I want to make up for linking to something featuring Michio Kaku yesterday by today linking to the exact opposite, an insightful explanation of the history of string theory, discussing the implications of how it was sold to the public. It’s by a wonderful young physicist I had never heard of before, Angela Collier. She has a Youtube channel, and her latest video is string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard.
Instead of going on in detail about the video and what’s great about it, I’ll just give you my strongest recommendation that you should go watch it, now. It’s as hilarious as it is brilliant, and you have to see for yourself.
Life hack: If someone is not even putting enough effort to focus while talking and instead is gaming while speaking then that video is not worth watching.
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She told there are 10 string theories (at 16:00) and were unified even though there are only 5. This person doesn’t look like she EVEN knows string theory at the popular science level. She wrongly included String theory in a nutshell (by Elias Kiritsis) as a popular science book among Kaku’s and Brian Greene’s books.
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So are we supposed to learn the history of string theory from someone who doesn’t know what Pauli got the Nobel for?
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“if they are not testable now they are not predictions”: Thanks for teaching me that when Einstein “predicted” gravitational waves it was not a prediction until 100 years later.
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She is wishing string theorists should never be hired (at 31:20). Looks like she is much less nuanced than people like you. Correct me if I am wrong but you don’t advocate for completely stopping hiring string theorists right? She is an ASTRO person. They are well-funded. Why do some of them wish that fields like string theory and quantum gravity which are already SEVERELY underfunded to go extinct? What do they achieve if humanity stops progressing in fundamental physics?
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She incorrectly said that the cost of SSC was 200 billion instead of 8.25 billion.
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She is randomly saying things (making stuff up) like the public was thinking like this in 2000s and like that in 2010s etc without any SOURCES. The pop science audience is in millions and you can’t assume they all have similar opinions. Even to know what the majority thinks you need a LARGE SAMPLE SIZE to get an idea.
She is saying due to string theory people lost faith in all sciences. This is definitely a baseless CONSPIRACY theory.
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So, she even left Astro (galactic evolution and dark matter), because the industry has even more cash (she exactly mentioned this as the reason) than Astro.
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The reason why string theory is more appealing to the general public is that humans are fascinated by fundamental things. Post a video about how John Bardeen invented the transistor. Next post a video about how Einstein discovered GR, obviously this will get much more views even though the transistor is more useful in everyday life. The origin of the universe is a mystery that humans found fascinating even thousands of years ago (religions were created in part due to this, in another part due to fear of death)
Most people are not fascinated by condensed matter or AMO. Most people who join undergrad join by wanting to contribute to fundamental physics. In my undergrad class, 10/50 people wanted to work on string theory or QFT/particle phenomenology, or loop quantum gravity when they joined. Only 2/50 were left in HEP by the end only because everyone understood that going into HEP is EXTREMELY bad for their job opportunities and they [reluctantly] sold their souls to condensed matter or AMO or Astro or finance.
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I hate myself for wasting time by watching this.
That was the best video I have seen in months!! I loved that she brought out the M-Theory text and pointed out the Greene quote in the Einstein anniversary edition!! Thanks for pointing this out—my class will watch this next week!!
Sage of PHY6 Paths,
I think you’re unfair on some of the specifics you’re accusing her of getting wrong, but I don’t think that’s what’s relevant. She could have made a scrupulously accurate and fair video, which would have been boring and no one would listen to. Many people quite accurately point out to me that when I write (accurately and fairly…) about the problem of string theory hype, no one is interested any more: it’s beating a dead horse, a complete waste of time.
So, how does one deal with the ongoing phenomenon of string theory hype (from the Kaku extreme, through the long list of prominent physicists still at it after all these years)? I thought this gonzo, bizarre, over-the-top, completely hilarious video was a unique answer to the question. Not something she or anyone else should try again, but I haven’t seen a better answer to the question of how to deal with the likes of Kaku (ignoring him doesn’t seem to work).
Sage of PHY6 Paths,
To give such a complex talk without “ahms” and without cuts while playing a video game at the same time shows that her intelligence and wit are extraordinary. Please stop hating yourself. Instead, hire her in your department!
I think this is a valuable video. I can imagine many other physicists would have a similar perspective. The public opinions on string theories definitely did some damage to the physics community as a whole.
But I don’t necessarily think Witten etal. lied intentionally, at least not in the beginning. I’m sure they were excited about their theories and did what they thought was the best for their careers. At least string theory did produce something useful for maths, even if there is no good testable predictions in the near future.
