Hacker News Reader

Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if future historians will look back at this time in physics and use the chemistry analogy of phlogiston.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory

Then, as now, there was a large body of entrenched individuals who would not budge until some ingenious experiments by the British and French (et al.) to entirely destroy the theory.

View on HN

Except that string theory isn't exactly mainstream - there's a small group of people who do string theory, and a large number of physicists whose work has been completely unaffected by string theory.

That's what makes this so strange. Everyone outside string theory seems to think string theory is pseudoscience. Why is it still being funded?

String theory may or may not hold the keys to the Universe, but it's so complicated that very few people understand it.

Should we stop giving taxpayer money to a group of people who can't convincingly make their case to the outside world, even if they are right?

Or do we trust their word without being able to check for ourselves?

I happen to favor the first approach.

I don't begrudge them the first twenty years. But for the last twenty years they don't seem worried about the lack of meaningful progress because their maths are so pretty. I sort of get that but its alarming that Physics Today still hasn't printed any of this really basic criticism. This makes me suspicious of other things including high-energy physics.

A falsifiable theory that led to a useful discovery (of oxygen, according to the Wikipedia article) seems nothing like string theory.

A closer match is the Victorian era vortex theory of the atom.

https://www.academia.edu/4084776/The_Vortex_Atom_A_Victorian...

I think of the closing to an essay by Martin Gardner on once mainstream scientific theories, eugenics, Freudism, etc. Which is when evidence is weak then scientific theory tends to exactly match scientists cultural biases.

With string theory there is no evidence to work off. To me it feels like with nothing better to do everyone in the field is just trying to out math everyone else.

Using "math" as an abbreviation for the noun mathematics always grates a little for us Brits (not that we'd say anything), but as a verb it totally works, I math, you math, he/she maths ...

And yet, despite all that annoyance for the ways Americans use the language, a significant number of French derived words are butchered on that side of the pond (e.g. lieutenant).

Touché, but we do agree on les maths.

Mathematics are my favorite subjects. I also enjoy multiple physics.

You use the word "jumper" for a piece of clothing, so I think we might call it even. :)

>Phlogiston theory led to experiments which ultimately concluded with the discovery of oxygen.

It's it possible string theory will create an experiment which finds something else?

Three theory of Phlogiston appears to have lasted 100 years. Our understanding still has plenty of time to change

One of the problems with String theory is that the researchers failed to produce any predictions at all from it.

Research today is orders of magnitude both bigger and faster, and String theory has been around for at least half a century already.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com