Peter Woit, noted blogger and string-theory gadfly, has written a book about his objections to string theory: Not Even Wrong, to be published next year by Jonathan Cape.
Good. I completely disagree with Peter’s opinions about string theory, and think that his accusations that the Landscape is non-scientific are completely off the mark. But his objections are not crazy, and his dislike for the theory is grounded in an informed scientific judgement. (Sometimes more than others, but that’s a matter of personal opinion.)
The whole discussion is a nice contrast with the Intelligent Design mess. The fact is, we don’t know what is the correct theory that unifies particle physics with gravitation. String theory is far and away the leading candidate, but its status as leader is a reflection of the educated judgement of the experts, not any airtight evidence. This judgement comes from looking at various pieces of information — what we know about gravitation, and quantum mechanics, and particle physics, and the history of ideas in physics, and the mathematical structures underlying gauge theory and general relativity, as well as an intuitive feeling for what principles are most important and what clues most worth pursuing — and deciding which path toward progress is likely to be fruitful. When people like Peter (or Lee Smolin) read these tea leaves, they come to a different conclusion than most scientists in the field. But it’s healthy disagreement among professionals working at the edge of what we know and don’t know — not politically-motivated intervention from people who have no clue, just an agenda, and operate completely apart from the scientific mainstream. To people looking in from the outside, I hope an accurate picture comes across: there is a widespread feeling that string theory is the best hope for a quantum theory of gravity, but it’s not a settled issue, and we’re working in good faith on moving forward.
So I’m happy to see this side of the argument represented in the popular press, even if I disagree — we shouldn’t be afraid of the free market of ideas. If people don’t agree, they should explain the sources of their disagreement rationally. There is always the danger of misprepresentation of course, and in this case there is an obvious worry — that a spate of stories will appear about how string theory is in trouble, and a house built on sand, and so forth. That might be true, but certainly isn’t the impression I have from talking to string theorists. In any event, I hope that we defenders of the theory can stick to the high road, and welcome this intervention in the discussion of these important ideas.
Since the main text is posted twice, I figure I should post my comment also twice 😎
Sean,
since you mention string theory and Intelligent Design in one blog entry,
I have to say that ID in the form of “Flying Spaghetti Monsterism” (yes, I am a Pastafari) finally found a way to unite religion and science.
The FSM obviously created the world in His image as a collection of vibrating spaghetti (= strings).
You say there are also branes ? Well, to every meal of Spaghetti there is a plate …
So, Peter’s book is clearly blasphemous, but spaghetti theorists knew this all along .
Hi Sean,
Thanks for your comments. I’d like to remark that the objections to string theory are only one part of the book, although the part that will undoubtedly get all the attention.
I agree with you that string theory and Intelligent Design are two very different stories. Intelligent Designers don’t even try to make real science out of it, and have an explicitly religious and political agenda they are pushing, whether they admit it or not. String theorists are operating within the realm of standard speculative scientific practice, even though I very much disagree with their take on the scientific evidence for the validity of this speculation that has piled up over the last twenty years.
But thinking about string theory and the landscape has convinced me that the scientific method is something a bit more subtle than we sometimes think. There’s lots to be said about the landscape, but the kind of “anthropic” and related research programs that some people are promoting seem to me to cross over the boundaries of what can legitmately be called the scientific method. When I see leading physicists promoting research which doesn’t seem to have any plausible way of ever leading to the making of falsifiable predictions, I see real dangers for the field, including the danger of not being able to effectively answer the challenge to legitimate science from ID.
Fundamentally, the most attractive thing about science to me has always been the fact that it doesn’t rely on faith or on appeals to authority, the way religion does. If one has the time and energy, one can look into the evidence for any scientific theory, and decide for oneself on its validity. I hope that my book, by laying out the opposite side of the argument from the pro-string theory one that has had wide distribution, will allow many people to make up their own minds about this issue.
I still dont see why string theory is frowned upon. I get mail all the time telling exactly the opposite. But I have to admit that people are entitled to their opinions.
EXACTLY! What is a theory worth if it does not allow for questions?
Now if you string-theory guys were the current administration, you’d be digging in to this Woit’s guy’s background so you could have your smear campaign ready by the publication date.
Sean hits the mark when he said that string theory is currently the leading candidate to unite particle physics and gravitation. Although no one knows if the theory is true, studying it is a worthwhile enterprise that the theorists take on. What may be worrisome is the scenario that for the next 200 years, reputable institutes hire half of their faculties on a giant theory that will be proven utterly true or utterly false, at the expense of other fields in particle physics.
“Now if you string-theory guys were the current administration, you’d be digging in to this Woit’s guy’s background so you could have your smear campaign ready by the publication date.”
Don’t worry, Lubos is already on the case!
Dear Peter,
let me repost a reaction to your ideas about the “wide spectrum of ideas” and your focus on Chern-Simons theory.
You seem to misunderstand the difference between mathematics and physics completely. Chern-Simons theory is simply not a theory that is designed as a competitor of string theory to unify the known physics.