This is in stark contrast with the “wormhole in a lab” hype, which is so obviously fabricated lies to get the public funds. In one hand I feel angry, on the other hand it feels pathetic that even the most well funded areas in physics are so desperate for funding.
I’d just like to say how shocked and dismayed I was to learn that Michio Kaku is a phony and an idiot.
I was an avid consumer of popular science during the 90s & noughties and I think this girl totally nailed it.
As to gaming while she was talking, well that was next level multi-tasking, I was truly impressed and I don’t see why anyone should whinge, I assume she was nervous and that is how she manages, good on her!
It seems to me that the takeaway here is not the details of her argument or the foibles of her presentation, but that she probably represents many other newcomers to physics who are prepared to move on from this apparent dead end. “And that may be an encouraging thought.” (I, too, found the gaming while talking incredibly annoying, but I dealt with it by just listening.)
Max Planck: “science advances one funeral at a time”
Thanks for the heads up, Peter. I love Collier’s history of string theory, except for when she bashes Margaret Wertheim’s book Physics on the Fringe, which I really like. Wertheim does not bash all of physics, only strings, multiverses and other ideas that cannot be tested.
For my take (back in 2011) on the Wertheim book, see here
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4246
where there’s a link to John Horgan’s review
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/in-physics-telling-cranks-from-experts-aint-easy/
For many young people, watching someone play a video game on camera while they’re talking about an unrelated topic is completely normal. Granted, it’s usually not about string theory, but it doesn’t matter. As a millennial and twitch enjoyer, watching the gameplay actually keeps my attention on the video much better than if she were just talking, and this might be one of the best ways to reach a gen Z audience. It didn’t even strike me as odd. If you can’t deal with this format because you’re a boomer or if it’s simply not for you, then don’t watch it. I can’t believe the first commenter decided to watch the whole thing and then be a hater. You’ve wasted your own time, why’re you complaining to us about it? The nerve…
Regarding the actual content, I find myself agreeing with the majority of her points. Her perspectives on string theory from an astrophysicist’s point of view resonate with me, being a lattice QCD guy myself. Both of these fields have made incredible progress over the past 30-40 years, maybe they should’ve paid some string theorists to write hyped-up pop science books about it. Many of the things she said also reminded me of the angry conversations I’ve had with the blank wall in my office when the wormhole paper came out. It’s not just that they’re obviously fabricating false “breakthroughs” to reel in funding and are getting away with it by misleading the public, what really upsets me is knowing that I can’t do anything about it, especially as an early-career scientist. At least string theory was sort of well-motivated back when it started, this new wave of pseudoscientific “quantum gravity in the lab” claims seems quite different from my point of view. I totally would’ve believed a younger Brian Greene or Ed Witten telling me that they’re indeed fully convinced that string theory is the answer, even if I had disagreed myself. But they just kept going even when it didn’t pan out, and as a result, the new generation of non-physicists they inspired seems to have no problem with engaging in deliberate misrepresentation in order to achieve their own career goals. I often wonder how they manage to sleep at night. No one can be this delusional, right? RIGHT???
lettuce field theorist,
Thanks for providing some perspective to boomers like myself. To me seeing someone play a video game while talking on screen seriously about something else comes off as a hard-to-believe attention-getting piece of radical performance art. Interesting to hear that it’s just what millenials do. Maybe I’ll start making videos of myself doing things shocking and incomprehensible to millenials, like reading a physical newspaper or something and put those on my Youtube channel.
Or, maybe the lesson is that if I want to get millenial’s attention for material about twistors and quantization of euclidean chiral spinor fields, I first need to take up gaming and work on that…
lettuce field theorist
As a boomer who stopped maturing many decades ago (a Z-boomer, as it were), your comment was pure gold. It would give me hope for the future were it not that the likes of Sage of PHY6 Paths – dismissive, arrogant, not fun at parties – exist in your gen too, and they have a way of rising to the top. Consult Machiavelli for further references.
Even as a mathematician with some tangential connections to string theory, I completely understand the skepticism for it and very much liked the video. Personally, I would be much more comfortable with strings if they were sold as a theory which was developed by physicists and have generated deep and non-trivial mathematical insights. In that respect, it has been highly successful (and much less controversial). And although physicists might not prioritize it as highly as a mathematician does, there is real value in solving difficult mathematical problems.
But there is a real problem in researchers aggressively overselling their work before it has produced the results to match. I understand it is necessary to promote your work, since no one will read technical research unless you convince them it is worthwhile to do so. However, I still don’t have a good answer to the question of how researchers can sell their work in responsible ways and not create the academic equivalent of a speculative bubble.
