I know that everyone is waiting breathlessly for more opinionmongering about the String Wars. After Joe’s guest post, filled with physics and insight and all that stuff, it’s time for a punchy little polemic.
The folks at New Scientist noticed a comment of mine to the effect that, contrary to the impression one might get from the popular media, most string theorists were going about their research basically as they always have, solving equations and writing papers — curious about, but undeterred by, the surrounding furor. This surprised them, as their readers seemed to be of the opinion that string theory was “dead and buried” (actual quote). So they asked me to write a short op-ed piece, which appeared last week, and which they’ve allowed me to reprint here. Nothing deep about the substance of what physicists should be thinking about; just pointing out that string theory is still alive and kicking.
————————————————
A philandering string theorist is caught by his wife with another woman. “But darling,” he pleads, “I can explain everything!”
I didn’t invent the joke; it appeared in the satirical magazine The Onion. The amazing thing is that people got it! Apparently the person on the street is sufficiently caught up with current thinking in high-energy physics to know that string theory — the idea that the ultimate building blocks of nature are quantized loops of string, not pointlike elementary particles — is our leading candidate for a theory that would, indeed, “explain everything.”
But, despite capturing the popular imagination, string theory has fallen on hard times lately, at least in the public-relations arena. We read articles such as “Hanging on by a Thread” (USA Today), “Theorists snap over string pieces” (Nature) and “The Unraveling of String Theory” (Time). Much of the attention given to string skepticism can be traced to books by Lee Smolin and Peter Woit that appeared last year. But those aren’t the only sources; increasingly, professional physicists as well as fearless pundits outside the academy are ready to pronounce the failure of string theory’s ambitious project of uniting all of the forces of nature.
So is the jig up? Is string theory in its last throes? No, not at all. At least, not if we measure the health of the field by more strictly academic criteria. String theorists are still being hired by universities in substantial numbers; new graduate students are still flocking to string theory to do their Ph.D. work; and, most importantly, the theory continues to be our most promising idea for bridging the gap between quantum mechanics and gravity.
String theory is unique; never has so much effort been devoted to exploring an idea in physics without the benefit of any direct experimental tests. One important reason for this has been the absence of experimental surprises in all of high-energy physics; for thirty years, the Standard Model of particle physics has resisted all challenges. But even that would not have been enough to coax theorists into thinking about the famously difficult problem of quantum gravity if string theory hadn’t come along to present a surprisingly promising approach.
It was realized in the 1970’s that string theory was a theory of quantum gravity, whether we liked it or not — certain vibrating strings have the right properties to represent gravitons, carriers of the gravitational force. Already, this feature distinguished string theory from other approaches; whereas head-on assaults on quantum gravity tended to run into dead ends, here was a quantum theory that insisted on gravity!
In the 1980’s the triumph of the Standard Model became complete, and work by Michael Green and John Schwarz demonstrated that string theory was a consistent framework. Physicists who would never have though of devoting themselves to quantum gravity quickly dived into string theory. It was a heady time, when promises to compute the mass of the electron any day now were thrown back and forth. True, there were five different versions of string theory, and they all lived in ten dimensions. The trick would be to find the right way to compactify those extra dimensions down to the four we know and love, and the connection to observation would be established.
That didn’t happen, but the 1990’s were nevertheless a boom time. It was realized that those five versions of the theory were different manifestations of a single underlying structure, M-theory. Tools were developed, in certain special circumstances, to tackle a famous problem introduced by Stephen Hawking in the 1970’s — calculating the entropy of black holes. Amazingly, string theory gave precisely the right answer. More and more people became convinced that there must be something right about this theory, even if we didn’t understand it very well, and even if connection to experiments remained elusive.
Since 2000, progress has slowed. In the mid-90’s it seemed as if there was a revolution every month, and — perhaps unsurprisingly — that’s no longer the case. Instead of finding a unique way to go from ten dimensions down to four, current ideas suggest that we may be faced with 10500 or more possibilities, which is pretty non-unique. It might be — maybe — that only a tiny number of those possibilities are anywhere close to the world we observe, so that there are still concrete predictions to be made. We don’t know, and it may be wishful thinking.
The truth remains — the miracles that got people excited about string theory in the first place haven’t gone away. The biggest obstacle to progress is that we don’t understand string theory very well; it’s a collection of bits and pieces that show tantalizing promise, but don’t yet fit together into a coherent whole. But it is a theory of quantum gravity, it is compatible with everything we know about particle physics, and it continues to provide startling new ways to think about space and time.
Meanwhile, spinoffs from string theory continue to proliferate. Ideas about higher-dimensional branes have re-invigorated model-building in more conventional particle physics. The theory has provided numerous deep insights into pure mathematics. Cosmologists thinking about the early universe increasingly turn to ideas from string theory. And a promising new approach has connected string theory to the dynamics of the quark-gluon plasma observed at particle accelerators.
Ultimately, of course, string theory must make contact with data in order to remain relevant and interesting. But profound ideas don’t come with expiration dates; that contact might come next year, ten years from now, or a century from now. In the meantime, the relative importance of string theory within the high-energy physics community is bound to take a hit, as results from the Large Hadron Collider promise to bring us firmly beyond the Standard Model and present theorists with new experimental puzzles to solve. A resurgent interest in more phenomenological particle physics is already easy to discern in hiring patterns and graduate-student interests.
But string theory isn’t going to disappear. Gravity exists, and quantum mechanics exists, and the two are going to have to be reconciled. Ambitious theoretical physicists will continue to pursue string theory, at least until an even better idea comes along — and even then, the odds are good that something stringy will be part of the ultimate story.
