I don’t do formal Bayes or Kolmogorov on a daily basis; in particle physics Bayes usually appears in deriving confidence limits. Still, I’m reasonably familiar with the formalism. As for string theory, my jest in the OP is quite accurate: I dunno nuffin’. I do have some friends who do string-theoretical calculations, but I’ve never been able to shake out an answer to the question of what, exactly, they’re calculating. My basic view of string theory has remained unchanged for several years: Come back when you have experimental predictions in an energy or luminosity range we’ll actually reach in the next decade or two. Kthxbye.
The controversy is, I suppose, that there’s a bunch of very excited theorists who have found all these problems they can sic their grad students on, problems which are hard enough to be interesting but still solvable in a few years of work; but they haven’t found any way of making, y’know, actual predictions of what will happen in current or planned experiments if their theory is correct. So the question is, is this a waste of perfectly good brains that ought to be doing something useful? The answer seems to me to be a value judgement, so I don’t think you can resolve it at a glance.
This is roughly what I can discern from outside academia in general (I’m 19 years old and at time of posting about to graduate the local equivalent of high-school).
I don’t do formal Bayes or Kolmogorov on a daily basis; in particle physics Bayes usually appears in deriving confidence limits. Still, I’m reasonably familiar with the formalism. As for string theory, my jest in the OP is quite accurate: I dunno nuffin’. I do have some friends who do string-theoretical calculations, but I’ve never been able to shake out an answer to the question of what, exactly, they’re calculating. My basic view of string theory has remained unchanged for several years: Come back when you have experimental predictions in an energy or luminosity range we’ll actually reach in the next decade or two. Kthxbye.
The controversy is, I suppose, that there’s a bunch of very excited theorists who have found all these problems they can sic their grad students on, problems which are hard enough to be interesting but still solvable in a few years of work; but they haven’t found any way of making, y’know, actual predictions of what will happen in current or planned experiments if their theory is correct. So the question is, is this a waste of perfectly good brains that ought to be doing something useful? The answer seems to me to be a value judgement, so I don’t think you can resolve it at a glance.
This is roughly what I can discern from outside academia in general (I’m 19 years old and at time of posting about to graduate the local equivalent of high-school).