String theory is one the most prominent instances of this due to the success of its public outreach. However, there are many other examples which come to mind. And in the long run, this hype often proves to short-sighted and ends up detracting from serious work in the area.
Curiously, I found your blog from the video (mentioned by user “Perfidy” in the comments section), and not the other way around. A useful feature of good science communication is that creates a cyclical effect, increasing the interest and awareness of the consumer. This increased awareness drives the consumer to seek similar but often less sensational content, which can lead to more good science communication.
An equal or greater challenge for “good science communication” is the fact that it is in no way equivalent to “good science.” From my perspective walking a different path saddled with its own plethora of “pop science,” it feels far rarer that the two are ever paired, in fact. It should be no surprise that people who rely on their communication skills to market their ideas rather than any facts or evidence contained therein also happen to be the smoothest communicators.
By contrast, the utility of a video such as this one, despite bearing such as egregious flaws as including videogame footage or misidentifying a cash figure, is that it serves to draw the public’s opinion away from hapless acceptance OR excessive skepticism.
The relaxed tone and focus on certain specific instances of potential wrongdoing welcomes viewers who have the (frankly commonly held) belief that “string theory is cutting-edge and well validated science” to reconsider this belief without reflexively disavowing physics – or indeed even string theory itself – outright. Perhaps beneficial outreach, given how perilous ignoring a scorned majority holding the keys of finance and electoral support can become. NASA alone teaches many lessons.
Cheers!
I enjoyed the video, although she should (i) have taken out the “This is just my opinion man” banners and (ii) done the whole thing riding a unicycle on a tightrope.
I know there are good scientists out there – I have worked with them, generally doing unglamorous, non-headline-grabbing things – but in fundamental physics, they seem to be few and far between.
I found her other video about postdocs maybe more useful.
In particular about how current professors are pretty much also responsible for the tough environment postdocs face.
I find it pretty hypocritical how usually professors and university admins are ready to jump on any silly talking point, like divesting oil and pronouns, but working conditions for postdocs are “just the tough way it is”. And I’m not referring to salaries, but at the very least administrative support. Changing countries with a family is easily a waste of several months of work, just because univ. admins can’t be arsed to put together a decent FAQ for new hires.
If nothing else, this video gives a sample (n=1) of a mainstream physics view of string theory, by someone who grew up reading the pop sci treatments of it. Yes, the inaccuracies are unfortunate. The SSC funding cancellation being moved up in time was to me the most egregious slip; the mentality of the episode is about right, but it lessens the impact getting that one wrong. Then the origin of supersymmetry being inspired by ST, but at least that was tethered somewhat to superstrings, and considered as a prediction. After that, the specific mistakes like the critical dimensions for CFTs, the specific number of different string theories, are more or less beside the point. If there are five or ten superstring theories, it changes nothing about the thrust of the argument.
The example of how the framing of the character of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory shifted is for me a really interesting. All of this is sociology, not science, so seeing evidence of attitudes is really about a barometer of general feeling, not basing the authoritativeness of Collier as a source on her precise recollection of internal details of string theory, when she specialised in some other type of physics.
I think the video is intentionally exaggerated in its claims and not meant to be taken nearly as literally as some here do and the gaming is there also mainly for trolling…
As a member of the class of science-book reading, science-loving amateurs to which she refers, I feel as if some dark-matter scientists have lied to me. (There was a commenter to this blog several posts ago who did so.) That is, like the string-theory advocates, they passionately believe in their hypothesis and refuse to credit data of its shortcomings, despite its lack of a-priori predictive results, adding or changing parameters as necessary to postdict results such as the CMB spectrum.
In neither case (string-theory or dark matter) do I think the lies are deliberate, conscious lies, but the result of cognitive biases which we probably all share to some degree (myself certainly).
I found the video game distracting and a bit annoying, although an impressive feat if true (would have been easy to fake in editing; I assume it was not fake but must logically leave room for the possibility). On the other hand, perhaps it forced me to concentrate on what she was saying more, by having to snap my attention back.
My recollection of pop-sci reading from the 90s/earlier? is that mentions of string theory always had some sort of disclaimer to the effect of ‘not testable by orders of magnitude and/or for any forseeable future’. I rhink the claim of “deception” of the interested public is not generally supportable. Certainly not compared to more technology-related hype-fests like cold fusion, or the EM drive, or this latest ‘simulated yet real’ wormholes, or …
I also found the simultaneous gaming to be sort of annoying, and detracted from taking her seriously.
