
String Theory Does Not Win a Nobel, and I Win a Long Bet - Osiris30
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/string-theory-does-not-win-a-nobel-and-i-win-a-bet/
======
knzhou
It's important to avoid conflating string theorists with all theoretical
physicists. Plenty of people in particle physics either don't believe in
string theory or don't think it can make useful predictions any time soon,
even if it were assumed true. Furthermore, the vast majority of people called
"string theorists" don't even work on traditional string theory day to day,
but on more concrete ideas that have been partly inspired by it, such as
holography and amplitudes.

This needs to be pointed out because there is a huge narrative bias out there.
Science popularizers will endlessly frame things like "this whole field has no
idea what they're doing, and only I, the brave contrarian outsider, can see
through the fraud", even though they're only pointing out things that are
already well known in the field. These narratives are completely wrong, but
uncritically eaten up by people who think of themselves as contrarians.

Despite what the current top comment claims, you're not reading this article
about Horgan because he was the first to think string theory would have
trouble making predictions. Physicists have made this criticism since the
beginning. Feynman pointed it out continually, and Glashow, one of the
architects of the Standard Model, tried to bar string theorists from Harvard
for the same reason.

You're reading Horgan's take, and not Feynman's or Glashow's, because Horgan
is popular, and that's because he _puts all his energy into expanding his
popular reach_. Only nonphysicists can do that, because physicists spend the
majority of their time doing, well, physics.

~~~
bufferoverflow
It should really be called String Hypothesis. Theories in science are
generally for something that's near 100% proven.

~~~
westoncb
The difference between hypotheses and theories isn't about whether one is more
likely true, they are different kinds of structures with different roles.

A hypothesis is ideally 'atomic': it's making a single assertion that should
be falsifiable by experiment.

A theory provides a specific way of modeling the elements of some field of
study, and how those elements interact with one another.

It should be structured in such a way that it can describe the components of
any experiment that might be set up to confirm/reject a hypothesis in this
field.

And once an experiment is described in the terms of some theory, the theory
should provide a systematic way of calculating what the result of the
experiment should be.

That's where the connection between hypotheses and theory comes in: actually
conducting experiments assigns either Acceptance or Rejection to a set of
hypothesis; ideally, the theory assigns the same Accept/Reject values to the
same hypotheses in its predictions (this is probably never 100% the case in
practice though—esp. not in an active field of study).

The structure of String Theory is much closer to theory than hypothesis. (It
may have limitations in how much it models physical 'experiments,' but it's at
least much more of a 'system description' than an atomic assertion.)

------
scottlocklin
FWIIW, Horgan is a well known science writer and author of a 1996 book called
"the end of science" which pointed out that science in general and physics in
particular has reached a point where there is no appreciable forward progress
and is obsessed with non falsifiable woo like string theory. It's a
provocative book; and people have raised the issue that Kelvin said something
similar 120 years ago, but it's really worth reading.

He was 100% on the money that Noodle Theory was a lot of non-scientific
mathematical baloney; a super unpopular position at the time (1996); pretty
much the only prominent person in agreement with him was Nobel Prize Winner
Phil Warren Anderson, who disagrees with him in many other respects.
Ultimately many other writers came out in agreement on this issue at least;
Woit and Smolin most notably, though others agreed. At this point I'm pretty
sure even the physics establishment is a little nervous about hiring new
noodle theorists. He's basically right about stuff like "complexity theory" as
well.

I had a couple buddies who were prominent string theorists; some involved in
its inception. One in particular retired a very disappointed man.

~~~
haolez
What’s wrong with complexity theory? I remember seeing a talk about it a long
time ago and the concepts were super interesting, but I didn’t (I don’t) have
the mathematical maturity to understand it in depth.

