string theory

Hmmm. We don’t often see serious skepticism of Cool ideas like string theory except from brave souls like Sabine Hossenfelder.  With luck, if this pans out to be a serious discussion, it will begin a trend. Note: Some of us would be okay with “Why String Theory Is Right,” provided it is a response to skepticism taken seriously and the theory is treated as a theory with serious problems—not a sort of foregone conclusion, upholding a multiverse. Hat tip: RealClearScience See also:  Sabine Hossenfelder: Black holes do not behave as string theorists say they should “Perhaps physics has slipped into a post-empirical era…” (from a review of Hossenfelder’s book at Physics World) Post-modern physics: String theory gets over the need for evidence and Read More ›

And have to leave academic science. Factually correct answers do not matter now if they are not politically correct. In a review of Adam Becker’s What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books, 2018), mathematician and physicist Sheldon Lee Glashow tells us No one can doubt that quantum mechanics is strange. Who could believe that particles can briefly violate energy conservation so as to pass through otherwise impenetrable barriers?1 Who could believe that a body’s position and velocity could not both be known to an arbitrary degree of precision, yet this is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Who could believe that not more than one electron can occupy the same quantum state, yet this is Pauli’s exclusion Read More ›