Maybe that's why you're not happy about it; maybe you don't know enough.

Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily true; I don't really know anything about string theory myself, and I don't think I'd understand it if I studied more. It's way over my head. But I don't think you get to complain about how wrong an idea is if you don't know what it is you're complaining about. And yet it seems to happen all the time . . . .

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Right-- does that not prove the opposite of what you were claiming? You claimed that people don't continue to study something they are happy with, and I was arguing the inverse. Our liking of the Big Bang theory doesn't cause us to avoid confronting it, we confront it constantly because we like it-- we like dealing with it, using it, testing it, kicking its tires, etc. It's basically a complete lie that the scientific community resists challenges to its paradigms-- it loves its paradigms and loves supporting them, but it also loves it when they are challenged and loves replacing them when it has good enough occasion to do so. You might say that the history of science has been one of loving its theories to death.

Oh i don't know... the way physicists are talking at the moment, strin theory will be dead within a decade.

If you don't study it, how do you know? Besides, it depends on which physicists you're talking about/to.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I talk to Dr. Fred Wolf... and he is certainly against string theory.

Then you hear about the major guy's like Sheldon Glashow. The very fact nothing experimental can arise from string theory, it is an unfalsifiable theory.

''If you don't study it, how do you know?''


Because it is ridiculous how it goes. Tiny vibrating and closed strings in an 11, maybe 12 to 26 dimensional space and time? Considering we see only three dimensions, something about it seems wrong. Terribly wrong.

You dismiss it prior to studying it or researching it?

If scientists did that, we would have very few working models.

Define a working model, because string theory cetainly isn't one.

I'm not sure pursuing this line of discussion is useful, OG, but I'd reply to your question with "Why is string theory not a working model?"

I bet there are plenty of researchers out there who still think it works. OK, it's not complete or perfect. It might turn out to be a dud. There probably will be a better theory coming along some time soon. But if scientists did their research based on "Ooh I don't think that looks very pretty and its got some problems, lets forget about it", I don't think we'd have progressed very far.

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Spike
:)

As far as I know, string theory is a working model--consistent with observations. The problem with string theory is so much observation is input, rather than output, of the theory, just like with the epicycles--so many input parameters to string theory, some suspect it could be made to fit just about anything. To actually test it, it must predict things not predicted by other theories, things that can be tested. The only thing I've heard so far is that the Large Hadron Collider should produce mini black holes under String Theory but not under the Standard Model, so that would be the first likely test in the near future.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Are you saying that string theory is very... tangled?

It ties you up in knots?

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Fraser has discussed one idea for testing String Theory on the UT website

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One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
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