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Comment by pfortuny | Hacker News Reader

Well, the same way that String Theorists are paying their bills from the taxpayers, mostly by pushing that theory as Physics.

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Given that they are physicists and no one has actually been able to properly find an alternative to string theory isn't that what they're supposed to be doing?

Isn't the main alternative LQG which is apparently a dead end?

In any case this is not how science works, you do theoretical physics by publishing in peer reviewed journals and your peers decide whether what you are doing is worthwhile or not. Both Smolin and Hossenfelder have been somewhat successful in doing so themselves, but Hossenfelder specifically didn’t manage to secure a professorship for various reasons and I am sure she has some axe to grind (again probably partially justified, partially not).

> you do theoretical physics by publishing in peer-reviewed journals and your peers decide whether what you are doing is worthwhile or not

No, science is not the act of publishing in a peer-reviewed journals, science is using past observations to make models that predict future observations, and then evaluating those models after making the future observations. Peer review is just the industry standard quality control mechanism.

I could have made the point differently. What I wanted to emphasize is that there is an external view of a given field and an internal view. The actual inner workings and process are poorely understood and the few public debates give a very skewed view of the field.

There can be lots of new alternatives. Why not fund those instead, by creating “moonshine physics departments”? (That is just a comment, not a suggestion).

The problem with String Theory is it unfalsifiability and that it has not even grown to explain 3D phenomena AT ALL. 40 years later.

Quantum Mechanics and Relativity (both special and general) gave results in a single decade.

What do you mean by 3D phenomena?

String theory is as far as I have ever read the only thing even close to a working theory in this area. That doesn't mean it's correct but in my admittedly limited understanding of the literature many alternatives are either dead or are similar to string theory only without the underlying principles.

People do work on alternatives. there are a lot of smart people unhappy with string theory they just can't actually provide any alternatives.

One thing I'd like to say as well is that if someone does provide an alternative there will be a large movement of minds. This always happens in science, people like to think of physicists as a kind of unionized cabal but this isn't true historically or today as far as I'm concerned. Certainly not with the physicists of tomorrow.

Of all the post-Standard Model theories in existence, string theory has the best publicists and has (to a degree) sucked up all of the air out of competing theories, so that the lack of competing theories is less due to string theory being better and more due to being unable to get funding to work on competing theories.

As far as I understand it, string theory has yet to provide a working model of quantum gravity despite focused work on it for ~30 years. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Newton explained interplanetary attraction.

Plank explained the black-body radiation.

Einstein explained too many things to say but predicted the precession of mercury which was unexplained.

Witten has explained either everything (which is to say nothing useful) or nothing at all (it depends on your position). In any of both cases, after 40 years and several LHC unfulfilled “expectations” it is time to accept the facts.

The issue is not that nobody found an alternative to string theory, the problem is that nobody found a use for string theory. Essentially vast amount of funding and talent has been pushed into string theory (via the tenure processes at universities which favored string theory for a long time, because it was considered the cutting edge of theoretical physics), and what did we get from it? Not one falsifiable prediction, which as Popper would tell you is necessary to do science. So everything and nothing would be an alternative to string theory.

String theory does make falsifiable predictions they're just at very high energy, technically.

For example my understanding of string theory is that Lorentz covariance must be exact, if you find this is either inconsistent or not true in reality then you have cut ze string.

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