Chern-Simons theory is a theory that admits a similar type of (quantum-field-theoretical) description as some physical theories, but that apparently lacks the physical strength to have anything to do with the observed particle physics and that can only bring us interesting mathematical results, not testable physical results.
Chern-Simons theory is just an effective description of D-branes in topological string theory.
The main problem of yours is that you have completely lost your knowledge of physics and especially the idea which mathematical ideas may be relevant for which physics. When you talk about the “wide range of ideas” that physicists should be talking when they try to go beyond GR+SM, you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.
There exist no general conceptual frameworks to surpass the existing theory except for string theory, and if someone tries to force people to work on these non-existent ideas, he is doing the same job as the Intelligent Designers. It just can’t work. There exist “small” ideas how new phenomena behind the Standard Model could look like, and this is what phenomenologists work on. But there is no unifying deep structure except for string theory. It’s not a theorem yet but it may well become one next year.
Most likely, you will never be capable to understand why these alternatives to string theory can’t work – because you’re probably just too old for these things and you have not learned these important technical things in time. But you should at least try to understand that there is a crucial gap in your knowledge that makes all your “big conclusions” totally worthless.
You just can’t judge string theory without knowing anything about its math, its physical implications, and its uniqueness, and if you try to make big conclusions anyway, then you’re a crackpot.
Best wishes
Lubos
Peter:
Super string theory and ID are certainly very different. But they differ in exactly the opposite way from what you described. If you take off the religious agendas that are actively pushing the idea, and just look at the Intelligent Design Hypothesis by its own merit. Then it is a perfectly scientific hypothesis: It makes certain assumptions about the nature, and those assumptions can be checked against evidences. Thus such a hypothesis is perfectly falsifiable, and indeed it has already been falsified, by compeling evidences supporting the Theory of Evolution. The ID theory, just like the Ptolemy theory, is shown to be a wrong theory because they are eventually falsified by evidences. Any thing that is falsifiable and is willing to be subject to the falsification of nature, is within the domain of legitimate science inquiry, regardless of the final outcome.
On the other hand, there is so far no evidence that super string theory ever makes any prediction or is ever falsifiable at all. If something does not make a connection to the nature and can not subject itself to the falsification of nature, it really can not be called science. And, for the benefit of Sean, the kind of firm belief you saw in super string theorists, without any any experimental backing whatsoever, is the kind of faith based belief, versus the other kind which is evidence based.
In a broad definition, any faith based belief IS a religion. Whether that religion is called Christianity or other names is an un-important detail.
To be fair, SSTers do believe they need to find material support, and they are struggling towards that goal. I am not going to say that the odd they eventually find experimental support is zero. Good luck searching. Mean while, before that happens, your faith is still a religious one.
Quantoken
Has Lubos ever said anything, ever, that was 100% free of rudeness? Is he capable of it?
Is there somebody else in Harvard besides a Motl person?
> Has Lubos ever said anything, ever, that was 100% free of rudeness?
Lubos always adds the 😎 and 😉 and so it is not really rude 😎
Thanks, Wolfgang, for your understanding of my true gentle heart, and greetings to your daughter! 😀
there is something reassuring here when Sean writes: “as well as an intuitive feeling for what principles are most important and what clues most worth pursuing — and deciding which path toward progress is likely to be fruitful.”
Intuitive feelings and making choices from those is a wonderful human characteristic. No matter how expansive a mathematical modelling becomes in multi-dimensions or how infinitely complex the probabilities must be for SST to be manifest, science and faith really come down to our acknowledgement of our inability to not be human. I like that about it all. The path through the maze of discovery about what is true about the constructs of the universe is filled with deadends, cul de sacs, huge monsterous obstacles, and tiny glimmers of light needing our very human intuitive awareness to guide us on. As my rocket scientist father often told me: As long as we are human, we can never really know!
Questions for Quantoken:
1) Exactly how has ID been falsified?
2) GR and the Standard Model are incompatible but separately successful. This issue needs to be reconciled. String theorists are trying to come up with a falsifiable theory that will do this, but they admit they haven’t found one yet. Do you know another way to go about doing things?
I think Peter Woit’s book should be used as a text in every physics department. Let’s teach the controversy, folks.
Oops. Where have I heard that before? 🙂
By the way, it is a bit unfair of Sean to bracket PW with Lee Smolin. Smolin at least has an alternative to offer.
Anonymous:
(1)Buildings are by intelligent design, for example, and trees are by evolution. The same abundance of fossil evidences that supports the Theory of Evolution also falsifies the Intelligent Design.
(2)The way of unifying GR and QM is neither to quantize GR, nor to derive a quantum theory that contains GR. Neither way works. The correct approach is a theory of quantum information conservation, which naturally leads to both GR and QM, as necessary ingredients to ensure quantum information conservation. Put it in this way: GQ and QM are two branches grown from the same tree, NOT two sides of one coin.