PatrickC,
Kaku to this day claims publicly that string theory is testable in the near future, although Brian Greene has become much more cautious than in the 90s. If you want links to 100 or so examples of string theorists making bogus claims about testability, see here
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?cat=8
These are post-2004, what was going on in the 1990s was even more egregious. For example, the New York Times was hood-winked in 2000, putting out this story
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/04/science/physicists-finally-find-a-way-to-test-superstring-theory.html
Yes, discussions of string theory in the 1990s did often include mention of the fact that the strings were small, so direct detection would be hard to impossible, but many claims were made about getting indirect evidence. I think the case that the string theory hype heavily promoted to the public at that time (and to this day…) was highly misleading is very strong. This hype was one of the main reasons I wrote “Not Even Wrong”, and I think the argument I was making 20 years ago that string theory was an overhyped idea that had already failed by then stands up quite well today.
This video also left me somewhat bemused and uncomfortably reminded of my advancing age. Even with the explanations above, I still don’t get the joke of the video game, if joke it is. My reflexively cynical side wondered if it was a built-in excuse for the chronological and factual inaccuracies. In my day bong hits provided similar absolution from fact-checkers on mornings after I was inspired to opine at great length extemporaneously.
Though not a physicist, I started having similar misgivings some time in the early aughties (I think I found this blog shortly thereafter). It is simultaneously fascinating and depressing to hear Collier’s take roughly twenty years later. She was in grade school when the problem became obvious even to a layman like me, yet the false narrative of String Theory is so pervasive in science popularization a new generation is experiencing more-or-less exactly the same sort of disillusionment. Very sobering.
Did her video bring me something? Yes, I was not aware that Greene is mentioning string theory in the intro of a new edition of Einstein’s ” The meaning of relativity”. This is pure hype, glueing this fictive theory to a classic. Looks like an irrespectuous act to me.
I have the old version in 3 different languages. I will not buy this new edition……
Coincidentally, I came across Angela just yesterday after watching another of her videos which is a gem: physics crackpots: a ‘theory’ video. I agree with her 100% after spending many years participating in discussions on sci.physics.relativity; and reading Lubos Motl’s opinions on his blog on identity politics, climate change, Covid, the 2019 US election etc.
JimV wrote: ” I feel as if some dark-matter scientists have lied to me. ”
I dunno. My impression was that the dark matter idea was at least in response to real data, to a real problem in astrophysics. My impression is that it isn’t working out, but that’s OK. Science is supposed to be about looking at data and thinking about it and trying ideas out. I suppose if I read the popularizing fan literature, I might get irritated, too, though.
But as a computer nerd (we’re supposed to like sci-fi more than I actually do), using words like cloaking and wormhole are far more objectionable. Ditto for teleportation. Even in the kindest possible interpretation, ripping off perfectly good (albeit inane) ideas from science fiction and using them to talk about things that aren’t anything like the original is objectionable in the extreme. The rather dated term “shameless” springs to mind and refuses to leave.
Have to disagree. This was narrowly opinionated, weakly argued, and pretty annoying.
I’ve been one of the string-theory-following “public” she mentions (theoretical physics undergrad). Listening to her I feel like we lived in different universes. Yes, string theory was probably over-hyped. And I am not wedded to it being the correct theory. But we had no (and still have no) serious alternative proposal for unifying gravity with quantum mechanics. She is certainly not proposing any such alternative.
It’s also not the case that string theory has drowned out the rest of physics, as she implies. Again, as an outsider interested in physics, I’ve seen far more public discussion of the rest of physics over the decades than I have of string theory.
She judges string theory based on books written by crackpots. That’s not string-theory’s fault. Pretty much every scientific field spawns its own crackpot literature.
I find the whole thing pretty disrespectful. Witten is a modern-day Einstein. Arguably Einstein + Gauss. Problems with argument from authority aside, when given a choice between the opinion of a YouTuber who doesn’t seem to know the Pauli exclusion principle and is offering no alternative to string theory, and someone of Witten’s stature that firmly believes it’s the most promising direction to pursue, I know who I am more inclined to listen to.
Jonathan Baxter,
Your comment makes a good case for the problem Collier is pointing to.
According to you the books about string theory she describes are “written by crackpots”. The ones I remember her referring to are by Michio Kaku, Brian Greene and Leonard Susskind. Are they all “crackpots”? If Brian Greene and Leonard Susskind are crackpots, do you have a way of figuring out which of my other Columbia colleagues and which of the Stanford faculty are crackpots? If you don’t, do you now see the problem with overhype trashing the credibility of conventional authority figures in science?
Yes, Witten is a genius, and he’s a professor at the IAS. Just like Einstein, who spent his time at the IAS pursuing a set of failed ideas about unification. Maybe things are more complicated, and geniuses sometime pursue misguided research programs?
