I asked a well-known string theorist about the fabled 10^500 vacua and asked him whether he worried that this would make string theory a vacuous theory since a theory that fits anything fits nothing. He replied ′ no, no the 10^500 ‘swampland’ is a great achievement of string theory—you see… all other theories have infinitely many adjustable parameters’. He was saying string theory was about ~1500 bits away from the theory of everything but infinitely ahead of its competitors.
Diabolical.
Much ink has been spilled on the scientific merits and demerits of string theory and its competitors. The educated reader will recognize that this all this and more is of course, once again, solved by UDASSA.
Re other theories, I don’t think that all other theories in existence have infinitely many adjustable parameters, and if he’s referring to the fact that lots of theories have adjustable parameters that can range over the real numbers, which are infinitely complicated in general, than that’s different, and string theory may have this issue as well.
Re string theory’s issue of being vacuous, I think the core thing that string theory predicts that other quantum gravity models don’t is that at the large scale, you recover general relativity and the standard model, whereas no other theory can yet figure out a way to properly include both the empirical effects of gravity and quantum mechanics in the parameter regimes where they are known to work, so string theory predicts more just by predicting the things other quantum mechanics predicts while having the ability to include in gravity without ruining the other predictions, whereas other models of quantum gravity tend to ruin empirical predictions like general relativity approximately holding pretty fast.
I asked a well-known string theorist about the fabled 10^500 vacua and asked him whether he worried that this would make string theory a vacuous theory since a theory that fits anything fits nothing. He replied ′ no, no the 10^500 ‘swampland’ is a great achievement of string theory—you see… all other theories have infinitely many adjustable parameters’. He was saying string theory was about ~1500 bits away from the theory of everything but infinitely ahead of its competitors.
Diabolical.
Much ink has been spilled on the scientific merits and demerits of string theory and its competitors. The educated reader will recognize that this all this and more is of course, once again, solved by UDASSA.
Re other theories, I don’t think that all other theories in existence have infinitely many adjustable parameters, and if he’s referring to the fact that lots of theories have adjustable parameters that can range over the real numbers, which are infinitely complicated in general, than that’s different, and string theory may have this issue as well.
Re string theory’s issue of being vacuous, I think the core thing that string theory predicts that other quantum gravity models don’t is that at the large scale, you recover general relativity and the standard model, whereas no other theory can yet figure out a way to properly include both the empirical effects of gravity and quantum mechanics in the parameter regimes where they are known to work, so string theory predicts more just by predicting the things other quantum mechanics predicts while having the ability to include in gravity without ruining the other predictions, whereas other models of quantum gravity tend to ruin empirical predictions like general relativity approximately holding pretty fast.