If a post-truth field of science is going to keep going, it needs to convince funders and the public that progress is being made, so there’s a continual need for people uninterested in truth and willing to produce appropriate propaganda. This is the 142nd edition of This Week’s Hype, which has been documenting this phenomenon for the past twenty years.
Such a post-truth project requires cooperation from institutions responsible for communicating science to the public. One such is the Royal Institution which sponsored a program of pure propaganda for string theory, now available on Youtube. From the transcript:
I’m not in propaganda mode here, and we shall avoid propaganda mode… As you see, I’m trying not to go into propaganda mode… Once again I’m in no propaganda mode, but we are fairly sure…
If a speaker four times in a talk assures you that what he’s saying is not propaganda, one thing you can be sure of is that it is propaganda.
Another part of maintaining a post-truth scientific field is that you need people willing to write propaganda “scientific” articles, institutions willing to publish such articles and venues to promote them. A good example of this is The Standard Model from String Theory: What Have We Learned? now published in The Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science.
The publisher of Annual Reviews has a publication called Knowable Magazine, tasked with promoting their articles, and they’ve hired Tom Siegfried to write about this one under the title String theory is not dead. By the way, if somebody is hiring journalists to write propaganda pieces entitled “Field X is not dead”, you can be sure that field X truly is dead. Siegfried has had a very long career in the string theory propaganda business, going back nearly 30 years. See for instance this posting, which has some background on Siegfried.
In his very hostile review of Not Even Wrong for the New York Time, Siegfried explains that I’m completely wrong about string theory’s lack of predictions:
…string theory does make predictions — the existence of new supersymmetry particles, for instance, and extra dimensions of space beyond the familiar three of ordinary experience. These predictions are testable: evidence for both could be produced at the Large Hadron Collider, which is scheduled to begin operating next year near Geneva.
Like all of those in the post-truth business, having one’s “predictions” turn out to not work doesn’t have any impact at all on one’s willingness to keep the propaganda campaign going.
A good giveaway that something is propaganda is a title that indicates that you’re not going to get just information about something, but also a sales job. Today the Higgs Centre in Edinburgh has a talk scheduled with the title What is string theory and why you should care?. The idea that people at a theoretical physics center would not know what string theory is after the past forty years is pretty laughable, so clearly the point of this talk is not the first part of the title, but the “you should care” part.
Update: Video of the Higgs Centre talk by string theorist Sašo Grozdanov is now available here. As usual in such things, lots of discussion of the quantization of the single-quantized theory of a bosonic string, which connects not at all to physics. No discussion of why the much more complicated things you would need to do to try and make this look like physics simply don’t work. Grozdanov’s acknowledges criticism of string theory, but claims that it’s just “sociological”, coming from people who are too impatient. According to him (and he says he’s embodying the consensus of the field):
- “It’s the only way forward”
- “We have nothing else”
- “It’s the only thing that works”
He acknowledges there’s no connection to the real world, interprets this though as only indicating that “we’re missing something” (since alternatives are not conceivable).
Dear Peter,
Specifically regarding the hype on IA applications to quantum gravity/unification/theoretical physics I think this is about to go on steroids and as evidence there is this recent interview with Nobel Laureate Demis Hassabis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZybROKrj2Q
in the section of peer into the mysteries of the universe.
If I remember correctly, he hopes to be able to apply it in the next 10-20 years and mentions wormholes and string theory. Luckly at least he mentions he dislikes the Multiverse….
Leo,
String theory hype is bad enough, last thing I want to do is get involved trying to do anything about AI hype. Took a quick listen to the Hassabis comments about the how AI and the end of all resource limit will allow us to operate at the Planck scale. Presumably the next generation DeepMind will explain to him at some point that he’s a fool.
All, please don’t take this as an invitation to start discussing AI, the world is depressing enough as it is.
Looking at the mostly negative comments under the video, we can see that even the general public no longer believes in string theory in recent years.
Don’t worry Woit, string theory is dying, slowly but surely
Velvet,
Yes, and this kind of thing hastens the process. A typical reaction to a “String theory is not dead” headline likely is something like “Oh, that’s interesting, I hadn’t known that the consensus is that string theory is dead.”
Peter, are you happy or unhappy with the Siegfried piece? I thought it was great – one of finest pieces of “damning with faint praise” I’ve seen in recent months.
You write that Annual Review wanted to “promote” an article with the Siegfried piece. Well, it works, but probably not as they intended. The only reason why I wanted to read their article was because of a very perverse curiosity. How do you stay a True Believer when – as Siegfried writes – basically nothing works out as planned?
It’s also telling that the title, “String theory is not dead”, is nowhere to be found in Siegfried’s piece. It feels like the work of some sub-editor who, after a desperate search, couldn’t find anything better to say about the subject.
Peter,
A good point that the title may not have been chosen by Siegfried.
Siegfried always struck me as what the string theorists might describe as a “useful idiot”, someone who had no understanding of what he was writing about, but could be relied upon to try and say something positive. That has become increasingly more difficult, so even a Siegfried at this point can only come up with praise that is rather faint.
He’s trying to portray the situation as:
” Success remains elusive, but real progress has been made. Questions plaguing physicists about not only the smallest bits of matter but also the properties of the entire universe may yet yield to string theorists’ efforts.”
where an accurate statement would be that no progress has been made, rather things have continued to go in the wrong direction.
Near the end there’s a section title “Tests are possible” which is the same dishonest bullshit that was in his NYT review of my book. Since it’s a section title, not in the main text, again this may be written by an editor, not him.