Peter Woit,
“According to you the books about string theory she describes are “written by crackpots”.
That’s not what I said. I said “She judges string theory based on books written by crackpots”.
I should have been clearer that I was not talking about texts on the subject, or popularizations by leading lights of string theory. She is far less judgmental about those, other than to accuse the authors of overhyping string theory’s potential. And on that point: I have a difficult time believing the authors did/do not genuinely believe that string theory had/has a good chance of unifying gravity and QM. I simply don’t believe they were intentionally telling lies as she claims. Speculating that something will happen “within a decade” does not automatically become a lie when it does not, in fact, happen within a decade.
A decade is usually a placeholder for “sometime not in the near future”, regardless of who is making the claim, and regardless of the subject. When I hear “decade” I think to myself “ok, you don’t actually know”. But again, the person speculating usually doesn’t know that they don’t know, so the accusation that they’re somehow lying is not justified.
As far as crackpot books go, I am talking about, for example, “physics of the fringe” which is written by someone with little knowledge of actual physics (full disclosure, I have not read this book and had not heard of it until it was mentioned in the video).
No doubt geniuses pursue misguided research programs. But Einstein is not a good analogy. Other than very accurately quantifying his objections to QM with the EPR papers, he essentially turned his back on QM, a field that was making astonishing progress explaining the physical world in his own lifetime.
Where is the corresponding field that competes with string theory? As far as I know it doesn’t exist. So while I am perfectly willing to believe that string theory is not the right answer, it’s not like Witten has been studiously ignoring spectacular advances elsewhere in favor of his own pet theory.
(tbf on Einstein, his objections to QM are just as valid today as when he made them. They’re an objection to the fact that QM does not describe the physical world of our own experience. He is in good company. Most people who go down the road of truly attempting to understand what QM is telling us about reality end up in a deep conundrum, and usually start musing about the nature of consciousness itself)
Jonathan Baxter,
So, by “books written by crackpots” you are referring to a single book written by a serious science writer that was about crackpots, and which you don’t know anything about? For more about it, see
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4246
You say “She is far less judgmental about those” (popularizations by leading lights of string theory), completely missing her main point. The video is entitled “string theory lied to us” and she repeatedly refers to the 1990s popularizations of string theory and their authors and repeated calls these authors “liars”. Seems pretty judgmental to me…
Peter Woit,
What can I tell you? I don’t think those guys are crackpots. If I misinterpreted her view of “fringe” then ok. Nothing I said stands or falls on that.
Yes, she is very judgmental about what she views as the overhyping of string theory – I said as much.
My main points are
A) Her “liar liar” claims are offensive and unconvincing. I don’t believe leading string theorists were intentionally lying when claiming that unification of gravity and QM/QFT was reachable within a decade. And her repeated claims that Witten was happily basking in adulatory Einstein comparisons while secretly harboring doubts? Come on. At least based on my impression from afar, Witten may have the highest ratio of talent to humility on the planet.
B) I don’t believe the string theory hype had any impact on the credibility of science (I didn’t make that point yet).
There’s vastly more nefarious corruption of science than a little overhyping of string theory.
To be clear, I’ve never heard of Michio Kaku. But I have read books by Greene and Susskind and they’re not crackpots.
“Witten is a modern-day Einstein. Arguably Einstein + Gauss”
Maybe it would be wiser to let history makes its job, and see in 50 or 100 years if the impact of Witten’s work in maths and physics is comparable to the one of Einstein and Gauss. The cult of personality is also part of the problem of over hyped string theory.
martibal,
One problem with Einstein/Witten comparisons is the following. While Einstein started his research career around 1900, just as modern physics was about to be born, Witten started his in 1974, exactly at the point the SM was finally in place, and dramatic progress coming to a screeching halt. So, Witten has been working his entire career in a very different situation than Einstein.
Everyone who is convinced string theory is the best way forward because of the undeniable fact that Witten is a genius should keep in mind the example of Einstein, Witten’s predecessor at the IAS, who similarly for his entire career there thought he knew the best way forward (extending classical GR to more general geometries), but was completely wrong.
I agree that Collier was being somewhat unfair to Witten about the issues of comparison to Einstein. Unlike some others, he’s not at all someone who seeks public attention. But he has been the most influential figure from the beginning in telling other theorists they should work on string theory, arguing the case within the theory community that it was by far the most promising way forward. The big scandal of string theory is that it failed and the leaders of the field (with Witten the most influential) have refused to admit what happened.
