Comment by tcp_handshaker
18 hours ago
And in the meanwhile you ignored Susskind, literally one of the fathers of String Theory saying "we need to start all over again"... :-))
18 hours ago
And in the meanwhile you ignored Susskind, literally one of the fathers of String Theory saying "we need to start all over again"... :-))
I did not ignore Susskind at all. I literally say "for each physics theory, on 100 physicists, you have 5 physicists saying it is a mistake to continue working on it". I mentioned the name of Hossenfelder, but you can replace it by "Susskind" or "Hossenfelder and Susskind", and the argument is as valid.
As for Susskind, the fact that he was a main contributor is not a factor, on the contrary, what I had in mind is about the percentage of experts in the subject that later criticize the field. You have plenty of other examples in other fields: Shiffman on SUSY, Loeb on WIMP, Hirsch on applied fusion, ... or even Einstein on quantum physics ("Yes, I may have started it but I always regarded these ideas as temporary. I never thought that others would take them so much more seriously than I did.")
Some outsiders are seeing a normal scientific process where people are continuously questioning the validity or the efficiency of things, and they start in their fantasy "look, they say it should not be done this way, it's the proof it's all wrong".
Again, what we observe with String Theory is not at all exceptional. The reason it is "a big deal" is because of the populist message and the scam around "these physicists who stole the public money". It is a bit like "vaccines cause autism": it got some media attention, it resonated with the populist conspiracy theory of "the physicists know but they are farming money" and the anti-intellectual trend, and now it has become both some kind of cultural war and an easy way to farm views and followings and show themselves as "so rebel, so edgy".
Don't get me wrong, I personally think that String Theory is overrated (and I was thinking that way before it was popular to criticize it). And the return of the pendulum means that it may now be in the edge side of the average. But nothing significant to pretend there is a particular dysfunction.
You are taking the approach of Brian Greene, in this debate:
"Why string theory isn't real physics | Roger Penrose, Brian Greene, and Eric Weinstein" - https://youtu.be/5GGGhI9ablQ
It did not work out....
The argument that I'm making was not at all discussed in the video. Can you point to the exact time in the video this argument is made?
It looks like you just took a video with someone defending string theory and simply concluded that we have the same arguments.
My point is that you could build a similar panel (with some eminent physicists pro and con investing in the theory) about more or less all cutting-edge theories. This is just a normal situation to have. Some people don't think string theory is a good use of time, others think it is. The video you presented is just that. It does not demonstrate that having this situation is specific to string theory.
But on the core of the video, I don't find it very interesting. It's a shame because I personally find string theory overrated and I don't like it much, but it is sad to see that there is no good arguments against it.
In the video, Penrose's argument was just "I disagree on some aspect and I don't find it elegant". Big whoop, this happens all the time. He also admits that he does not know enough about it, and when he brings specifics, Greene reacts as if the objections were trivial things he and his colleagues also thought about but realised were not in fact a problem.
Not sure what to say about Weinstein. He basically ends up saying what I just said in my previous paragraph here: Penrose did not provide much argument, just "I don't find it beautiful". That being said, it's a bit strange to see him there as he has a bad reputation as a scientist (not sure I should go into details, but he claimed to have a terrific unified theory for years, TGU, and when he finally explained it publicly, the whole scientific community saw it was nonsense, which is not something you expect for someone who is reliable when talking about science). It does not mean that he may not have good points sometimes, but having pseudoscientists presented as scientists on the panel is not the best.
In fact, the situation is a bit like in open source free software: you have always people saying "you should not work on that, you should work on this instead". People working on KDE are "wasting everyone's time" for not working on Gnome and inversely. People working on a new software when alternatives exist are "bad for the community". And people using a given development paradigm are "fundamentally wrong" according to people who like the other paradigm.
So, in fact, another way of putting my argument: string theory is not particularly bad, what we see around it is in fact so common that you even see it around KDE vs Gnome.