~~~
knzhou
It hasn't become concrete enough to make sharp, striking, _correct_
predictions. It turns out the real world is extremely messy. Complexity theory
can produce specific predictions ("disease spread will follow a power law with
a critical exponent of...") but they won't be quantitatively correct. Or it
can produce correct predictions ("airplanes increase disease spread because
they increase the global network's connectivity") but they're generally
obvious, and certainly don't require the full formalism of complexity theory
to get.

------
dmix
Michio Kaku has long been my least favourite of the celebrity talking head
scientists. And he has some good competition for that label. His pop-science
books tend to read more like coming from a Hollywood screenwriter than a
careful and thoughtful scientific mind.

~~~
DidISayTooMuch
Kaku is the Deepak Chopra of physics.

~~~
mhh__
Harsh...

I have a copy of Kaku's Quantum Field Theory book on my shelf, but no Chopra
(thank god)

------
fabiosussetto
"It would culminate the ancient human quest for knowledge, which began when
the first of our ancestors asked, "Why?""

I'm always baffled when I read these kind of quotes, especially coming from
such smart people. Do they just forget that our theories are models of
reality? I personally believe that there are no wave functions or vibrating
membranes out there, as there are no "triangles". These are just names for our
mental models on which we map reality the best we can. Fitting models are very
useful, but they certainly don't answer the big "Why?" and are doomed to be
superseded by more accurate ones, when progress is made. Is it just me
thinking this?

~~~
im3w1l
Your perspective is a popular one, but a lot of people also think there is a
"true" theory that will perfectly explain how the universe evolves.

~~~
wuliwong
>a lot of people also think there is a "true" theory that will perfectly
explain how the universe evolves

Doesn't Godel's incompleteness theorems make this doubtful? Logic was not my
area of focus but I thought the basic idea was that there is always going to
be some un-answerable question(s) or un-provable answers in any consistent
theory[1]? I'm pretty sure there is not significant work using non-axiomatic
math, I'm honestly not even sure what that looks like. I'd actually be quite
interested to find out about some theoretical physics work that did not fall
under the auspices of the incompleteness theorem.

[1] There are certainly caveats to "theory" but I believe all those caveats
are satisfied by any version of String Theory be actively researched.

~~~
mantap
No, for instance you can perfectly describe the rules of Conway's Game of
Life, and if you were an artificial intelligence living in the Game of Life
you could presumably figure out the rules quite easily through
experimentation. You wouldn't be able to _prove_ those are the rules though,
you'd have to make some assumptions that the rules didn't change in space and
time, and that they weren't a manifestation of some more complex rules.

~~~
namirez
> _you can perfectly describe the rules of Conway 's Game of Life, and if you
> were an artificial intelligence living in the Game of Life you could
> presumably figure out the rules quite easily_

