Friday, November 13, 2009

A Sit Down Talk With Michael Green

The new holder of the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge sat down for a brief interview. He, of course, tried to justify String Theory.

"I have been thinking about how I can make use of such a prominent position to benefit my colleagues. It is difficult to find funding at the moment, especially for subjects which don't obviously have an immediate application for something that will make money.

"But the people who discovered magnetism and electricity had no idea what they could be used for. The MRI scanner wouldn't exist without particle physics. There are so many spin-off industrial investments in things that are being researched, and we need more of this."


There's only so far that one can run away with this. People "...who discovered magnetism and electricity..." had, in their corner, empirical evidence to at least tell them if they are on the right path or not. This is where the analogy to pursuing String Theory breaks down and the similarity ends. I don't believe that there has been, in the history of physics, a study in a field of physics that has gone for so long, and garnered THIS much attention, that has been totally devoid of any empirical evidence which indicates one way or the other that it is on a right path. For many of us who value physics as being guided by empirical evidence, this is the most troubling aspect of String theory.

Zz.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

"I don't believe that there has been, in the history of physics, a study in a field of physics that has gone for so long, and garnered THIS much attention, that has been totally devoid of any empirical evidence which indicates one way or the other that it is on a right path."

Sure there has been: Aristotle's law of falling bodies. Of course, to be fair, it did have the Dark Ages to help keep it afloat.

ZapperZ said...

But it was still FALSIFIABLE because one has the ability to actually test it against empirical observation!

Zz.

Anonymous said...

Yes, you're right. But String Theory is falsifiable too. All you need is a particle accelerator so big...

;)

Mr. Jody Bowie said...

You bring up a good point. String theory has been around for quite some time. I hadn't thought about just how long until reading your post.

Do you think its been around as long as it has partly because our society has the ability, through special effects and such, to make it interesting to "everyman"? Or do the mathematics work so "elegantly" (Green's words) that there are some who are not willing to accept that it ust might not work?

Simon said...

Anonymous - can you list one quantitative and falsifiable prediction of string theory even if it involves energies at or beyond the Planck scale ?

Anonymous said...

"Anonymous - can you list one quantitative and falsifiable prediction of string theory even if it involves energies at or beyond the Planck scale ?"

Stringy resonances, regge behavior... thats the hallmark of strings, of course.

Doctor Pion said...

You did just scrape the surface.

That statement might have been true for the very first person who picked up a lodestone or played with amber, but the use of a lodestone for navigation goes back more than 2000 years. Besides, the person who picked up a lodestone didn't ask for a sinecure to contemplate it.

But once you put "and" in there, you are just begging for the comparison between String Theory and Maxwell. It took about 20 years for Hertz to produce radio waves, and Maxwell had already produced the value for the speed of light and Faraday rotation. When will strings give us the electron mass?