/sci/ - Science & Math

ifls tier larpers love string theory

There's like 3 people at most on this board who actually studied it. All the others are pop sci larpers.

"It's just a theory."

That's about as much true information /sci/ will give you on string theory.

It's just a theory that tries to explain the world using unproven hypothesises.

It doesn’t work

>>14597252

>>14597252
its just a modern version of the monadology.

appeals to computer science geeks cuz every "string" is a vector of some fundamental stuff, so it can be modeled really easily on a computer.

Really they have just abused the word "dimension" to its umpteenth degree. Normal people talk about 3 dimensions, maybe 4 if they are really autistic.

High level math allows you to look at something in an unlimited number of dimensions. So they elevate every fundamental force into its own dimension, and call it a string.

That's it and it is pathetic.

Go watch one of these PBS series on string theory and you will see it is pseudoscientific bullshit they made up for research dollars.

>>14597359
>"It's just a theory."
A theory about strings.

>>14597586

it's an extension of a failed statistical model to explain protonic substructure. nowadays we know the substructure is quarks and gluons, which should have falsified string theory and put it to rest forever. but no, string theorists are clever. they repackage it under many names (like m-theory) and pretend it's not all founded on a falsified model.

>>14597252
my understanding is limited to what i remember from like two classes about it, but at its core, it a very attractive model: you get gravity and gauge fields for free, remove a lot of the mathematical trouble that comes with qft and gain new powerful tools and dualities to make use of. also, its a very interesting subject from a mathematical perspective and has lead to breakthroughs there too (i.e. mirror symmetry, moonshine).
also has its uses for qcd calculations, but cant say more about that.

>>14597651
but doesn't string theory explain what the quarks and gluons are tho??

>>14597947
No. They only describe quarks and gluons in an ad hoc way with the aid of hindsight. Same thing works with God and evolution.

>>14597947
that not what the anon meant. string theory was originally invented to explain hadron interactions and behavior. this failed, but people noticed that string theory included gravitons, so it worked as a quantum gravity theory

>>14597651
quarks and gluons are as unscientific as string theory though??
>little balls with fractional charge that conveniently cannot be separated from each other and thus be observed and can change color however we like so that we can model any interaction that we desire

>>14598257
can't a collider separate quarks?

>>14598690
Quarks and gluons cannot be isolated due to color confinement, which is postulated ad hoc to make them unobservable. Quarks have never been observed directly, by design.

>>14598699
explain to a physics noob what color confinement is

>>14598736
The postulated mechanism by which, if you try to separate two quarks from each other, you'll have to put in enough energy to produce a new pair of quarks with which each separated quark will immediately pair up, therefore never producing isolated quarks.

Proving that this mechanism actually works is an open problem.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/118825/what-does-it-mean-that-there-is-no-mathematical-proof-for-confinement

>>14598257
Fire an electron at an electron, and what you measure is the effect of an electron scattering off an electron. Trivial. Fire an electron at a proton at increasingly high energies, and the electron no longer scatters off the proton. Instead what's observed is the electron scatters (elastically) off a constituent particle of a proton. Call it whatever you want, but that's the first evidence the quark existed. Since then countless experiments have corroborated the existence of quarks.

>>14597252
>redpill me
It's fake just like all of physics. Now come back to >>>/pol/, fellow magapede

>>14598805
Of course, because deep inelastic scattering proves that the proton has internal structure, than that necessarily implies that there are
>zillions of gluons and zillions of quark-antiquark pairs
inside of it, unobservable to all but those with the strongest faith.

https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/largehadroncolliderfaq/whats-a-proton-anyway/

>>14598962
You misunderstand. DIS experiments proved not only that the proton has a substructure, but that the substructure is constituted of (at least) spin-1/2 leptons with fractional charge. The masses of these leptons can also be determined via simple scattering cross sections. When you take the masses of all these three quarks which give the proton its electric charge, they don't even come close to giving the proton its mass. So what gives the proton its mass? So far gluons are the best answer. If you don't like it, offer something better. Or even better still: falsify the model.