String Theory
drorzel | January 19, 2006In the ongoing string theory comment thread (which, by the way, I'm really happy to see), "Who" steps off first to ask an interesting question:
One way to give operational meaning to a theory being predictive in the sense of being empirically testable is to ask
What future experimental result would cause you to reject the theory?
I think what worries a lot of people about string thinking is that it seems so amorphous that it might be able to accomodate any future experimental measurement. In fact I am not aware of any string theorist's answer to this basic question.
It's an interesting…
drorzel | January 16, 2006There's a slightly snarky Review of Leonard Susskind's book on string theory (The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design) in the New York Times this week. Predictably, Peter Woit is all over it.
The central issue of the book, and the review, and Woit's whole blog is what's referred to as the "Landscape" problem in string theory. This is a topic that seems to consume a remarkable amount of intellectual energy for what's really a pretty abstract debate. It also leads to a remarkable amount of shouting and name-calling for something that just doesn't seem like…
drorzel | January 15, 2006I'll have something more serious to say on this subject tomorrow (I want to sleep on it, and take another look at the post in the morning), but I have one quick comment on the New York Times review of Leonard Susskind's The Cosmic Landscape:
Susskind's insider perspective also lends an air of smugness to the whole affair. He falls prey to the common error of Whig history: interpreting past events as if they were inevitable stepping stones to the present. He allows remarkably little doubt about string theory considering that it has, as yet, not a whit of observational support. "As much as I…
drorzel | December 27, 2005I've managed to leave string theory alone for a while, but a post came across Mixed States today that I can't avoid commenting on. Lubos Motl points to a news article about a recent measurement at MIT and NIST, in which Dave Pritchard's group used their cyclotron mass spectrometry technique to mesure the change in mass of a nucleus after emitting a photon. They pitch this as a test of E=mc2, and Pritchard is quoted thusly:
"In spite of widespread acceptance of this equation as gospel, we should remember that it is a theory," said David Pritchard, a professor of physics at MIT, who along with…