All string theories require more than 3 spatial dimensions, all on equal footing. (Plenty of workarounds have been proposed, like compactification, to work around this obvious and glaring issue.) This has been falsified time and again, most recently by the LHC not generating microscopic black holes.
Superstring theories predict “superpartners” for all known particles, none have been seen so far. The proposed workarounds center on “fixing” superpartner masses to be too heavy to be observable. Such moving goal posts are a standard approach.
Multiple possible universes with wildly different physical laws, ours being one of the least likely ones (hence the hyper-anthropic Boltzmann Brain discussion)
The Not Even Wrong blog has addressed the issue a number of times. Here is an example.
String theory remains popular mainly out of desperation: no one has any better model at this point. Plus some of its ideas, like holography and duality, ring true, even if they aren’t literally true. Additionally, some of the math developed by the string theorists ended up being quite useful for some real-world calculations. None of which justifies taking Boltzmann Brains seriously.
When you’re talking about a theory as insanely vague as string theory, this isn’t exactly an independent problem—it’s just something that comes along with it being insanely vague. Not that that isn’t a problem, but accusing them of moving the goalposts doesn’t fit.
Their goalposts were already spread all over the field. We’ve just discovered that many of them weren’t the set that the ref is watching… if any are.
This has been falsified time and again, most recently by the LHC not generating microscopic black holes.
Is that the case? I’m not an expert, but I’m under the impression that the LHC was predicted to generate microscopic black holes only for somewhat large compactified dimension size (i.e. millimetres), and even string theorists wouldn’t have thought of that as particularly likely.
Right, I should have phrased it better. It puts tighter constraints on extra dimensions. The string theory itself says nothing about the expected size, so the tighter the constraints, the less likely string models are correct.
Recently I was directed towards A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence M. Krause, which I was told puts forth a map that is better than string theories at describing the everything that string theories try to sketch. Have you heard of it?
This review by Sean Carroll, who is an expert in the subject matter, seems to analyze the book and the reviews pretty nicely.
Nothing about modern physics explains why we have these laws rather than some totally different laws, although physicists sometimes talk that way — a mistake they might be able to avoid if they took philosophers more seriously
Falsified predictions:
All string theories require more than 3 spatial dimensions, all on equal footing. (Plenty of workarounds have been proposed, like compactification, to work around this obvious and glaring issue.) This has been falsified time and again, most recently by the LHC not generating microscopic black holes.
Superstring theories predict “superpartners” for all known particles, none have been seen so far. The proposed workarounds center on “fixing” superpartner masses to be too heavy to be observable. Such moving goal posts are a standard approach.
Multiple possible universes with wildly different physical laws, ours being one of the least likely ones (hence the hyper-anthropic Boltzmann Brain discussion)
The Not Even Wrong blog has addressed the issue a number of times. Here is an example.
String theory remains popular mainly out of desperation: no one has any better model at this point. Plus some of its ideas, like holography and duality, ring true, even if they aren’t literally true. Additionally, some of the math developed by the string theorists ended up being quite useful for some real-world calculations. None of which justifies taking Boltzmann Brains seriously.
When you’re talking about a theory as insanely vague as string theory, this isn’t exactly an independent problem—it’s just something that comes along with it being insanely vague. Not that that isn’t a problem, but accusing them of moving the goalposts doesn’t fit.
Their goalposts were already spread all over the field. We’ve just discovered that many of them weren’t the set that the ref is watching… if any are.
Is that the case? I’m not an expert, but I’m under the impression that the LHC was predicted to generate microscopic black holes only for somewhat large compactified dimension size (i.e. millimetres), and even string theorists wouldn’t have thought of that as particularly likely.
Right, I should have phrased it better. It puts tighter constraints on extra dimensions. The string theory itself says nothing about the expected size, so the tighter the constraints, the less likely string models are correct.
Thank you!
Recently I was directed towards A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence M. Krause, which I was told puts forth a map that is better than string theories at describing the everything that string theories try to sketch. Have you heard of it?
This review by Sean Carroll, who is an expert in the subject matter, seems to analyze the book and the reviews pretty nicely.