Comment by Nextgrid
1 day ago
Not taking either side here - but surely a lot of cosmological phenomena couldn't be testable/verifiable at the time they were theorized either?
(thinking of black holes for example - they were theorized way before we had observations. And presumably a lot of particle physics can similarly be theorized before we built the technology to experimentally verify them)
Black holes were theorized and you could design experiments that, given the proper instruments, would allow them to be detected. Relativity was similar (famously, the curvature of spacetime was demonstrated during a solar eclipse by being able to see stars that should have been behind the sun).
String theory has nothing even theorized that would allow us to prove it.
String theory, being a high-energy theory, predicts that at high energies things will look “stringy.” It’s not untestable in principle. But it is out of reach of current experiments. I think that distinction is important.
Same as the parallel comment: the situation of string theory is the same as with black holes and relativity. It is not it is not testable, it is that it is not testable yet. The situation is very similar of the situations of black holes and relativity at their own time.
The fact that so many people, like you, just INVENT that it is not testable is quite worrying. Why? What's the point of doing that?
No one has "invented" that it's untestable. String theory literally doesn't give predictions that would allow it to be falsified. There are an astounding number of possible geometries that mean that any set of data could technically be "consistent with string theory". There are no specific energy bounds where it kicks in - if an experiement doesn't show existence of strings, it's "try again with more energy" instead of "falsified".
String theory can't be disproved even in theory. Spending decades on that is akin to spending decades rearchitecting your software to make it more beautiful and full of design patterns and promising users/management that some day it'll all make sense.
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