
Time is running out for supersymmetry and string theory [video] - zenoswonkyarrow
https://iai.tv/video/time-is-running-out-for-supersymmetry-and-string-theory
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H8crilA
There is no "time" prescribed for developing scientific theories. There is no
plan here. They take exactly as much as they need to be developed, not any
shorter nor any longer. It can be days, months, years, decades, centuries,
millennias. Or more. They can take zero large failures, 5 large failures, 1000
large failures.

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cwzwarich
Is there anything that would cause adherents to accept that it is a failed
theory? All of the false predictions so far apparently haven't moved the
needle much. After a while it starts to seem more like Aristotelian natural
philosophy rather than modern empirical science.

It would be different if this belief was pushed by a few isolated theorists,
but it's the major focus of the field and they will likely ask for billions of
dollars of new public investment for accelerators to continue the goose chase,
with no promising leads from any of the previous experiments.

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whatshisface
It is not possible for an un-falsified theory to be a failed theory. Instead,
among theories there is only more interesting and less interesting. It is up
to each researcher to individually decide which theory they think is the most
interesting, on the basis of what is the most promising. There is no
scientific basis for doing that, because by definition we are talking about
trying to guess which theories _future_ evidence will support.

Some people argue that since so much of the supersymmetric theory parameter
space has been ruled out, that this reflects negatively on supersymmetry as a
whole. However you must understand that this is exactly the kind of non-
empirical argument that some stringers get so much flak for deploying. Nobody
knows what the prior distribution should be over parameter space and it is not
possible to do something like applying a uniform distribution, because if you
do something as simple as algebraically re-arrange the parameters the uniform
distribution over the new parameters will not be equal to the uniform
distribution over the old parameters.

I can give you a concrete example to illustrate the fallacy of trying to
measure the "volume" of the ruled-out parameter space. Suppose there is a
grain of rice somewhere on a chessboard, and you are trying to find it by
asking a person who can see the board whether the grain is in zone 1, zone 2,
and so on. You count all the way up to zone 63, and the person who can see the
board says "no" to every query. You conclude that if the grain is not on
63/64ths of the board it is unlikely to be on the board at all. Later, you
happen to walk in to the room with the chessboard, only to discover that the
man in the room had drawn a weird grid that mapped zones 1 through 63 to
different parts of square A1, and mapped 64 to the entire rest of the board.

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cwzwarich
[deleted, since reading it would waste your time]

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whatshisface
> _Even if you think the parameter space is "uniform" in some sense as a
> probability distribution_

Quite to the contrary, I was arguing that a uniform distribution over
parameter space was impossible to define.

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lidHanteyk
What are the alternatives for understanding the nature of quark interactions?
As I see it, string theory first developed in order to try to simplify the
process of calculating the possible different interacting paths. The fact that
string theory can directly describe particles is convenient, but seems like an
instance of the Microcosm Principle [0] wherein quantum particles can be
described as collections of quantum particles. We could drop all of this, but
then we would have to return to the problem of worldsheets another way, right?

[0]
[https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/12/the_microcosm_p...](https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/12/the_microcosm_principle.html)

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abacadaba
I dunno, seems like this time thing could go on for a while.

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fennecfoxen
[video]

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quantum_state
it turned out a waste of time for the video.

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RandomTisk
"95% of the universe we don't understand"

Telephysangelists should also start questioning the 5% of what they do
understand. All we hear about is DM/DE as if the underlying assumptions that
lead us to believe they exist must, at any cost, be true. It reeks of more
lost decades of scientific discovery to me, but then again I'm just a
bystander.

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Ididntdothis
I don’t think that’s true. The ideas of Dark Energy and Dark Matter are the
best explanations for actual observations. There is no pressure to believe
that they must exist. They are just the best we have right now and competing
theories must be able to be confirmed by observations which they usually fail
at.

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shrimp_emoji
Observational evidence:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster#Significance_to...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster#Significance_to_dark_matter)

The blue is dark matter. The pink is normal matter.

It's thought that the two clumps of blue+pink there passed through each other.
But the blues went right through each other, undisturbed, while the normal
pink stuff formed a shockwave.

>most of the mass in the cluster pair is in the form of two regions of dark
matter, which bypassed the gas regions during the collision. This accords with
predictions of dark matter as only weakly interacting, other than via the
gravitational force.

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barkingcat
What they mean is time is running out for mass media to make money (by selling
ads) talking about supersymmetry and string theory. Science and physical
theories are timeless - they already existed before there were any humans, and
they would continue to exist even after the sun explodes.