…”This process of translation of an idea from words to calculation will be familiar to any theoretical physicist. It is often the hardest part of a problem, and the point where the greatest creativity enters. Many word-ideas die quickly at this point, or are transmuted or sharpened”…
This is simply because the consecutive logic of math is not suited well for description of heavily parallel processes. We are simply using incompatible tool for description of concepts and calling it “a science”.
For example, the Aether Wave Theory explain both strings, both quantum loops by density fluctuations, which appear during supercritical vapor condensation, i.e. by common Newtonian mechanic. The process of vapor condensation is difficult to describe by contemporary math, but it doesn’t mean, it cannot serve for conceptual reformulation of contemporary physics.
Pingback: Quantum gravity mechanism and predictions « Quantum field theory
“…In addition, the Weinberg-Witten theorem tells you that a massless spin 2 particle can’t be composite.”
Oops, what about the ADS/CFT correspondency 😉
“So is the jig up? Is string theory in its last throes? No, not at all. At least, not if we measure the health of the field by more strictly academic criteria. String theorists are still being hired by universities in substantial numbers; new graduate students are still flocking to string theory to do their Ph.D. work; and, most importantly, the theory continues to be our most promising idea for bridging the gap between quantum mechanics and gravity.”
This is a pretty unconvincing response. It certainly does not address any of Smolin’s criticisms.
“But, despite capturing the popular imagination, string theory has fallen on hard times lately, at least in the public-relations arena.”
Public relations and popular imagination. A major part of the problem is how eager string theorists have been to capture the popular imagination, without properly qualifying their “discoveries.” I certainly won’t bother reading the next hyped-up Scientific American article on string theory.
Anonymous, if you have specific critiques about Sci Am articles — on why you think they’ve been hyped-up and why their scientific content still did not make them worthwhile — please let me know. I’m always trying to improve what we do.
George
gmusser at sciam.com
Anonymous,
It seems to me that SciAm has also done ‘hyped up’ articles on Loop Quantum Gravity as well as string theory, so I think your criciticism is rather unfair.
AFAIK, SciAm hasn’t been as egregious as New Scientist (think pentaquarks, Heim theory, MECOs, Masaru Emoto’s water-woo, the EmDrive. . .).
hmmmm
It seems I have missed much in the last few months of not checking this blog.
I would like to make a few points here, and I am by no means a physicist, but a few things do strike me as… off.
It does appear that string theorists are struggling to maintain superiority. Many very reputibale scientists are standing up and taking a stand FOR ST. But what they lack is the factual paper results. This has been said over and over, but the mainstream needs (or will need soon) some sort of physical evidence.
Newtonian Physics lasted hundreds of years and was widely accepted because it fit. It had just enough experimentable data to satisfy the main stream, but when we get down to it, newton was wrong. (insert apology for all MOND lovers here)
I am well aware of the difference between MOND and ST, but the point i am trying to make is that every since i got into science (I forecast weather… less complicated lol) was that unless you had some sort of experiment that could be done by many people in many places, unless you had some solid sort of debatable…. thing… then well you dont have much to begin with.
The math is nice to see, and although a bit of it is above my level.. well i am beating a dead horse.
I just don’t understand how ST can be considered the true UFT or any resemblance to it at all…
Maybe someone can point me to something that has all the gouge that I am missing. (A little more in-depth than the powerpoint slide please.. I would like to see some of the math.)
Aaron S. Newton was not wrong, only incomplete. Any correct theory needs to reproduce Newtonian mechanics in the appropriate limit. A correct theory of QG does not need to reproduce 10- or 11D ST, only 4D SM+GR.
“snip”
that word describes our double-edged scissored view of string theory, which seems like a postmodern system of epicycles …. or … do branes have brains?
At
http://www.lawpundit.com/blog/2005/01/belief-without-proof-evidence-and.htm
we write:
“What are the main logical problems with string theory (alleged physical laws) from our point of view?
a. Perceived physical reality in physics is always a function of the system of measurement. Measurements are by definition relations presupposing frames of reference to be measured by some sort of “measurement ruler”. Thus, “measured” reality is
1) a function of the frames of reference chosen for the relationships being measured (for example, particles, waves or “strings”) and
2) the means of measurement (motion, inertia, velocity, weight, dimension, extension, contraction, etc.) “….
Speaking of “measure”, has anyone considered the rather simple idea that “God” did not “make” the universe, but that God “is” the measured universe….
Perhaps the world is an “ultimate” string – but no string ever vibrates by itself, but needs to be plucked by something – frankly, we think that the idea of an infinitely extensible and unsnippable vibrating “rubber band” is better than simple string theory because it would more accurately reflect a yo-yo world alternating between the impossibles of absolute something and absolute nothing….
For the math freaks this means that the Universe U could conceivably be defined by the formula U = >0 and
I constantly hear about String Theories problem is it can not be tested. It really doesn’t matter if we can detect strings. Take the equations, plug in the numbers and lets see what comes out.
Why not try String Theory on Pulsars or Neutron Stars?
See what happens. We know what happens to General Relativity. It fails big. I mean real big, so the goal is not to unify General Relativity with anything.
Cosmology was weak during Einstein era’s (ie Local). We now have the most advance telescopes in the world and that is what is proving General Relativity wrong. Strings should have stayed on the subatomic level because on this level we know how stars move. If String try to piggy back on General Relativity the will fail as well.
General Relativity will be replaced but not with Strings.
Pingback: Gauge theory errors corrected by facts, giving tested predictions « Gauge theory mechanisms
Pingback: Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe (Parts 1 through 10); And an Attempt at Understanding String Theory « Rosettasister’s Weblog
Pingback: String Wars: The Aftermath | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
Pingback: Quantum gravity evidence « Gauge theory mechanisms
Pingback: The String Wars and the end of masculinist science « A Fistful of Science