AaS! 122: Is String Theory Worth It? (Part 8: An Armageddon of Strings)
Ask a Spaceman!
Paul M. Sutter
4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2020
⏱️ 49 minutes
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Summary
How did String Theory get started? What has made the idea so popular over the decades? Can we ever truly have a theory of quantum gravity? What is supersymmetry, the landscape, and the AdS/CFT Correspondence? What do holograms have to do with this? How many dimensions do we live in? Why does String Theory have such a hard time making predictions? How are we supposed to judge a theory that isn’t done yet? It’s a non-stop String Theory bonanza as I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Perhaps the worst insult you can possibly give a physicist |
| 0:14.0 | when they present their idea is attributed to none other than Wolfgang Polly. |
| 0:21.8 | He's one of the greats when it comes to quantum mechanics, |
| 0:26.0 | and I'm sure we'll talk about him more someday. |
| 0:29.2 | We met him in the last episode |
| 0:31.9 | when his response to conformal field theories was to say, |
| 0:36.4 | shut up. |
| 0:41.4 | And there are a few stories of when listening to a colleague or reading a paper, and I can totally see this. You present your ID, you say it to him. |
| 0:47.7 | And, you know, Wolfgang Polly is he's Polly. You want his opinion. You want his approval. So you're |
| 0:52.3 | like, hey, you shoot some idea at him. |
| 0:55.3 | And he simply sighs, shakes his head sadly and says, this is not even wrong. |
| 1:03.3 | The point of science is to generate theories that are testable. |
| 1:08.8 | Not even wrong means that the idea is so far beyond reasonable science that it can't |
| 1:16.6 | even be tested. It's nonsense. It's non-verifiable. A testable but wrong theory is preferable to this. |
| 1:25.6 | At least if your theory is wrong, |
| 1:28.2 | at least you're still doing science. |
| 1:31.8 | And that's one possible benchmark |
| 1:33.4 | to use to evaluate string theory. |
| 1:36.4 | Is it even good enough to be wrong? |
| 1:41.3 | As you can imagine, this is a somewhat contentious subject, and so we've spent the past few |
| 1:47.3 | months exploring string theory. |
| 1:51.0 | I mean, give yourself a pat on the back for slogging through S matrix and conformal |
... |
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