I am also of the opinion that, e.g., Brian Greene has, or at least had, no intention to misinform. I also still hold his books in high regard for their introductory material and the quality of their writing.
But let’s face it: Even when the Elegant Universe came out, the claims therein about the candidacy of String Theory as a TOE were already in serious trouble, not only empirically but purely theoretically. AdS/CFT was 1997. Elegant was published in 1999. KKLT was 2003; Fabric of the Cosmos was published in 2004. So circa Greene’s most successful publications, there was already every reason to believe that String Theory not only couldn’t work in anything less than ten dimensions, but those six extra dimensions could be rolled up in a functionally infinite number of ways…and the extended ones had to have the wrong curvature. By the mid-2000s (and arguably well before), String Theory was obviously an empirical dead-end to all but its most ardent believers. None of its proponents, nor practically anyone involved in popularizing HEP, saw fit to educate the layperson about the fact that natural SUSY was pretty much DOA before the LHC even turned on. They didn’t tell us the so-called WIMP miracle was in serious tension with experiment in the 1990s. They completely glossed over the fact that String Theory’s one “prediction” i.e. “gravity” is actually a little-known extension of GR with scalars we never observed nor ever needed to explain anything. And on and on and on…
And it’s just been getting steadily worse with time. Today we’re agape at this latest wormhole nonsense, and all I can think is practically anyone could come up with a takedown of this whole industry, and yet it amazingly seems indestructibly undead. One simply has to quote certain very respectable people 30, 20, 10, 5, 2…years ago, look at what they said then, what they said later, what they say now, and compare. It’s stunning how many goalposts have been moved, how many equivocations have been required to keep the machine going, how many ridiculous statements to the effect of “well, we never actually claimed we could predict”… The only proper answer is “Yes, you did. Over and over again, in fact. And you’ve been wrong about every single one of these claims. Every. Single. One.”
So, no, it’s probably not accurate to call some of these folks liars. But does that help, at all?
I’m late to the party here, but I enjoyed the video. I don’t think over-hyping string theorists have somehow deeply harmed the credibility of all of science, but I do think they and their ilk have done the discipline of physics a serious disservice. There is far more to physics than just high energy theory, and hype + acting like they speak for all of physics is not helpful. Sage of PHY6 describing people choosing to work in AMO or condensed matter as “selling their souls” is hyperbolic sneering-at-non-high-energy bs, and attitudes like that approach Sheldon Cooper levels of self-caricature.
“He lied and never knew that he lied, and when it was pointed out to him said that lies were beautiful. He was an idealist”
–Maugham
I think that the tone of Angela Collier’s video might not have come across clearly. She’s speaking conversationally and without artifice. The reason that she’s playing a video game as she talks, as she explains in the first few seconds of the video, is that she doesn’t want to get too involved in scientific details when she talks about this, since it isn’t her real focus, and she’s using the game to distract herself from doing so. It wasn’t a gimmick; she was just being straightforward.
Since she’s talking off the top of her head, she’s unsure of some details, so, for example, she speaks of the SSC as costing two hundred billion dollars (just meaning, basically, a lot of money), and, although she’s certainly aware of the exclusion principle, she isn’t aware that it’s what Pauli got the Nobel Prize for. She was careful to look up the facts afterwards and put them onscreen in the video, however.
This isn’t my field, but I have followed popular accounts of string theory since the late 80s, and I tend to share her point of view. It was only when I read Peter’s book, and Lee Smolin’s, that I realized how little of string theory was actually on solid ground. Up until then I’d thought it was odd to devote so many resources to a program that speculative, but I had the impression that at least the foundational conjectures were proven. In any case, it had all begun to seem more and more contrived as it went on, and it was being greatly oversold, so things hadn’t been smelling right anyway.
From Angela Collier’s standpoint, it wouldn’t have been so easy. She would have grown up wanting to be a physicist and trusting popular books to tell her the truth about what physics was. The media of the time, always happy to find something to push, was selling string theory as the future. When that proved to be hype, it would have been a serious thing for her.
She’s an astrophysicist, and she’s from Appalachia. Both of those things, I think, would incline her to be a lot more bottom line than most particle physicists. Her claim is that the string theorists who were behind many of the claims in the media knew that they were stretching things at the time they said them, and therefore they were lying. That’s a strong way to put it, but I wouldn’t say it was unreasonable. If she’s correct about what was going on, and they’d been selling used cars with the same attitude, then I think that’s the word people would use.
