
Evidence that the universe is made of strings has been elusive for 30 years - jonbaer
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/string-theory-about-unravel-180953637/?no-ist
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Zigurd
The author of this article is Brian Greene, who is the leading explainer of
string theory to mass audiences. He has taken on the challenge of explaining a
kind of physics that many see as unintuitive and messy, and this article is a
kind of "checking in" on the health of string theory for Smithsonian readers.
So cut him some slack about the title, and about the French horn analogy. The
gist of it is "Did string theory math explode and leave a big mess instead of
finding something experimentally verifiable?" and his answer is "No. Maybe the
varying options for extra-spatial dimensions in string theory explains why we
have this set of cosmological parameters and not some other set."

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tupshin
Which is basically just using the weak anthropic principle as a convenient
excuse for a lack of verifiability.

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Animats
Lee Smolin, the physicist who wrote "The Trouble with Physics",
([http://leesmolin.com/writings/the-trouble-with-
physics/](http://leesmolin.com/writings/the-trouble-with-physics/)) is the
most notable critic of string theory. The basic problem with string theory is
that it doesn't generate experimentally testable predictions, at least not at
any energy level reachable. It may just be an mathematical exercise.

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tim333
>That string theory unites general relativity and quantum mechanics is a
profound success.

Hmm... I'm not a string theory guy but I was not aware that they'd done that
in a meaningful way.

[edit] Googling I came across a quote from Peter Woit: "The sole argument
generally given to justify this picture of the world is that perturbative
string theories have a massless spin two mode and thus could provide an
explanation of gravity, if one ever managed to find an underlying theory for
which perturbative string theory is the perturbative expansion." Dunno if
that's fair?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit#Critic_of_string_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit#Critic_of_string_theory)

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amelius
It would make more sense to me if the universe was built from precisely
nothing. Thus everything around us would be merely abstract, but because we
are part of it, we experience it as being real, or tangible.

The fact that multiple beings live in this abstraction is of course also an
illusion, for we are all one.

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deciplex
You could say this about any model of the universe that's computable. You
don't seem to be making a claim that could possibly be useful, or I'm
misunderstanding you.

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amelius
No, my remark does not give any useful explanations. The main point is that if
we start thinking about how our universe could come into existence from
absolutely nothing, we _could_ reach a model for it more quickly than by
"just" matching theories to experimental outcomes.

Think bottom up, instead of top down.

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pavlov
The C string theory of everything: God called printf() with a string argument
that wasn't null-terminated, and now we're just running on a buffer overflow
until the universe segfaults and blinks out of existence.

It's pretty amazing to realize that everything you know is the result of
accessing random leftovers in heavenly RAM, but that's what C string theory
tells us.

~~~
agumonkey
There are alternate theories though
[http://xkcd.com/312/](http://xkcd.com/312/)

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chengiz
Talk of a misleading title. This is not even the journalistic principle, which
says if a question is posed in the headline, the answer is "no". The title
question is "not even discussed" in the article. Which is ironic, considering
the "Not Even Wrong" criticism of string theory and multiverses.

~~~
laex
Brain Greene - the author said this about the article:

"Hi Everyone, To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the key paper that
launched string theory into the mainstream of physics, I've written personal
retrospective, just published in Smithsonian Magazine, on this remarkable but
challenging approach to unification. \--BG PS: I didn't choose the title of
the article, and don't consider it representative of the piece."

See
[https://www.facebook.com/BrianGreenePhysicist](https://www.facebook.com/BrianGreenePhysicist)

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thret
It seems that this article was published next year.

~~~
dalke
(In case it wasn't obvious), the Smithsonian is primarily a print magazine.
The magazine arrives at or near the start of the month, which means the
articles are written and ready before the printing starts. When I was a
subscriber I would sometimes get the magazine before the start of the month,
and occasionally joke about time travel.

