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Comment by Shawnecy | Hacker News Reader

Weren't those all arrived at from a series of falsifiable predictions? What does string theory even predict that can be tested?

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As a non string theorist my understanding was that string theory actually makes quite a lot of empirically verifiable statements, just that those statements are only interesting at either never or extremely high energies.

I think ppl are asuming that sting theory comes from the meme about turning 1+1 = 2 into some massive integro differential equation. The world is rarely so simple.

I’ve heard that it also predicts at very low precision, some values that are practically measurable, and, unsurprisingly for how little precision these predictions have, these predictions are correct (I.e. the experimental results are within the predicted range).

(Or, maybe “a prediction” rather than “predictions”? I only heard about one, and I forget what it was.)

I am aware of no case where it clearly made an advance prediction of any behavior that later turned out to be true.

I'm aware of quite a few where they managed to "predict" something we already knew.

That said, they've made so many "predictions" that I'm sure that some likely worked out by sheer coincidence.

Oh, yes, I meant predict a value we had already measured at the time the "prediction" was made. I should have made that clear in my original comment. I would add it now except that the editing time has run out. Maybe I should have said "postdicted".

Actually, I think the value might have been something like, the electron mass? Or something like that. (Which, obviously, had been measured before string theory made a "prediction" of it.)

I think the prediction you may be referring to is supersymmetry, which was apparently empirically disproved by the LHC, or at least the supersymmetric extension to the standard model was disproved.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/supersymmetrys-absence-l...

You are making it sound as though string theorists are asserting some kind of flying spaghetti monster theory. Do you think these people are not genuinely interested in advancing science? That's an ad hom fallacy. There is a difference between a hypothesis being conceptually unfalsifiable and a hypothesis that is incredibly difficult to test from a practical standpoint, or impossible with present energy constraints.

I don’t think the mistake made is exactly an ad hom fallacy? I agree with the rest of your comment though.

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