
I think string theories are wrong - Hanua
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/benjamin-t-solomon/strings-are-dead_b_7560444.html
======
jwuphysics
Oh boy. I also think that string theories (in their current state) are wrong
and possibly a dead end, but I feel uneasy reading this. Besides the harmless
typos [0] in the article and his questionable academic affiliation (iSETI [1],
which does not pass the straight face test), his referenced publication [2] is
published in a questionable journal [3] and begins with an abstract that jumps
around from topic to topic while "introducing" new terminology such as "kenos"
and tau, a "change in time dilation over a specific height."

[0] E.g., "Noble Prize"

[1] [http://www.iseti.us/](http://www.iseti.us/)

[2]
[http://www.scirp.org/Journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=3...](http://www.scirp.org/Journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=36276)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_Publishing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_Publishing)

~~~
Trombone12
(the "straight face test" I wonder to myself, the author claims some
endorsement from t'Hooft, maybe some eccentricity can be tolerated...)

Just following the link is enough to tell that indeed, under any reasonable
definition of "straight face test" that site would not pass as an academic
affiliation. I suspect that the "endorsement" from t'Hoof was more of the "I
don't care, send it to these guy" followed by a brisk walk in the opposite
direction.

As to the issue at hand, I don't think anyone claims to have a complete string
theory to begin with so it's not really an issue of proving anyone wrong.

The sad truth is rather that despite lots of work by many people, string
theory and/or supersymmetry, these ideas from a past millennia, are basically
the frameworks which produces most somewhat novel ideas today. And its not
like people don't try other things, the criticism that string theory is a dead
end is at least twenty years old by now, so it's not like there are no
incentives to come up with new stuff.

It is true that for a while there was an awful lot of papers with strings or
string like words going up on the archive, but looking at the actual
production right now, hep-th seems to be into black hole information paradox.
So maybe Smolin and Woit making all that fuss did have an effect. Or maybe the
graduate students thinking of going into string theory found Luboš blog and
decided that accounting was probably more fun anyway.

~~~
mahranch
> are basically the frameworks

This is precisely it. The name "String theory" is a bit of a misnomer; it's a
framework, not a scientific theory like evolution or special relativity
despite the common perception. Sure, it does make predictions (like tiny bits
a vibrating energy or "strings" are the most fundamental thing in the
universe), but that's a lot like playing solitaire in windows and then
proclaiming it a bad OS. Strings are only a tiny piece of a much larger
framework.

String theory is a framework in which you build scientific theories. Where
relativity or evolution might be programs on a computer, string theory is the
OS. Which is why there's so much confusion.

And to say it's a dead end is incorrect; to date there have been some
incredibly useful applications in unrelated fields. People are using it for
all kinds of things. Even if it's not a theory of everything, it is still
helping advance our knowledge and understanding of science.

------
sago
So to precis the intro: "I was asked by a Nobel laureate to submit this to
peer review, but I thought it would take too long, so I self published".

Yeah, the Nobel laureate told you that, not as an endorsement, but because it
is the standard response. "Ah yes, that is... erm... interesting... how about
you submit it for a notable journal. Oh sorry, I need to go talk to
whatshername over there, kthnxbai."

Peer review exists for a reason. Specifically, the merits of theories can't be
assessed via HuffPo opinion pieces, and the ratio of rubbish to quality
speculation is so large, that actual professional scientists need a filtering
mechanism.

------
api
"In 2013, I presented the paper "Empirical Evidence Suggest A Need For A
Different Gravitational Theory," at the American Physical Society's April
conference held in Denver, CO. There I met some young physicists and asked
them about working on gravity modification. One of them summarized it very
well, "Do you want me to commit career suicide?""

"What worries me is that it takes about 70 to 100 years for a theory to evolve
into commercially viable consumer products. Laser are good examples. So, if we
are tying up our brightest scientific minds with theories that cannot lead to
empirical validations, can we be the primary technological superpower a 100
years from now?"

...

I get the feeling that proposing something bold and wrong in physics results
in a 'crackpot' label, effectively ending your career. So if you want a
career, stay away from making bold predictions. Stay away from _testable_ new
ideas!

Perhaps the attraction of string theory is that it never leads to testable
specific -- and therefore possibly wrong -- predictions. There are infinitely
many permutations of string theory, all of which are mathematically
potentially valid. So you can publish forever on string theory and never be
wrong.

