It makes no testable predictions! Wah wah wah! I only have a high-school education but I am perfectly suited to critique the most complicated scientific endeavour humanity has ever undertaken! Wah wah!
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Your truly,
Peter Woit
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Anonymous2006-06-22 8:02
tell it like it is....its exaclty the same with the morons going on about evolution...none of them have a clue about what evolution is.
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Anonymous2006-06-22 8:07
lol niggers
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Anonymous2006-06-22 8:50
It's not 'crackpot', but it is currently useless.
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Anonymous2006-06-22 15:27
If you squint you can totally see the strings.
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Anonymous2006-06-23 0:53
The only explanation of string theory on TV they have is just some gay ass scientists with a big grin on their face going "there are like infinite strings n shit lolz".
That's because it's on TV. In the physics community, string theory is really exciting, even though there is no empirical evidence for it. String Theory is really fucking awesome if we ever find evidence for it. You watched a TV documentary on string theory. You watched a journalist try to listen to a bunch of physics he doesn't understand, and try pathetically to summarize it for Joe Six-Pack. Whenever the media tries to cover science they fuck it all to hell.
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Anonymous2006-06-23 6:41
>>1
>I only have a high-school education
Make that a PhD in particle physics from Princeton, you stupid cock.
I tend to agree with him. String theory is great, but it makes no testable hypotheses whatsoever. It's not science. Maybe some day it will, but we're not there yet, and we should be focusing our scientific resources on much more important topics in particle physics.
There's a string theory physicist at my university, and the particle physicists make fun of him all the time for it. I remember one of the talks that one of the particle experimentalists gave about the new accelerator at CERN: "Hopefully we'll see the Higgs. And if we get really drunk, maybe we'll see some extra dimensions!" It's pretty awesome.
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Anonymous2006-06-23 11:27
As someone who is actually studying current supersymmetric string theory, I have to say that it's without a doubt the most beautiful theory ever (with the symplectic formulation of classical mechanics somewhere far behind), and I will be sorely disappointed if it turns out to be false.
I feel a bit like I'm preaching to fish about the wonders of air here. The important thing is to remember that science isn't art. Unless you're proficient in the discipline, your opinion is worth NOTHING. There are reasons things are done the way that they are, and flinging feces at things beyond your comprehension is so passe.
>>8
Relativity wasn't testable until, well, we found an experiment in a solar eclipse. Just saying.
>>10
It's worth studying for the same reason time travel is worth studying. (If you think nobody studies time travel, it's because they wouldn't get money if they called it that.) Even if it doesn't work out, we can learn a lot about the math and ideas which lead to the theory in the first place. Science, if nothing else, is about figuring out the what-if hypothetical questions first and trying to understand the real world in that framework.
Regardless of it's testability, if it were true, it would be the biggest scientific breathrough in a long time. We could finally explain the actions of the smallest atoms, to the actions of the universe.
But, you are right, no matter how bright the future may seem with String Theory, until there is testable evidence of it, it's just as it's name implies, a theory.
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Anonymous2006-06-23 22:15 (sage)
Theory my ass, its obviously a universe of sound.
That's all the proof I need.
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Anonymous2006-06-24 6:57
>>10
So, is it true that superstring theorists keep tripping over pion decay?
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Anonymous2006-06-24 10:42
I was goin to study string theory, but engineering just looked like so much more fun...and it gets paid better. lol.
Academics = poor as shit.
At least academia contributes to society. Engineering is "LOL I MAEK STUFF." We give you the theories you use to do your job.
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Anonymous2006-06-26 0:25
>>12
Are you joking? Relativity is generally known as the fastest proved theory of all time. The theory had all sorts of testable hypotheses; it was Einstein's idea to use the sun to see the bending of light.
You're a fucking idiot. Art students gtfo/sci/.
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Anonymous2006-06-26 1:31
string theory DOES have a major issue with falsifyability, but I don't think that makes it bullshit so much as it makes it protoscience. String theorists should either start looking for ways to show that string theory is true, or perhaps we should stop paying so much attention.
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Anonymous2006-06-26 11:03
Roger Penrose states in "the road to reality" something along the lines that he's still skeptical about string theory and it may turn out to be a mathematical curiosity rather than a physical reality. Now, according to wikipedia, "Nordström's theory of gravitation" was a 'self-consistent relativistic theory of gravitation' but was not in 'agreement with observation and experiment'. Could this be what string theory turns out to be? A self-consistent theory that does not agree with observation?
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Anonymous2006-06-26 13:59
>>17
Wrong, nigger. Engineering is so far advanced, we come up with shit that makes you faggy "academics" go "HUH? BUT DATZ IMPOSSIBLEZ". Even better, engineering academia is a hell of a lot more fun than the rest of it.
>>21
I would like to see a biomedical engineer manipulate proteins without using chemistry or biology. I would like to see an electrical or mechanical engineer develop new elecronics and construct buildings without using physics.
i agree in theory....in theory communism works.
I agree that engineers use physics and maths (no fucking shit) but its a practical and tangible use of them, by this i am not stating that physics/ maths have no use in the "real" world. I'm just saying that with Engineering it is alot more reqarding to me to be able to see something that i built and modelled come together and function well.
Most of the "physics" you speak of for EE and MechE were all solidified by the 20th century. Even better, most of our new appreciation for particle physics/materials stemmed from research in electrical engineering. Case in point: transistors.
Basically, we engineers are superior because we synthesize your theoretical pipe-dreams into practical, efficient, and creative solutions to actual issues in the world. We make your posturing and posing relevant to the common man.
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Anonymous2006-06-29 3:42
>>27
You're so full of shit. You let the physicists make all the discoveries because you're too stupid to do it yourselves. Physicists are not interested in making their theories relevant to the common man; they simply want the knowledge. If you can make it useful, good for you, but don't think for a second you're high and fucking mighty because you can find new ways to exploit the discoveries of scientists.
To add fuel to the fire, there's the trend that while previously the experimentalists had come up with stuff that the theorists had to prove, lately it's been the other way around
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Anonymous2006-06-30 0:15
>>29
In certain fields. For the past hundred years in physics, it's been the other way around. Which is completely awesome and devastatingly intimidating for someone entering the field of theoretical physics, like myself. 20th century physicists basically built the entire standard model of physics on sheets of paper. Experimentalists spent an entire century in the footsteps of theory, setting up billion dollar experiments only to say "fuck, they were right again".
On the other hand, other fields of science, especially biology right now, is completely the opposite. They are mind boggled by all the shit that a single cell can do, and they've barely scratched the surface of the knowledge there is to attain. They can watch all sorts of things happen but they don't know why they do yet.
Are you kidding? There's been oodles of shit that the theorists only came up with after the fact. Psi/J (and hell, most of the particle bestiary), the Lamb shift, etc. Since about the 1930s, it's been the experimentalists who've been at the forefront. It doesn't help that much of the theory as of late hasn't been terribly falsifiable, in the Popper sense.