The much-anticipated Bloggingheads.tv faceoff between George Johnson and myself is now available. We talk about string theory, religion, love, the anthropic principle, and plates. After this, any further episodes might just be superfluous.
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AQ– I think whether or not certain theories correctly describe the universe is very much a scientific question. Right now we don’t know how to test string theory, but it’s certainly possible (and people like me are optimistic) that it is testable, but we won’t be able to figure out how unless we keep studying it. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to post on this more soon.
Sean, I look forward to your future post.
Whether or not string theories correctly describe our universe is not a scientific question precisely because they promote no actual theory.
All we have is 10^500 possible theories that might in certain limiting cases describe our universe.
The problem is the limiting cases are not what is interesting. We want to know the why/how/what is going on in the great experimental phenomena and observations of the day. The string theories seem to be silent. All they offer is that when new exciting limiting cases come along they happily pronounce that one of the 10^500 theories probably allows that too.
Sean, in your future post you tease that you think string theory could at least in theory be ‘testable.’ Do you mean ‘falsifiable’ or do you mean experiments that can be imagined which would bolster string theory?
I would really like to hear if you think falsifiable tests, as opposed to those which would merely bolster, are even possible for the landscape.
It is only Life as we know it requires (our) certain pre-requisites be met. And an earthlike planet in another galaxy (or parallel universe) is no guarantee that life would evolve, nor that it would evolve as on this planet
Right, it’s a testable prediction that naturally falls from the physics. The average of extreme opposing runaway tendencies that are common to the anthropic coincidences make many testable predictions about the observed universe.
It’s the same physics that predicts that life, (past or present), will not be found on Mars nor Venus, (a prediction which is being better and better established to this very day), but it will be found in other galaxy systems along the layer of spacetime that makes-up the goldilocks enigma.
For example, Venus suffers from the runaway greenhouse effect, whereas Mars represents the cold stagnate equally-runaway proof of what will happen if extremist environmentalists get things all their way too, so heed the lesson of this anthropic coincidence.
Please take further discussion of this off topic conversation to this post on my weblog.