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theoretical wasteland   I’ve never been a fan of string theory (actually, theories). Being educated in the scientific theories and methods the way done since Galileo and Newton, I can’t accept a theory based only on its logical and/or mathematical beauty. A theory has to be testable experimentally in Earth’s environment or, as in the case of cosmic scale, to predict an event unobserved so far or to improve understanding of an event, all that without the adverse consequences to existing experimentally testable theories.

String theories look to me more like a religious proclamation than a science. However, I don’t feel qualified enough to be a serious critic on the subject, so I was delighted with the assessment published by a respectable physicist John W. Moffat (Reinventing gravity, 2008):

"Some of the brightest minds in physics have devoted the last twenty or thirty years to searching for a way to make string theory a predictive theory, and producing convincing evidence experimentally that the theory is sound and describes nature. After so many years, and after the waste of so much talent, it now seems improbable that string theory will ever succeed.

Indeed, these bright minds constitute what can be called a "lost generation" of theoretical physicists. Much of the financial support for theoretical physics as a whole has gone into string theory over the last twenty years. ... Compared to past centuries of scientific endeavor, the amount of wasted talent is staggering. This is because of the large sizes of groups devoted to the single-minded pursuit of string theory. Quantum mechanics, in compari- son, was developed in the early twentieth century over a period of ten years by a mere handful of physicists such as Einstein, Schrödinger, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Born, Dirac, Jordan ... Today, at any given time, perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 theoretical physicists are doing research on string theory, publishing papers, and citing each other’s papers, thereby skewing the whole literature citation index to make it appear that string theorists produce the most important research papers today."

John W. Moffat longs for some of those bright minds and their mathematical skills to join his field of research - modified  relativistic theory of gravitation which generalizes Einstein’s general relativity to accommodate for some new cosmological discoveries. The field, obviously, has its own problems and setbacks.

 2011-11-20 

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