I also did a long post to expand on what I was saying, I didn't lose mine, I had to take my mind off the election tomorrow, so I decided to expand on my comments.
So let me tell you how I really feel about String Theory, let’s call it what it is, a rant.
Our theory of gravity, the General Theory of Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics are fundamentally different theories that have different formulations, that represent incompatible descriptions of reality. Relativity theory represents reality as deterministic and local; Quantum physics represents reality as probabilistic and non-local. They have fundamentally incompatible and mutually exclusive conceptions of time, space, matter, and energy, and they are expressed in two completely different types of mathematics.
One works incredibly well at very small scales but completely falls apart at cosmic scales, the other works very well at very large scales but completely falls apart at the smallest scales. These are two of the most successful and well proven theories ever, and most importantly, they work very well in their applicable areas, which is the whole point of scientific theories.
String theory is nothing more than an abstract mathematical attempt to reconcile these two theories, which has nothing to do with the real world, cannot be considered physics because every bit of it theoretically unobserved and unobservable, everything about it is unfalsifiable. It is about mathematics, it isn’t about the real world. It needs anywhere from 7 to 22 more spatial dimensions to be consistent, and it predicts 10^500 different universes, all with completely different laws of physics, and all of it unobservable, undetectable, and unfalsifiable, it can’t be confirmed, even in theory. The problem is that we confuse these mathematical musings with science, and assume there must be a corresponding reality that we just can’t observe, and better yet, we can’t falsify, even theoretically.
We call our theories “laws of nature” and then come to believe that nature isn’t allowed to break our laws, that the laws determine how reality must behave.
Never really believing that it is impossible for us to know the ultimate, we have seized on quantum theory not as a tool for interpreting experiments, but as a statement about how the world really is. Rather than recognize that our mathematics and our theories are practical tools that help us interpret experiments, we have confused the tools of science with the substance of science, we confuse the map with the territory. So we decide that the standard model tells us what matter and energy are, the actual stuff of the universe is made up of waves of probability, a realm of pure possibility that goes unrealized until it is “collapsed” by an observer, who apparently conjures the particle into existence out of a mathematical haze. We can’t ever see these particles directly of course, they are hypothetical particles acting according to theory, interacting with other hypothetical particles, whose existence is built on a very long chain of inferences, but at the end of this series of hypothesized reactions, matter and energy come into being. We know the particles exist because they were verified by experiment; and we know the experiment was designed correctly because it found the particles. But we are too self-absorbed with our technology to wonder whether perhaps, just maybe, we are interpreting machines, mathematics, and theories, instead of nature.
When we see that the theory doesn’t fit the observations, we don’t think the theory must be wrong, we decide it’s the observed reality that is wrong. The laws of gravity don’t hold up unless we find something that is holding the galaxies together, there must be something else, something unobserved and perhaps unobservable – some kind of unseen matter that emits no radiation, and we say we know it by its secondary effects, it is an “inferred” phenomena. And what is that secondary, inferred phenomena? It is the fact that the current theoretical framework doesn’t explain the observations. But our theoretical framework can’t be wrong, we can never accept that our theories might be wrong or at least incomplete, it must be the universe that is wrong or incomplete, so we decide that the universe that the conceptual framework was supposed to explain is only 1% of reality, there must be another 99% of it that is unobserved and unobservable, and we will call it dark matter. The facts didn’t fit the conceptual framework, so we change the facts.
And it goes on and on, Galaxies spin in contradiction of Newton’s laws, so there must be unobservable dark matter, the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating, so there must be unobservable dark energy. Beta decay violates the conservation law so we invent invisible neutrinos, a single proton at a time still displays an interference pattern in the double slit experiment so we say that a single proton travels every possible path simultaneously and therefore it interferes with itself, the universe appears to be fine-tuned so we say there are an infinite number of undetectable universes and we just happen to live in one that looks fine tuned. Somewhere along the way, in the last three decades, the observed universe we were trying to understand with our theories became subordinate to the theories, rather than adjusting the theories to fit the facts, we began adjusting the facts to fit the theories. Somewhere along the way, the observed universe we were trying to understand was no longer reality, it was just 1% of reality, and that contrivance wasn’t even the universe anymore, it was just one of an infinite number of universes, all of it unobserved and unobservable, and all so the sacred theory could remain intact.
It seems we have gone from a realm of pure possibility that goes unrealized until it is “collapsed” by an observer, who apparently conjures a particle into existence out of a mathematical haze, to an entire realm of pure abstraction, that goes unrealized until it is “collapsed” by a theory, and that apparently conjures entire universes into existence out of a mathematical haze. And I have to wonder if we are still doing science. We are doing some incredibly complicated things with mathematics, but they are abstraction that do not correspond to reality. We confuse the tools of science with the substance of science, we decide the theory is what is real, and rather than have the theory conform to reality, we decide that it’s the reality that must conform. to the theory. All of it unobserved and unobservable, and completely unfalsifiable, which is to say, it is a matter of faith rather than science.
The enterprise of science has largely abandoned its reliance on observations and gone into the business of manufacturing unobserved and unobservable realities in order to support the theories. I’m not really sure what this process is, but I know what it isn’t, it isn’t science, it’s something else, and because it is based on unobserved and unobservable realities, its completely faith based.
Einstein said “It is the theory that allows us to see the facts”, but I don’t think he ever said anything about inventing facts to fit the theory. I’m sure he never said anything about the theory being what is most real, and that reality should just be altered to fit the theory. In the end, if you really think about it rather than just accept what the High Priests bring down from the mountain of complexity on their stone tablets, it’s not hard to see that science has built a self-sustaining system, a mathematical tissue of concepts, its gone way beyond interpretation of observations to become a tower of abstraction that is detached from the reality it was meant to interpret.
