/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15404039
>as a layman
as a layman, string theory should occupy ZERO space in your mind until it produces actual results

With an IQ of 190 I'm almost feeling morally obliged to have an opinion on string theory after it has been advertised as the alleged pinnacle of physics only amenable to genius minds. However, I don't care about it the topic at all. Does it have any relevance to solving the hard problem of consciousness? Does string theory give us novel insights into the nature of consciousness or free will beyond the well known links between these two subjects with quantum mechanics and special relativity?

>>15404062
>morally obliged
190 or 19 IQ?

>>15404062
No symbolic theory can ever explain consciousness

>>15404039
String theory is the Christianity of science. They literally just make shit up to solve all problems.

>>15404096
>god did it, no i don't have any proof
>strings with silly amounts of dimensions did it, no i don't have any proof
basically yes

>>15404039
Yeah I really think they just said OK to the first few boards of complex math they saw as a group and then kept going with it based off of whatever initial proofs they had, as mentioned in the post. I also never think about string theory and I'm skeptical of it's validity as I am of quantum physics.

>>15404092
Poppin' molly

>>15404122
Aren't quants measureable/observabke?

>>15404039
>How the FUCK did this ever happen?
no other viable candidates

>>15404062
Shut up Langan. Stay in your CTMU threads.

>>15404220
is that because everyone was too focused on string theory or have we just reached something of a plateau in physics?

>>15404241
It's because post-WWII physics has been a disaster. The overnight celebrity caused by developing the atom bomb ruined the field for decades.

>>15404039
>How the FUCK did this ever happen?
newsflash people are stupid. smart people solve real problems and get rich

>>15404264
How would the celebrity of it effect it's progress?

>>15404289
Was Einstein not smart? He didn't solve any real world problems

>>15404307
>How would the celebrity of it effect it's progress?
By giving unwarranted authority to a small number of people, setting them up as unchallengeable idols of the field even though most of their work was ad hoc and wrong by their own admission.

>>15404039
I'm a physics grad students and I can tell you that recent ST grads have a really hard time getting positions. Even postdoc positions for them a re incredibly hard to get.
ST is dying at universities. If you're a grad student in ST, switch. Find something else to do. You will be jobless when you graduate.

>>15404264
Is that the sole reason?

>>15404340
Rightfully so. Tbh I'm a math head at the phys institute no one ever talked about strings. That was almost 15y ago.

>>15404264
Standard Model is almost 30 years post-WWII and has been widely successful

>>15404460
kek! good one!

>>15404039
Superstition that protects the pyramid scheme of academic physics, wow, what are the chances they messed up what even the 5th dimension(it jumped from 5 to 11 and there is an arbitrary limit on the number) is? Hmmm
Basically it is unfalsifiable though at the same time a boltzmann-like derivation of quantum gravity. Physics is dead, studying it is like being a little boy who goes visit his wise grandpa on a weekday and then has to play with the old man's rotting corpse for a few hours instead. It is like enrolling in Biology only to find your colleagues are a bunch of anti-racist anti-science terrorists who can't memorize 4 Latin words. Most modern physicists seem to have a horrible intuition and an ape-level ability for reproducing any lab or greater experiment. They learn all things by blind belief and then become useless human beings. They also become really good at obfuscation and relying on magical simulation software.. Fair to say though since 2010 this fake show is running out of its vomit green gas.

>>15404039
>heterotic

>>15404039
go and study it if you want to know
you will never understand
>as a layman

>>15404039
Boomers, the most spoiled generation on earth, took over. They thought they could become le ebin heckin theoreticists without any of the rigor their earlier counterparts had, grifted their way into tenure positions, and drowned the field in sophistry for 50 years.
Who needs physical proof when you've got 19-year-old begging to kiss your ass and a comfy 6-figure job till death?

>>15404039
Mathematical elegance. String theory is a very simple unifying framework that has only one dimensionless parameter and predicts every self-consistent quantum gravity model. It works a bit too well and you get 10^270000 possible universes. This vast landscape relegates experiments to the Planck scale where strings can be probed directly, but to do so requires a collider the size of the galaxy.

