Sean Carroll on the String Wars
This year is witnessing an unprecedented large attack against string theory in the popular arena, with Peter Woit and Lee Smolin publishing books with criticism of it and its dominance in beyond Standard Model theoretical physics. Is string theory right, wrong or not even wrong? What is a layman to make of this? Well, for starts, he or she could move over to Cosmic Variance and read the excellent and level-headed post Sean Carroll has written. The discusion in the comments is also surprisingly civil and substantial, perhaps because a certain L.M. has not weighed in yet.
posted by Alejandro at
10:23 AM
5 Comments:
In the face of the Intelligent Design nonsense in this country, it is wonderful to have an example out in the open of the way scientific controversies do work in the actual scientific community.
I also relish the chance to bring out all the wonderful arguments around the interpretations of physical theories that a discussion of string thery necessitates: Are physical theories decriptions of underlying structure or are they just sets of models, one of which is the universe we inhabit? Are they mere instrumentalist tools ot to be given ontological interpretations?
By
SteveG, at 3:23 PM, June 20, 2006
LM did weigh in with a by now removed posting which was so utterly inane (he apparently hadn't even bothered to read the post) that absolutely nobody sane have taken his side.
I copied it since I anticipated it would be removed.
Other then that it's a good discussion, though by neccessity there's a lot of rehash.
By
Anonymous, at 5:48 PM, June 20, 2006
fh: yes, I noticed the link from Not Even Wrong to a post that did not exist any more. I'm surprised that he took his post back -rather uncommon, isn't it? Could you email me the text if you have saved it?
Steveg: Of course the sting theory debate is a real scientific controversy as opposed to ID which is a manufactured one; however I'm not sure if the way it is handled gives too much credit to the physics community. As to the philosophical question of what are pysical theories, I agree it is fascinating. I remember a post by Sean at CV some months ago, How many dimensions are there?, which gave rise to a great discussion in the comments on the realistic or instrumental interpretation of extra dimensions. See especially comments by Fyodor, rof and Moshe to enjoy watching physicist wrestling with philosophical issues relevant for their work.
stringsandpbranes, I thank you for stopping by and commenting, but please try to post comments relevant for the post or discussion thread, and to put some effort into writing them in grammatical English.
By
Anonymous, at 6:13 PM, June 20, 2006
Dear Alejandro,
I found that you really have big talent in making advertisement. :-) Good job!
Best, Yidun
By
Anonymous, at 12:31 AM, June 23, 2006
Thanks Yidun!
By the way, LM has reposted his anti-Sean Carroll rant. I think it was better left buried.
By
Anonymous, at 10:09 PM, June 23, 2006
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