There is an inherent problem here and it can be expressed by the character in Seinfeld who claimed “It’s not a lie if you believe it”. Clearly there is no way to tell the difference between sincerely held ideas, sincerely held delusions, having doubts but pretending not to and barefaced lying.
JimV writes: “As a member of the class of science-book reading, science-loving amateurs to which she refers, I feel as if some dark-matter scientists have lied to me. (There was a commenter to this blog several posts ago who did so.) That is, like the string-theory advocates, they passionately believe in their hypothesis and refuse to credit data of its shortcomings, despite its lack of a-priori predictive results, adding or changing parameters as necessary to postdict results such as the CMB spectrum.”
I do not know what “lies” JimV is referring to. Dark matter was hypothesized by Fritz Zwicky around the same time that he and Walter Baade hypothesized neutron stars, in 1932. The reason for the hypothesis was the apparent non-Keplerian dependence on stellar orbits in galaxies; absent more mass than provided by the estimated mass of luminous matter, these stars would have left orbit. Vera Rubin seems to have established Zwicky’s hypothesis with decades of careful measurements. I don’t see how the existence of dark matter can be denied. I don’t know what it is, nor what predictions have issued from its existence. The predictions may well depend on its identity, and that is as far as I have heard far from settled.
For a good popular book on dark matter, I like Laurence Krauss’s “The Fifth Essence”, though thirty years old now. Probably there is a better, newer choice, maybe “The Four Percent Universe” by Richard Panek (2012), which discusses both dark energy (also confirmed by extensive data, and recognized by a Nobel) and dark matter. And neither are necessary to predict the CMB; that was done by many back in the 1940’s (at least as early as the 1940’s): Gamow and his students Alpher and Herman; Zel’dovich in the ’50s (who even suggested the Holmdel NJ horn antenna!), Dicke and Peebles in the early 1960’s, it’s not a short list. No post-diction required!
Seeing some very smart people making very bad arguments about string theory has always made me wonder what they are thinking. I suspect that thinking “this is wrong but I’m going to write/say it anyway” (i.e. truly lying) is very unusual. But what is all too usual is people approaching the problem of what to write/say as “what can I say that will further my agenda and interests while not actually being indisputably untrue?” If you do this, I don’t think you have a lot of right to complain when another physicist calls you a “liar” on youtube.
One thing that strikes me about ChatGPT is that it seems to work exactly like this. If you tell it to make an argument for string theory, it will produce much the same output as what you hear from the best string theorists. ChatGPT I don’t think “lies”, it just is designed to produce output that sounds plausible and convinces people, with the question of accuracy and fairness of its argument just not in the code. People’s behavior I guess is much the same.
My experience of many string theorists is that in private they will avoid bogus arguments, and do their best to refuse to make public comments (because they know an accurate argument would cause problems). The ones who show up in the media are the ones with the lowest built-in restraint against saying something inaccurate.
It’s interesting to contrast mathematicians to physicists. Mathematicians have a strong ingrained culture of never saying anything inaccurate, so rarely turn up in the media making bogus arguments (every so often they do show up making bad arguments about physics, but because of lack of expertise).
For the nitpickers: I double-checked my memory of KKLT, and what I took from it back then was A) there’s no denying or avoiding the Landscape in ST, and B) KKLT’s conjectured mechanism to break SUSY, get rid of massless scalars and the non-existent long-range forces they would mediate, and “uplift” metastable dS vacua to realistic lifetimes was hardly universally embraced, and hotly debated ever since. The verdict today appears to be either (super)ST is inherently incompatible with a positive cosmological constant, or our pocket of the multiverse doesn’t “really” have one, despite the overwhelming observational evidence to the contrary. Who could have predicted such an outcome except…well, everyone who wasn’t a fan of String Theory?
Assuming I got the above correct, I ask again: What good does it do anyone to say ST is an “honest” enterprise?
David Derbes,
The dark matter question seems to me the opposite of string theory. It’s completely conventional science: you have phenomena that don’t fit your best theory (galaxy rotation curves, CMB observations) so theorists try and find a better theory that explains the data and experimentalists try to get better relevant data. Sure, theorists sometimes overhype the theory they work on, denigrate opposing ideas, but this is all very conventional science.
The problem with string theory is that it never became a conventional science, which is very different.
LMMI,
I think that few string theorists are signed up for the “no positive CC” program of the swampologists. To me the whole “swampland program” seems like what you would get if you asked ChatGPT “the landscape is killing us on the PR front, what can we do about this?”.
