificially imposed in all major science institutions, and string theory (as well as its main "competitor", quantum gravity, and the rest of "mathematical" physics) is but a leading instrument of that natural-curiosity- and intelligence-killing junta. In particular, string theory does NOT propose any solution to those canonical "quantum mysteries" of your interest, it just creates ever greater number of new mysteries, leaving the old ones silently "in the background". [You have "undular" quantum aspects, in their strongly reduced "model", as a "general" basis for string theory and "corpuscular" aspects as a similarly over-simplified basis for loop quantum gravity (or spin networks), and those two dominating theories are even more "mysteriously" - and hopelessly - opposed to each other than the old good "quantum duality" aspects!] By the way, it's the general property of the "new (mathematical) physics": it never solves problems of a previous theory (even Newton laws remain unexplained!), but profits instead from new, purely empirical (technical!) discoveries in order to create new, shamelessly "postulated" mysteries, thus leading the "grateful humanity" ever farther from genuine, consistent understanding of reality, which does emerge within quite another kind of science (e.g. [ 1 , 2 ]), containing ALL, old and recent, problem solutions and clear experimental confirmations and perspectives, far from "mere speculations"...

• 14 Miguel Gregori May 14, 2008 11:59 AM

  To Andrei Kirilyuk: As I said before, I do not know much about string theory. When I said technical, I meant non-philosophical (as "for thechnicians"), maybe I got wrong the meaning of the word. And I defended string theorists mainly because I thought they were trying to go beyond what can be tested experimentally in order to understand nature at a fundamental level. What would be the point otherwise? Anyway, I want to make clear that my point was intended for modern science in general, and I took the opportunity to make it in this blog since it is about a theory which cannot be tested experimentally. What you say about ST may be true, but given the fact that all links you send saying they are the good work are for your own papers I do not know if I should trust you. Please do not get me wrong and do not be offended. I understand you, I also think I do things right when I put effort doing them, but you have to realize that these are subjective opinions. What would a string theorist tell me about ST??? Is for that I do not think it wise to trust either proponents or opponents of the theory. As the saying goes (at least in Spain):
  Virtue is in the middle term... I am sure every country has its own version of the saying as it is very, very true.

• 15 Andrei Kirilyuk May 14, 2008 8:06 PM

  If "virtue is in the middle term", Miguel, then the world science is indeed very far from virtue because it gives the absolute preference just to ONE, actually very esoteric (if not perverted!) fundamental science approach, that of "mathematical physics" (actually represented by "string theory", "quantum gravity" and a few other versions of the SAME, ultimately simplified construction). It's good that we can chat rather freely on these pages, but as a Spanish and European citizen, you are forced to support one and only one, explicitly fruitless kind of science (it does not solve problems), far from any "balanced equilibrium" or assumed "fair competition" of ideas. This is a point you're missing in your position statement and this is an essential one because, you know, while material support (including real publication possibility) is not the sufficient condition for scientific progress (as proved extensively by today's long-lasting stagnation in official science), it's a necessary condition, without which one's ideas/results may be truly the best ones but remain unrealised in their potentialities. As you might note, science journalists of physicsworld.com (as well as all other media!) make their materials exclusively about that evidently fruitless science content (and thus the readers are forced to discuss it and its sterility) and all very expensive - and actually useless - experiments in fundamental physics are performed in order to "verify" those explicitly "contradictory", abstract theories claiming their "independence" from physical reality they're supposed to describe. And when the experiments demonstrate, without surprise, that the official theory is wrong (there is no "necessary" artificial dimensions, particles, forces, gravity waves, quark plasma, etc. - it's confirmed experimentally, Miguel!), both disproved theories and super-expensive experiments to "verify" only these, already "falsified" theories still continue, despite everything. If you can find a "virtue" here, I'll be grateful, together with billions of duped tax-payers. So everything is very strongly, ultimately biased, once and forever, and this is a problem, not particular features of a particular theory. If the "officially great" candidates fail all experimental tests (multiply and for many years), then it's the time to reject, or at least suspend, them and try something else, right? This is what any reasonable human activity would accept without discussion, just according to that universal "middle way wisdom". But they do the reverse, Miguel, investing all the world's resources for science, all those crazy billions and thousands of scientists, in the evidently bankrupt enterprise of official scholasticism.

  Accidentally, this is also an answer to the above "financial" comment by Amer Husain (science as a fight for limited resources): the problem is that there is no fight, Amer, no real competition (contrary to other human activities), everything goes only in one direction, that of the provably wrong, fruitless but subjectively imposed doctrine. We're not in democracy here, boys, it's the nightmare dictatorship. And I am not forcing you to believe it, Miguel, these are well-known, undeniable facts summarised above. You can and should preserve your reasonable doubts about any other candidate theories/approaches for the best world description and understanding, but when those official ones are so definitely, multiply disproved and decay even by themselves, isn't it the time to seriously try something else, without any subjective belief (as it has been the case with official abstractions) but with a balanced attention to the actual, over-all consistency in each case (there are but few of them, finally)? In particular, those "my" results are in agreement with the totality of (major) observations, including those that explicitly disagree with scholar "models" (and this is the true reason of my own continuing efforts!). So you see, Miguel, I am following the wisdom of the Spanish (and any other) people, but what about the Spanish (and any other) research council (generously nourished by the same people)? They follow the well-known "international" saying of mathematical physicists, "shut up and calculate" (your profits)!