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Joined: 06 Oct 2005
Posts: 602
Location: Toon Town
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How come the skeptics have not debunked string theory?
“One wonders, however, what Feynman’s reaction would have been had he
lived to contemplate the contemporary scene in high energy theoretical
physics almost twenty years later. String theory and its progeny still
have yet to make a single, falsifiable prediction which can be tested by
a physically plausible experiment. This isn’t surprising, because after
decades of work and tens of thousands of scientific publications, nobody
really knows, precisely, what superstring (or M, or whatever) theory
really is; there is no equation, or set of equations from which one can
draw physical predictions. Leonard Susskind, a co-founder of string
theory, observes ironically in his book The Cosmic Landscape (March
2006), “On this score, one might facetiously say that String Theory is
the ultimate epitome of elegance. With all the years that String Theory
has been studied, no one has ever found a single defining equation! The
number at present count is zero. We know neither what the fundamental
equations of the theory are or even if it has any.” (p. 204). String
theory might best be described as the belief that a physically correct
theory exists and may eventually be discovered by the research programme
conducted under that name.”
-John Walker,
http://kelvin@fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/indices/topic_physics.html
Can we compare string theory to the war in Iraq?
Looking for the actual equations and contact with experiment
like looking for Saddam’s WMD? |
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