Peter,
I stay away from all string theory arguments. My thesis (1979) was on supergravity/local supersymmetry, so I feel some sympathy for the string folks. Me, I got out five seconds after I passed the thesis defense. I was simply addressing what I felt another poster was saying about dark matter. I agree completely with your remarks about dark matter; it is a handy way of describing an observed phenomenon (same as dark energy, though of course that has some theoretical underpinnings in Einstein’s introduction of the Lambda term), and with luck we will eventually have a much better understanding of what’s going on. I do think that some interesting math has come out of string theory, not that I understand much of it, and maybe down the road some good will come from it. I do remember early on—1976?—when Witten scored a PRL with a nifty proof of the positivity conjecture in GR with a supersymmetric argument, later modified not to need susy at all. And as I think you know, I have two friends and former (high school) students who have made careers at least in part with string theory. Both geniuses and good guys, in my opinion, for whatever that’s worth.
David,
I think you have in mind Witten’s 1981 paper here
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01208277
While he was motivated by thinking about supergravity, the argument doesn’t need that, just properties of spinors and the Dirac operator. My impression is that Witten’s paper has become a classic in the mathematics literature, often taught to grad students in differential geometry.
Jonathan Baxter, at 43:00 Angela says:
“It’s fine to do String theory… the fact that they spent 30 years on it is fine… they didn’t do anything wrong, that’s how science works, my issue is how they lied to everyone about it… for thirty years String theorists wrote books and gave interviews where they said within the next decade it’s going to be the next big thing”
at 44:48:
“it’s a lie to give an interview where you’re like ‘see the problem with the Standard model is this happens and my theory fixes it’ when your theory is not a theory and you don’t have any experiments. It’s OK to give an interview and say ‘here’s what I’m working on, here’s what I think will happen when we test it’, but you need to say when we test it.”
Take the LHC: it was built first and foremost to discover the Higgs. It was worth building to test the claims of the Standard model at the time; and the Higgs being confirmed in 2012 is a spectacular achievement IMO. But leading up to it, the public were told its other purpose was to possibly discover SUSY, which was ‘likely’ as some claimed, new dimensions, black holes, dark matter etc… when it wasn’t. It’s damaged the credibility of scientists being believed by the public when justifying them paying for their scientific funding.
String theory has also been used in a similar and damaging way according to Angela.
Jonathan Baxter
If the string theorists on grant review panels deny grants to people trying to research alternative theories of quantum gravity (something that I am fairly sure happens), we never will get an alternative theory of quantum gravity.
Yes, none of the alternative theories of quantum gravity work very well yet, but if you use that as a reason to deny funding to people who want to research them, you get a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Peter Shor,
I’ve had a couple of recent comments nuked, so it seems opinions like mine are not particularly welcome. I get the hint: I wasn’t going to bother commenting any more. But since you addressed me directly:
I doubt that serious alternative theories of quantum gravity have been nixed in favor of string theory. This all starts to sound very conspiratorial.
The undergraduate theoretical physics department I studied in had two “factions” for want of a better term: the “phenomenologists” and the “mathematical physicists”. I thought phenomenology was dubious: making models you know are false yet somehow are going to yield insights into the truth. Felt like curve-fitting not science to me.
But other than the usual zero-sum struggle for a limited funding pie, I don’t think the phenomenologists (who were ascendant at the time) deliberately nixed the research programs of the mathematical physicists.
Peter Shor/Jonathan Baxter,
This has been getting off-topic, I’d like people to stick to discussing the video. I will however take the opportunity to add one thing relevant to the issue of how ideas get suppressed that I noticed recently. A postdoc ad
https://www.aei.mpg.de/1023262/postdoctoral-position-in-quantum-gravity-supergravity-string-theory
for the “Quantum Gravity and Unified Theories” department in Potsdam specifies explicitly
“Potential candidates should have a PhD and a research background in supergravity, string theory or their symmetry structures.”
This kind of explicit specification that people pursuing different ideas shouldn’t even apply isn’t that common, but if one has any experience with how postdoc and junior faculty hiring in this field works, I think it’s very clear to everyone what your career prospects are if you try and follow a different road.
The whole thing is kind of bizarre actually. The SUSY/string theory approach to unification has become widely discredited among the physics community (and physicists on youtube…) but people are still advertising jobs restricted to working on this approach.
Sorry, but for further comments, please try to stay on-topic…
Note added (5/5/23): The example I gave here was a bad one. The department at Potsdam, with Hermann Nicolai as director until recently, has been among the places more open to a wider array of ideas. I had not understood the significance of the clause (“or their symmetry structures”). The position advertised is to work with Axel Kleinschmidt, who (see here) works on some interesting new ideas about symmetries, which is exactly the sort of thing I’d hope to see more of.