Many people have begun to realize the importance of the concept of information, or entropy, in building a TOE, but I guess I am the first one to realize that the key is the conservation law of quantum information. The math details still need to fill out. But it surely leads to both curved spacetime, and uncertain principle, in a very natural, and mandatory way!!!
Put it this way, given the requirement that only a finite amount of information can be embedded, and you can pick and choose the rest of physics laws any way you want, even the God can NOT create a world that is classical, deterministic, with space and time extends to infinity and no gravity exists, and still be compatible with the requirement of finite information.
Quantoken
Quantoken:
1) I disagree, in that evidence for one theory does not necessarily imply evidence against another theory (oops – called ID a theory just then!). A smart IDer (?) agrees that the tree fossil record is consistent with descent with modification, but he claims that there are certain structures on trees which are too complex to have evolved. So I don’t see how ID can ever be falsified. I can always find something that seems too complex for evolution to make – that is, until biologists explain every single solitary detail about life on earth.
2) “Many people have begun to realize the importance of the concept of information, or entropy, in building a TOE, but I guess I am the first one to realize that the key is the conservation law of quantum information.”
You seem to have many non-mainstream ideas. What is your science background?
“There exist no general conceptual frameworks to surpass the existing theory except for string theory, and if someone tries to force people to work on these non-existent ideas, he is doing the same job as the Intelligent Designers. It just can’t work. There exist “small” ideas how new phenomena behind the Standard Model could look like, and this is what phenomenologists work on. But there is no unifying deep structure except for string theory. It’s not a theorem yet but it may well become one next year.”
This is an astonishingly pompous statement. Until I read the last sentence my immediate reaction was where is the proof? Proof by assertion or intimidation? “There exist no …” requires rigorous proof. Proof of this statement would require showing that any conceptual framework that “works” can be faithfully represented in some mathematically rigorous way within the string theory framework, i.e., string theory must provide a universal object. I’d love to see this attempted without circular arguments.
As for the last sentence, a statement for which there is no known proof is not a theorem or even a proto-theorem. It is called a conjecture. Spell it … c o n j e c t u r e.
Do we have a crackpot in our midsts?
Let me put it plainly.
Let religion to those who want to believe their religion. Each has that right under your constitution, and let me also say that this was well thought of when Benjamin Franklin went over Thomas Jefferson’s words.
Some might argue these things are ancient and lost touch with reality, but they seemed to have seen farther then those who converse string theory and idealization to ID.
Everyone can believe in their own God if they like, but the essence of the debate about science should be about science and not associative trademarks that people like to give them with ID.
Like I said, I have watched this debate from the sideline and watched it fuelled by connotation given from those in the know. Would such racial profiling be accepted, that you find each others position, “satanic verse”?:)
Let ID die it’s own death, and let science spread forth it’s wings to dailogue and reason. I’d put some words from Benjamin here for others to examine, but I am having computer problems right now
I see Richard has already pointed this out but, Lubos said,
wow.
and you know this how? It hasn’t even ever been shown that the string framework is a way let alone the only way. But apparently this will all become clear next year…
anonomous,
on a related note, there are many speculative ideas one could explore to make a conclusive theory for which GR and QM are different limits, there is a list of some of the more popular ideas at wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_theory_of_gravity#Theories
A lot of the more popular methods try to make gravity and the feild theories different types of the same thing something which seems very unlikely to some people like myself and apparently quantoken, who think that instead there is a encompassing framework of which they are completely different aspects.
Gordon #3: The main reason why people frown upon string theory was succinctly formulated by string theory pioneer Dan Friedan in hep-th/0204131, subsection 1.6:
“Recognizing failure is an essential part of the scientific ethos. A complete scientific failure must be recognized eventually.”
I think that there is a quite widespread feeling that the string community is acting unethically in this respect.
Sigh. Here we go again. Please see the discussion on the Landscape thread .
-cvj
Im with Sean on this. ST is promising, but certainly not ironclad. Its not even ironclad mathematically, in a way mathematicians like Peter would feel comfortable with. Nm the lack of experimental evidence
But thats ok in my book, string *theory* isn’t really a *theory* yet. Its more like a rather general program to understand quantum gravity. In 20-30 years or however long it takes them to start making things really rigorous along with a good idea of which phenomological model to use, then perhaps it might be fair to criticize it as a failure or success.
But until that time, I still think there is enough tantalizing promises inherent within the structure to make it the primary research endeavour.
Haelfix,
> ST is promising, but certainly not ironclad
I agree that superstring theories are “promising” and indeed M-theory is a very good candidate for a consistent quantum theory of gravitation.
Unfortunately, there is no empirical evidence for a main ingredient: supersymmetry. The LHC data (expected for 2008) may change that.
Until then, physicists will investigate other ideas as well, this is what physicists do, whether Lubos likes it or not.
Scott,
I was actually more interested in Quantoken’s idea that string theorists are being “religious” in that that their work is not yet testable. I wanted him to put forth a non-religious way of proceeding – something that was testable or for which there was evidence, and he didn’t.
He usually makes very strong statements about physics, and I have wondered about his science background. I think I’ve figured it out from his blog.