Reminds me of the old Star Trek TNG episode where they killed the Borg
collective by giving it an impossible but mathematically valid shape to
contemplate. It contemplated, and contemplated, and contemplated, and...
stopped doing anything else. Since the halting problem is unresolvable, it's
possible to contemplate within the bounds of any Turing-complete mathematical
system forever.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Lasers are terrible examples, they were invented in the 60s and an absolute
upper bound on their introduction into the consumer market is 1982.

~~~
maxerickson
They stand on theory that started to come together ~1900.

~~~
DougMerritt
To be more specific:

> Albert Einstein first broached the possibility of stimulated emission in a
> 1917 paper

[http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200508/history.cfm](http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200508/history.cfm)

~~~
mannykannot
You need more than stimulated emission for a laser. I think that figuring out
how to create a population inversion in an excited state is the best candidate
for the inception point of the laser as a specific possibility, and I believe
the honor for that achievement goes to Townes circa 1950.

~~~
DougMerritt
Nothing is ever simple. Before Townes' 1951 population inversion, there's also
Kastler's 1950 invention of optical pumping, and Dennis Gabor's 1947 invention
of holography (yes, 1947, before lasers, which stimulated development of
lasers)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_pumping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_pumping)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Gabor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Gabor)

~~~
mannykannot
Interesting. On following up on your links, I see that while optical pumping
was invented first, Townes was able to make the first maser by using an
electric field to separate out an excited state of ammonia, achieving a
population inversion without pumping.
[http://home.fnal.gov/~kubik/FermilabWebsiteDocs/Masers.ppt](http://home.fnal.gov/~kubik/FermilabWebsiteDocs/Masers.ppt)

The closer you look, the less the history of innovation looks like a simple
sequence.

------
calinet6
Sadly, I think there are some confounding factors to the lack of success in
this story. If this is the same manner in which the author communicates a
scientific theory to the community, it's not exactly surprising it hasn't been
received well.

Perhaps it should be that science is entirely disconnected from how it's
presented and who by; but in reality, it is still a human pursuit, and in
order to be successful at it, you need to appeal to other humans, and you need
to do it well. This is true of basically all pursuits involving social groups.

This is, of course, highly critical after reading only a single data point,
but it's probably a contributing factor to the frustration here.

~~~
hackcasual
It's unfortunate, but cranks are a natural occurring human thing. In the grand
scheme of things, it's probably for the best that we use higher level cues as
to the value of a work, than exerting a large amount of effort digging deep.

~~~
vixen99
"Very unfortunate!" and a knowing look appeared on the faces of all those
present'.

------
geofft
Flagged because

\- there is serious evidence of crackpottery, as evidenced by other
contributors

\- there is little evidence of good science, as evidenced by other
contributors

\- there is little evidence of good review (either of content or of prose), as
evidenced by other contributors

\- in the absence of all of those, one would fall back on the credentials of
the author, which seem to be minimal

\- _Super Physics for Super Technologies_ is self-published (via Amazon
CreateSpace)

\- the forum seems very bizarre for this subject

I don't think this article is worth HN readers' time to read and consider, and
I'd taken its presence on the front page as an endorsement by the community. I
want my time back.

~~~
Trombone12
The huffington is HN related right? Maybe OP linked as a satirical commentary
on their content policy?

~~~
geofft
I do sort of dislike that there's no good way to include commentary along with
a link. But I don't think "Look at this piece of trash that HuffPo posted"
would be particularly great HN content, either.

------
hliyan
A stark contrast from the days when Lee Smolin (author of _The Trouble With
Physics_ [1]) lamented that your career in physics is essentially dead unless
you went into string theory, and pursuing quantum gravity could lead to
conflict with pro-string peers. And I don't think he was imagining it. Here's
one reviewer:

"In the context of string theory, he literally floods the pages of his book
with undefendable speculations about some basic results of string theory.
Because these statements are of mathematical nature, we are sure that Lee is
wrong even in the absence of any experiments." [2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics)

[2] [http://motls.blogspot.com/2004/10/lee-smolin-trouble-with-
ph...](http://motls.blogspot.com/2004/10/lee-smolin-trouble-with-physics-
review.html)

~~~
gohrt
The motls blog claims that Smolin made provable mathematical errors in his
book. Do you disagree?

~~~
johncolanduoni
I cannot speak to the mathematical errors, but I recommend you take most of
what Motl says with a grain of salt. He is well known in the physics and
mathematics community for a variety of interesting statements, including my
personal favorite: "Discrete math is just a disorganized mess of random
statements."
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1720](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1720)
Which is interesting, because I have yet to see a construction of continuous
mathematics that didn't start with something discrete.

