October 28, 2006
ONCE THE IDEOLOGICAL CAMEL GETS ITS NOSE UNDER THE TENT....:
Stringing Along: The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin (Doug Brown, Powells.com)
From the title, one might expect Lee Smolin to be some cranky science writer, or even some sort of anti-science Luddite. However, Smolin is the real deal. He got his doctorate in physics at Harvard, spent some time teaching at Yale, spent more time studying at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study (the place Einstein spent his last twenty years), is one of the founders of a model called "loop quantum gravity," and he has worked on string theory. Folks in the physics community should give him a listen, and more broadly people interested in science will likely find this an interesting book.The first half of The Trouble with Physics covers (as the subtitle says) the rise of string theory. It has been through several incarnations, each one shot down before someone modified it and started it back up. The trouble alluded to in the title is that there is no experimental evidence to support string theory. Well, actually, that's only part of the trouble. Another part is there actually isn't a string theory; there's a bunch of separate theories, each of which isn't a theory itself. What I mean is, all we have now are approximations that suggest there might be an actual theory called string theory (a.k.a. "M-Theory"), but we're too stupid to figure out the math. None of the approximations agree with each other. One of them includes gravity (it has 25 dimensions), most of the others don't (they mostly have 10 spatial dimensions). Different models (there are hundreds of thousands) can be tuned to describe different aspects of our world, but no single model does it all, and none of them predict that the world should be the way it is.
In short, from the standards that used to be applied to science, string theory is a mess. It makes no testable predictions, there is no evidence it is right, and it isn't even in a form yet where one could begin testing it anyway.
That would be pre-Darwinian scientific standards.
When it was only ignorant peons questioning the wisdom of their elders it could be safely ignored. Now that some of the high priests are begining to doubt the sacred dogma, there is a crisis of faith, and hope of reformation. The silence of the bishops is telling -- perhaps they subconsciously know their doctrine is rotten at its core.
Posted by: jd watson at October 28, 2006 9:17 PM