I'm not so sure about this. It reminds me of the quote "If our brains were
simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't".

~~~
selectionbias
Conway's Game of Life is Turing complete, so if it is possible to build an
artificial intelligence in a regular computer then it is possible to build one
within the Game of Life. Also, understanding the basic rules of the game of
life is not the same as understanding how an artificial intelligence within it
functions. The rules that determine how patterns of pixels change in the game
can be written down on a single sheet of paper, a description of an artificial
intelligence built within the game would probably be absurdly complex.

------
kashyapc
Two weeks ago I heard a very interesting EconTalk podcast[1] by Sabine
Hossenfelder on _Physics, Reality, and Lost in Math_.

Hossenfelder herself is a theoretical physicist, and researches quantum
gravity. And a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced
Studies. She has a refreshing tone and frankness, and I appreciated learning
about her work.

Quoting the podcast's abstract:

"Hossenfelder argues that the latest theories in physics have failed to find
empirical confirmation. Particles that were predicted to be discovered by the
mathematics have failed to show up. Whether or not there is a multiverse has
no observable consequences. Hossenfelder argues that physicists have become
overly enamored with the elegance and aesthetics of their theories and that
using beauty to evaluate a model is unscientific. The conversation includes a
discussion of similar challenges in economics."

[1] [https://www.econtalk.org/sabine-hossenfelder-on-physics-
real...](https://www.econtalk.org/sabine-hossenfelder-on-physics-reality-and-
lost-in-math/)

------
Mugwort
It's very likely a unified theory will win a prize maybe even the Nobel Prize
but it isn't going to happen anytime soon. FWIW I'm about as convinced of the
truth of string theory as I am of the truth of General Relativity. Sure a
better version of M-theory or something else is sure to be discovered but it
will be an outgrowth of the current enterprise. The problem is even if we had
the correct theory right now it probably would not do us much good at all. It
would be a puzzle box we couldn't even open or get answers from it. People
underestimated the difficulties involved and the theory was over hyped. Now
begins the long "string theory winter". Decades from now, some diehard whose
career is foundering will make a significant breakthrough, enough to compel
everyone's attention. Until then, there's plenty of interesting physics
problems to work on that have been unjustly neglected for too long.

Einstein's theory of GR could end up being "wrong" but it would live on as a
very good approximation to a more fundamental theory.

String theory could very well turn out to be completely wrong but it would
fail in a very different manner. If ST is wrong, it's no longer useful. If GR
is "wrong" people will still use it.

For various reasons which are by no means proof or even evidence I think ST is
basically correct but we're simply unable to make proper sense of it.

Anyway, we're here at the string theory winter. Careers are ruined, people
disappointed etc. That's just how it goes. Sometimes, things work out and
sometimes they just don't. We didn't exactly walk away from all of this with
ZERO but we're very far from the ultimate PRIZE or GOAL. In hindsight we'll
probably look back on this and realize we were hopelessly unable to succeed
given the tools and ideas of the day. Expert systems were simply unable to
deliver and people were crushed. Careers were ruined. Hopes dashed. Naysayers
vindicated then along comes this crazy guy who just won't give up on neural
networks.

I think the future looks much brighter for unified physics now that string
theory as we knew it has clearly failed. I don't want to leave these guys out
too so let me add that loop quantum gravity has failed too, much more
gracefully I might add. I think these guys were on to something and their
ideas aren't going to completely disappear.

I've thrown away about 10,000 hours of my life on this stuff. Thanks for
spending 3 minutes on my meager insights.

------
Animats
This can happen in academia. I went through Stanford CS, finishing in 1985.
That was about when it was clear that "expert systems" were not going to lead
to Strong AI Real Soon Now, or, indeed, much of anywhere. But many faculty
were in deep denial about that. The "AI Winter" followed. There was little
progress until machine learning finally took off about two decades later.

~~~
perl4ever
I still remember reading an article about Doug Lenat and Cyc a long time ago
in some pop sci publication and thinking, surely you can't be serious...

I don't understand how people ever thought such things could become equivalent
to human minds, but I don't think that's my insight, but that others' thinking
was blinkered for some reason.

~~~
namarie
Makes you think about what we think today that will be seen likewise by future
people.

~~~
thanatropism
You're being downvoted, but we' re basically drunk on these amazing successes
in Computer Vision and apply at least _some_ magical thinking when expecting
them to extend to general (e.g. reinforcement learning) domains.

~~~
Animats
AI is doing a lot better now than in the 1980s. AI back then was groups at
MIT, Stanford, and CMU, and a few small groups elsewhere. Almost all the 1980s
AI startups went bust.

This time, there's enough success that the field is self-funding. Cynically,
because mediocre machine learning is good enough for ad targeting.

~~~
thanatropism
You mean AI planning and stuff?

I’m bearish on reinforcement learning right now. Is there good stuff happening
in a comparable front? (Will a blocks world solver ever play Super Mario?)

------
beloch
"The Nobel prize judges have always been sticklers for experimental proof."

One of the big challenges of devising a grand-unifying theory of everything is
that, if it doesn't make different predictions than existing theories do in
any context, it's experimentally unverifiable. We can hope for a unifying
theory that makes everything simpler, but it's far more likely that a theory
that deals with all things at once will makes dealing with special cases
harder. If such a theory is harder to work with and does not differ from
special case theories that are easier to apply, why bother?