~~~
DougMerritt
Motl is an infamous pain, and makes enemies at the drop of the hat, and is
extremely scornful and overly negative -- but he's also intelligent and knows
mathematical physics.

I would disregard his unsupported _opinions_ out of hand without thinking
twice, but not his supported arguments, whether right or wrong.

------
donovanr
The author only encountering to 10^500 sting vacua/landscape issue in 2013
raises some serious crackpot alarm bells [0]. That was common knowledge in the
community by 2005 at the latest.

[http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html)

~~~
gone35
Yet FWIW, note that #39 applies to _every_ string theorist!

"39\. 50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no
concrete testable predictions."

------
zitterbewegung
When physicists can't be employed as physicists they go into finance right? So
all of the unemployed string theorists will go into finance?

~~~
jessriedel
Most of them already have. The number of strings postdoc has already slowed to
a trickle.

------
DougMerritt
Given the brief text, I'm not clear on how t' Hooft's idea is different than
orthodox GR:

> Prof. Gerardus 't Hooft had brought up something interesting in his 2008
> paper "A locally finite model for gravity" that "... absence of matter now
> no longer guarantees local flatness..." meaning that accelerations can be
> present in spacetime without the presence of mass. Wow! Isn't this a
> precursor to propulsion physics, or the ability to modify spacetime without
> the use of mass?

I don't know about the speculations, but the basic question of curvature in
the absence of mass is totally orthodox general relativity.

It's a very widespread folk myth, even with physicists, that absence of matter
means asymptotically flat spacetime, but it's not absolutely true.

I had thought John Baez discussed this on sci.physics ages ago, but after I
couldn't find that, this is the first formal reference I dug up to support
that:

"Relativity And Geometry" by Roberto Torretti, 1983

Page 199: Chapter 6, Gravitational Geometry

> First several new non-flat matter-free solutions of the field equations have
> been discovered, which show that an empty universe built in accordance with
> General Relativity can be a very lively place, the interplay of pure
> gravitational energy being enough to produce some remarkable phenomena if a
> handful of test particles is supplied.[31]

[footnote [31] on page 334 discusses "Friedmann's equation", with a limit
tending to 0 in the case of interest]

Maybe the point is that the orthodox stuff is usually concerning an empty
universe solution? I had thought there were non-empty universe solutions that
behaved this way as well, but I might be misremembering.

~~~
donovanr
Massless GR is sometimes called "pure gravity", and is something people are
still interested in (or were, last time I was paying attention) [1]. Kind of
remarkable that even the base-case has so many open issues. I should re-read
that Torretti book, I remember liking his style but that some of the math was
over my head at the time.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.3359](http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.3359)

------
tacos
This article on theoretical physics misspells "Nobel Prize" three times.

~~~
carterehsmith
Yep, it is a "Noble Prize".

Also, "The Founder & Chairman, Solomon completed a 12-year study into the
physics & engineering of Gravity Modification"

"Solving gravity modification and doing it in 12-years is a very significant
achievement as Michio Kaku’s estimate was ‘several hundred years’ (April 2008
Space Show interview)."

Sauce: [http://xodusonefoundation.org/about-
solomon/](http://xodusonefoundation.org/about-solomon/)

------
mjcohen
Besides, in 100 years we will be fortunate if anyone will be alive, let alone
doing theoretical physics.

------
jsigoerjg
Yeah, I'm going to go read an article about string theory in the fucking
Huffington Post, because I hate myself.

Seriously, why is the Huffington Post not banned as a source here?

~~~
dang
It used to be, but occasionally a substantive article shows up there, so we
moved it up a level to penalized-but-not-banned.

------
pimlottc
That's got to be the most inadvertently HN-clickbait headline I've ever seen.

~~~
pshc
Having a personal vendetta against 'string'ly typed programming, upon seeing
the headline, my head involuntarily perked up like that of a meerkat.

(The OP headline was previously "Strings Are Dead")

~~~
agumonkey
Same here, somehow I was picturing a realization (that strings are wrong) so
large that even the HuffPost would write about it.

------
littlewing
"I forecast that both string and quantum gravity theories will be dead by
2017."

I was listening until this. What is the basis for this statement? Whenever
I've made a statement trying to forecast the future by a date, I've been
almost always wrong.

