The Economist today reports that New theories and experiments should shine light on string theory. This is more of the promotional campaign for Cumrun Vafa’s “dark dimension”.
We’re told that a torsion balance experiment in Austria will “according to Dr. Vafa’s calculations” possibly detect the “dark dimension”. Vafa has convinced The Economist that
in the dark dimension, string theory has made a testable prediction. And for a topic that has been stuck in the mud for half a century, that should be lauded.
This is complete nonsense, a shame that The Economist has been taken in by it.
Update: Sabine Hossenfelder gives this a 10 out of 10 on the bullshit meter.
I cannot read the article since it is behind a paywall. But it’s very difficult to understand what The Economist’s endgame is here. Maybe some AI algorithm has decided that people who subscribe to it are still fascinated by this eighties nonsense…
Bernhard,
In all cases like this, the news source has been scammed. They have a prominent physicist telling them that string theory has, after more than forty years, finally made a prediction. If they believe this, of course they should report it. And, why shouldn’t they believe what a prominent scientist tells them?
The real thing that’s hard to understand is why physicists, who have been going to the press with bogus “string theory finally makes a prediction” stories for thirty years, won’t stop doing this.
“The real thing that’s hard to understand is why physicists, who have been going to the press with bogus “string theory finally makes a prediction” stories for thirty years, won’t stop doing this.”
Sunk cost fallacy.
Also, are there not a lack of follow up stories in journalism? If we have seen these claims for thirty years, what has become of them?
Anders VILHELMSSON,
This is a major source of the problem. If you can make “predictions” with no negative implications for you or your theory when the prediction turns out to be wrong, then why not keep making and advertising as many bogus “predictions” as the market will bear?
Peter,
On a totally different note, would you consider reporting briefly on the status of student protests for Gaza again? My understanding is that they’ve been totally crushed.
I came across a “serious” article celebrating how universities eventually stopped being politicized. The publishers probably pretend that people ignore how heavily political the mere existence of US universities is, starting right from their methods of funding, going all the way to student debts and to the mentality they cultivate.
Eleni Petrakou,
I’ll write about this at some point, but the short version is that nothing has changed. Anti-genocide protests have been crushed, and the trustees continue to lockdown the campus to keep us “safe” from the possibility of such protests. Since July 1 we have a new president and there was initially some optimism that this would cause a change, but that is now fading.
I rarely comment on this sort of thing anymore because it seems so hopeless. This particular story isn’t even new, just regurgitation with a minor status update on the experiment, it being just one example (albeit a highly impressive one) of a host of precision measurements of a universal constant, for which there are myriad proposed theoretical consequences in the extremely, astronomically, ridiculously unlikely event a veritable deviation is observed. The vast majority of those have precisely zero to do with strings. The useful information content here is nil. This story should be tagged “Not Even Bullshit”. Especially slow day at the Economist? How on Earth did they see fit to print this?