Of course, a unifying theory probably _will_ differ from existing theories in
at least some contexts. They may be extremely high energy, gravity, etc.
contexts that are beyond our current technology to test. String theory likely
falls into this category. The question is, how much resources should we pour
into developing a theory before demanding that its differences with currently
accepted theories become _testable_?

Quite frankly, answering this question is above my pay-grade. Scientific
history is full of both dead-ends and things that were initially thought to be
useless that have since become the foundations of entire fields. How do we
know which string theory is? If we cut funding to string theory development,
are we cutting off a field that will one day be essential? By continuing to
pour funds into string theory, are we funding a dead end and starving several
other things that might have been revelations?

~~~
SolarNet
> One of the big challenges of devising a grand-unifying theory of everything
> is that, if it doesn't make different predictions than existing theories do
> in any context, it's experimentally unverifiable.

Yea, but then it isn't a unifying theory it's basically just a giant case
statement of "if relativistic motion, use relativistic motion equation". That
isn't a unifying theory, that's more like a programming library that does
everything.

A unifying theory would have to allow one to unify all of the existing
equations we have as well as synthesize new ones; not just the ones we already
have. It probably doesn't exist. It smacks too much of an NP-hard compression
problem, where if we have enough output of the function we can find the
minimal representation of it, but applied to everything in the universe.

------
jsnk
Whether you get it right or wrong, I really appreciate people making
verifiable predictions about the future publicly.

On the other hand, I am less and less interested in post hoc analysis done by
journalists and academics judging after the fact, what should've happened.

------
dkrich
Other than for fun and to donate to a good cause, I'm not sure why anyone
would ever take the other side of a bet like this or the follow up one for the
case of wine. The author is basically betting against an unlikely outcome and
the challenger is betting on it, with no adjustment for the likelihood. This
would be like offering a bet that a particular college football team won't win
a national championship and getting even money that they will.

I realize this is outside the scope of the article, but I think it's worth
noting because the author gets outsized credit for being correct despite not
really offering an alternative. To be fair the author should have had to bet
an alternate area that _would_ win a Nobel prize before 2020, otherwise it's a
push and each person's stake goes to charity.

------
whatshisface
> _Gaining access to the infinitesimal microscales where superstrings
> supposedly wriggle would require an accelerator 1,000 light years around._

Has anyone ever proven that there aren't any better accelerator technologies
left to be discovered? What about natural accelerators like the charges that
build up and produce cosmic rays?

~~~
magicalhippo
> What about natural accelerators like the charges that build up and produce
> cosmic rays?

As mentioned the benefit of artificial accelerators are that you can make the
collisions happen right in the middle of the detectors, which is quite nice.
You can also generate a lot of collisions, which is good because statistics
require it.

That said, there are projects, such as this[1], utilizing natural
accelerators. There's a technical talk about their results here[2]. The first
part explains the system in more detail.

[1]: [https://www.auger.org/index.php/cosmic-
rays/detection](https://www.auger.org/index.php/cosmic-rays/detection)

