String Theory: Difference between revisions

Moral: we destroyed our ability to self-police. Peer review won’t work. We need to go back to doing physics. What’s holding us back may not be physics but the political economy of academic labor, citation, reputation & attribution.🙏

|content=@martinmbauer Seiberg/Witten/Dijkgraaf/Maldacena

Maybe get a string theorist to admit this to you. Brian Greene likely wouldn’t disagree with me.

“String Theory” has done a *tremendous* amount of good while “String Maximalism” has done even more harm.

If the String Theorists who led the movement were to undo some of the damage by admitting what happened, it’d be a major positive.

|content=Here is where I respectfully disagree with my colleague @skdh. You can’t ‘get rid of string theory’. String-like objects are natural and have an unbelievably rich and beautiful interlocking mathematics. The beguiling beauty isn’t the problem in my opinion. Beauty is the excuse.

|content=During that time String Theory diverted the entire field into a magical never-land of “toy physics”. Models that aren’t in any way real. You now have “particle physicists” at the end of their careers who have never worked with anything like a particle and can’t remember them.

|content=So, here’s my analysis. In a world where David Gross, Ed Witten, Lenny Susskind, Cumrun Vafa, Michio Kaku had a public Come To Jesus moment where they admitted the disaster in front of the community faithful, I’d be up for having ST as a major theory. But without that I’m unsure.

|content=The damage to the culture of High Energy Physics is more severe than the damage done by Geoffery Chew in a different era. And here I support @skdh, Peter Woit, Lee Smolin etc. These are brave people who paid with abuse to communicate that physics was diverting into pure fantasy.

String Theory deserves to be a major branch. But it has already mostly given up on the ‘80s promises/lies it told us to gobble up all the resources of the community (brains, mind share, $$$). That was a crime which may prove fatal to our being able to do physics.

|content=@martinmbauer String theory was a giant percentage of a tiny priesthood. That was the same tiny priesthood that brought us Thermo Nuclear devices. And if you want to pay for me to research the numbers I’m willing to hire somebody to put together the data after 1984. It’s not usually contested.

Beyond the standard model theory? Is a small field. Tiny. But hugely consequential. And the percentage and effect wasn’t small. Do you really dispute this??? Look at the IAS professors.

|content=Discussion of the future of theoretical physics seems like a game of "Intellectual Keepaway."

|content=Said differently, what if our leadership is brilliant but SPECIFICALLY untrustworthy in identifying the path forward. What if 1000 David Gross & Ed Wit1ten Keynotes setting the agenda are the problem? What if Lenny Susskind is not correct sbout non-string people wasting our time.

"Are there any OTHER ideas? Not Strings. Not Loops. Not Asymptotic Safety. Not Simple Compact GUTs. Not Quantum Computing. Not Black Hole Information. Not Technicolor. Not Amplitudes."

|content=Look, we could just hold a conference: "Fundamental Physics: Can't *Anybody* Here Play This Game?"

David, Ed, Maria, Cumrun, Nati, Lenny, Juan, Lee etc. could be respondents giving constructive feedback. We would then at least learn why we are where we are. But this is nuts.

I) Independent breakthrough science is in a long wind down starting with the Mansfield amendment, and is being partially decommissioned. Why? Because it was found to be too powerful and redistributive.

II) The National Security and National Interest folks now use science, journalism,  academe etc to dump their cognitive sludge. Epstein cover stories, UAP cover stories, Assasination cover stories, COVID cover stories, Inflation/Money Supply cover stories, etc. That is, the organs that kept us partially free in 1975 are now used to attack our ability to think, every day of our lives.  

III) Anyone not going along with I) and II) sticks out like an absolute sore thumb and is targeted for “Image Cheapening”. This is abhorrent abuse of power.  

V) The UFO community is way too recreational. What ever is hidden behind the UAP curtain is serious business. It involved high level physics as recently as 50 years ago. Then that connection got buried. I just don’t know what this about. And I have *zero* proof it involves aliens or interdimensional beings.