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. |
|