[2]: [http://pirsa.org/17120007](http://pirsa.org/17120007)

~~~
smueller1234
Thanks for posting that reference to the (Pierre) Auger Observatory with links
and all. We loved to point out that at current accelerator tech, our high
energy events would need a ring with about the same radius as the Earth's
distance from the sun. What also blows my mind is that there aren't really
credible/supported theories about what process or effect may be able to put as
much energy into a single particle. Whatever it is, my money is on that is a
process that happens at large scales (just like Fermi acceleration), so the
"giant accelerator" bit remains somewhat true, except we don't have to build
it. :)

------
ttctciyf
As a long-time antagonist of Kaku and string theory / supersymmetry, Peter
Woit naturally has a blog entry[1] on this that's worth a look.

He points out Prof Gordon Kane upped[2] the ante:

> By 2020 there will be a Nobel Prize for a string- or unification- or
> supersymmetry-based theory or explanation or experimental discovery.

And goes on to give us some insight into Kaku's current point of view.
Spoiler: he thinks string theory will give us the "God Equation" when it
reaches its final form!

1:
[http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/](http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/)

2:
[http://longbets.org/12/#comment-166313625](http://longbets.org/12/#comment-166313625)

------
max_zhou
Correct me if I am wrong. i think string theory is searched not just because
of its beauty, but also because of existing problems in general relativity.
For example, the center of black hole is predicted to be `infinite` in terms
of many metrics . But the center is also part of the spacetime, it should bear
some measurable values. The answer might require quantum physics since it is
microscopic. Therefore, the unifying of general relativity and quantum
mechanics is asked for.

~~~
sanxiyn
Yes, quantum gravity is searched for. String theory is not quantum gravity, it
is a specific approach to quantum gravity that has not been very fruitful.

~~~
max_zhou
Ah, thanks for pointing that out!

------
heroHACK17
String theory is probably the one scientific topic I spend the most of my free
time learning about. It is fascinating. I have read Brian Greene's 'The Hidden
Reality' over five times, I think.

I recently watched his conversation with Sam Harris and was intrigued by a
point Brian made, albeit about quantum mechanics and the 'many worlds' theory.

Brian claims that he doesn't think the many worlds theory holds water because
it makes an assumption about what happens before some object is measured (A)
and after that same object is measured (A'): while many worlds claims that all
possibilities are indeed realized, Brian claims that we just don't know for
sure what happens between events (A) and (A'); he claims that a unified theory
would explain what happens between those events.

In any case, that's just me rambling about it. Thanks for the post :)

~~~
madhadron
Sadly, popular discussions about topics like these are usually not worth
spending any time on. There is no shortcut for digging into the math.

> while many worlds claims that all possibilities are indeed realized

That's...a problematic statement since you have to define "realized" without
resorting to any classical concepts. Once you manage to excise the classical
concepts you end up with something that is perfectly reasonable.

> Brian claims that we just don't know for sure what happens between events
> (A) and (A'); he claims that a unified theory would explain what happens
> between those events.

I suspect that this was a communications breakdown. It's hard to imagine a
quantum physicist today postulating this in the face of the last few decades
of experimental and theoretical work on the foundations of quantum mechanics.

------
steelframe
> characteristic radiation from black holes and Creation

Wait, did the author just refer to the Big Bang as "Creation" with a capital
'C'? Since when did Judeo-Christian mythology (or whatever mythology you think
"Creation with a capital 'C'" means in the author's culture, inferring some
creative agent in the "beginnings" of the known universe) become relevant in
this article's context?

~~~
agota
I also noticed that.

------
didibus
So is all this about the fact that String Theory just didn't turn out to be
practically useful? Or is the theory no longer believer to hold weight given
current observations?

~~~
sanxiyn
It is not about being useful, it is about there being zero experimental
evidence for string theory.

~~~
didibus
I'm really a commoner when it comes to physics, so indulge me if I don't make
sense.

As I gather then, there's been no experiment showing evidence to String
Theory, but all experimental result are also not contradicting it and fitting
inside its models?

If so, I don't really understand how both these thing can be true at the same
time. Is it that people criticize String Theory for kinda being too broad, so
in a way, it allows too many things to be possible, but that also renders it
useless for prediction, because it's not close enough to exactly what happens?

Like saying that the weather on any day must be between -100 and 100 celcius.
It will be hard to find evidence to the contrary, but it's so broad that it's
useless for any valuable predictions?

------
braindead_in
Is there a clear boundary where string theory ends and Standard Model starts?

------
edmqkk
the whole time I just kept thinking, "but... when they put up their money in
2002 it was invested right?? The charity got something more like $2880? why
aren't they telling us!?"

------
m0zg
Can it even win a Nobel? I thought the Nobel is not awarded for math, and
string theory is just math, with no verifiable real-world side effects or
consequences that I'm aware of.