>>15404039
let me just comment on this as a high energy physicist (experimental myself but i follow theory to some extent)

string theory proper, i.e. studying string dynamics and string scattering and worldsheet CFT, culminating in the 5 well known theories (type I, IIA, IIB, heterotic E8xE8, and heterotic O(32)) and their relations under M-theory is pretty much a dead field since let’s say 2010. string phenomenology (i.e. trying to cook up plausible models of the real world using more generic stringy / braney schemes) has hit a major roadblock since say 2018 since something known as KKLT (which was a key thing that allowed string theory to predict the accelerating expansion of the universe) got debunked

however, string theory basically gave birth to gauge/gravity duality or more generically “holography” , which indeed establishes some interesting tools that apply to plain quantum field theory. so that does connect to real physics like the standard model, albeit in a very formal way. those tools even have tentative uses for things like scattering amplitudes that particle physicists care about, but currently it only really gets applied to things like supersymmetric theories that are not real physics. but formally, holography does give a connection between string theory and QFT which most of the theorists in the area think might one day in, let’s say a decade or two, might apply to real particle physics such as simplifying calculations by leveraging formal dualities

it is kinda a silly basket to put one’s eggs in since we can already do QFT calculations pretty well. but maybe they come up with a theorem proving quark confinement or something. but i think the real reason they push this direction is because the mathematicians love their stuff, and secondly because they’re so far down the rabbit hole they are too distant from physics at this point and can’t give up and move to other theoretical physics since many folks are way too specialized

>>15404948
Fascinating, even though I barely understand it. Glad it wasn't a total waste and gave us some stuff. Is there anything more promising on the horizon in your opinion?

the real answer is that einstein was wrong and general relativity is bullshit, physicists and astronomers have been taking the wrong turn to albequerque for the past 100 years, and plasma physics provides the most coherent explanations for physical phenomena large and small

>>15405032
personally my feelings about the future of theoretical high-energy physics is that unless the LHC or some other particle physics experiment finds something that’s unequivocally new, then theory is going to stay on track doing what it is doing. i mean, i think in the current mode the theorists are in, i appreciate the scattering amplitudes work from say Zbi Bern and Lance Dixon, but there are connections (i.e. the Nima amplituhedron stuff) that link it into the string umbrella, via the holography connection. it is largely independent but for example the Bern/Dixon stuff had actually been implemented in some software packages (not the top ones but the second-tier ones) that particle physicists use (the package that implements their methods is Sherpa iirc)

but that’s sort of not going to cure the plague that causes the string/holography crowd to go deeper into the rabbit hole forever. what is needed is something like the November Revolution of ‘76 when they discovered the b quark—everyone at that time who was working on (hadronic) string theory dropped it and went to work on QFT and that led to the standard model. we need a discovery to reality check these people

on the less theoretical front I really like Jesse Thaler who had been doing great particle phenomenology which has greatly improved our ability to search for new discoveries. but that is quite mundane compared to hype about the “““Theory of Everything””” so it hardly is on the radar of normies or the media

>>15405056
sorry i meant ‘74 not ‘76

>>15405063
ugh, i also meant charm quark, not b quark. ancient history is tough for me apparently

>>15405056
Interesting, even if it does make me less optimistic it gives me some things to begin to read up on. Thank you

>>15404062
>Does it have any relevance to solving the hard problem of consciousness

Not in the near future. And the mid to late future is looking murky (on a societal level, not just an academic one) thanks to AI.

>>15404101
>i don't have any proof
Proof is everywhere, assuming you would recognize it is the hubris of man.

This is proof, why dont you understand? Are you stupid?
Then youre asking for what you'll never understand.
Are you ignorant?
Then youre asking for what wont make sense.
Are you hubris?
Then you will always ask for what is beyond you, it attracts those that can and gives you a sense of power to which you know you never will have, if they dont show up then you can assume said position. An NPC of the Hivemind operating on biological protocols, the script "I am of free will." is encoded there.

...a charlatan, a living lie.

Physics is just schizophrenia
is made sense when we wanted to make sure bridges wouldn't fall into themselves, but now it's just schizobabble

>>15405363
cool story bro

>>15404241
plateau
the only other viable candidate is loop quantum gravity which is beset by technical problems and can't replicate currently known physics
other ideas such as causal sets aren't well developed enough and suffer same issues as LQP
there's a few more mathematical ideas (noncommutative geometry, algebraic QFT) but those aren't super developed either and the math is too much for most physicists
I suspect a lot of the focus in the future will be in effective QG models
>>15404948
good post