Rationally Speaking #7 - Peter Woit discusses whether string theory is “not even wrong”

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2010

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

We are taking on fundamental physics! Our guest, Peter Woit, is a physicist in the Department of Mathematics at Columbia University and author of "Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law." We discuss the apparently peculiar state of theoretical physics and the rather startling possibility that superstring theory — the best candidate in decades as the elusive “theory of everything” — may actually have been a colossal dead end for the physics community. We also explore the meaning of theory in science, and what is the connection between theory, observation and experiment. As it turns out, superstring theory has not been able to make any empirically testable predictions, which supports the argument that perhaps it isn’t — as Peter puts it — “even wrong,” meaning that it just isn’t science.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.4	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEptics.org.
0:30.7	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:40.6	I am your host, Massimo Pilducci, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.
0:45.6	Julia, what are we going to talk about today?
0:47.9	Mathema, today we have a very special guest.
0:49.7	We're here with Peter White, mathematical physicist and senior lecturer in mathematics at Columbia University,
0:55.9	and the author of the book Not Even Wrong, the Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law.
1:01.9	He's joining us today to talk about whether string theory has made testable predictions,
1:06.7	whether it has the potential to do so in the future,
1:09.5	and more generally, how do we distinguish a promising scientific theory from a dead end?
1:15.2	Peter, welcome.
1:16.3	Thanks for joining us.
1:17.2	Thank you.
1:17.7	Thanks for inviting me.
1:19.1	Could you maybe start off to sort of by summarizing what string theory was trying to do
1:24.2	and your sort of take on how things have gone with that.
1:29.2	Just summarize your book for us and 20 words.
1:31.7	Two minutes, yes.
1:33.3	Well, so, so the history of string theory goes back to around 1970 and it started out as a,
1:39.5	as an attempt to understand the, the issue of how to deal with strongly interacting particles, things like
1:45.5	protons and neutrons and nuclei. And the idea was that fundamental objects in a theory,
	...

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