~~~
rsj_hn
Nobel prizes skew heavily towards experimental physics and theory prizes
require experimental verification. That's why Higgs had to wait until 2013
even though absolutely everyone was convinced that a Higgs boson existed for
decades before that.

Even Einstein didn't win the Nobel for GR, but for the photoelectric effect.
Back in the day when high energy physicists kept discovering new particles and
there was a short delay between theory and experiment, there were more Nobels
awarded to theorists for this, and I think that golden age of grand
unification progress created a false impression that theory work is expected
to win Nobel prizes just for being good theory work.

But if you look at the last dozen or so Nobels, they are all for describing
observable phenomena or conducting novel experiments: (lasers, discovering
exoplanets, detecting gravity waves, theoretical descriptions of phase
transitions of matter, LEDs, mass of the Neutrino, etc.) It would take very
convincing experimental confirmation before String theory wins a Nobel, but
there are lots of other prizes awarded to string theorists, and Witten even
won a Fields medal, which is more prestigious than a Nobel to the math
community.

~~~
mhh__
My history of physics is probably simplified, but I think Einstein got it for
(mainly) the photoelectric effect in part because relativity was still
(despite having been verified to some extent already) too weird.

~~~
madhadron
Yes, it was given for the photoelectric effect and other work (which was nudge
nudge, wink wink, relativity). Everyone forgets just how much physics Einstein
did besides relativity. Brownian motion, for example.

Turns out that the photoelectric effect as described by Einstein was possible
to get out of classical physics, though, so it took a few more iterations in
the later 20th century to really nail that one down again. See 'The Quantum
Challenge' by Zajonc.

------
avip
Mandatory string theory introduction for the novice
[https://xkcd.com/171/](https://xkcd.com/171/)

------
hoseja
This guy really hates the search for grand unified theory, wow. What a
miserable fellow.

~~~
tim333
I don't think he hates it so much as being pessimistic about finding it in a
hurry.

------
35787
Kaku also incorrectly predicted HEVs.

------
the-pigeon
I can't wait until String Theory dies. As a couch scientist it seems to very
clearly be a dead end.

They keep massaging it to make it fit any new objective discoveries but an
accurate theory matches new data, it doesn't need to be forced to fit with it
constantly.

------
raspasov
Quantum computers might be able to perform simulations which will be
indistinguishable from reality. Many theories can be tested that way once we
have a sufficiently powerful quantum computer.

~~~
krastanov
While I agree on the promise of quantum computing, the way you phrased it is
somewhat misleading (hides plenty of complications (even theoretical ones)
under the rug). Moreover, even if we can simulate a theory efficiently, we can
not use that simulation to learn the value of a (hyper)parameter, without
being able to make an observation.

And this is the main problem: it is infeasible to make observations in the
parameter regime of interest. The difficulty of simulating the theory is
borderline inconsequential in this case.

~~~
raspasov
Is observing a parameter not allowed by quantum mechanics or a current
fundamental law?

I am aware of the difficulty involved but an optimistic view is that anything
is possible until fundamentally proven otherwise. As far as I’m aware, quantum
computers would be able to simulate an entire universe in theory.

Sorry if my initials comment seemed to disregard the enormity of the problem.
I realize we might be decades/centuries before any of this is testable. Not
unlike how Newton was compared to our current understanding of physics.

~~~
krastanov
The parameter regime of interest is monumentally out of reach to experiments.
We can already derive things on paper about that regime, and with better
computers we would indeed be able to make more complicated calculations about
that regime. But to get something useful we also need to "fit" these
calculations to observations. We do not have observations not because of a
fundamental constraint, rather because it is engineeringly impossible to reach
these energy scales with anything we can imagine. So the roadblock is
experimental and a quantum computer would not be particularly helpful with it.

