{"id":12353,"date":"2021-06-02T13:12:38","date_gmt":"2021-06-02T17:12:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12353"},"modified":"2021-06-08T15:11:53","modified_gmt":"2021-06-08T19:11:53","slug":"non-empirical-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12353","title":{"rendered":"Non-empirical Physics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;t been paying much attention in recent years to the philosophers of science studying &#8220;Non-empirical&#8221; or &#8220;Post-empirical&#8221; physics or theory confirmation.  At various times I did write fairly extensively about this, see for instance <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=108\">here<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=5880\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7005\">here<\/a>.  By 2015 there was a conference in Munich on the topic, which led in 2019 to a volume of papers entitled <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10931\">Why Trust a Theory?<\/a><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a new paper out along similar lines, <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2105.14342\">String theory, Einstein, and the identity of physics: Theory assessment in absence of the empirical<\/a>, evidently to appear in a journal special issue from a 2019 conference on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de\/event\/non-empirical-physics-historical-perspective\">Non-Empirical Physics from a Historical Perspective<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The reaction of most physicists to this sort of thing is exemplified by Will Kinney&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/WKCosmo\/status\/1400060002832982017\">tweet about the paper<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>WTAF<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In the past few years I&#8217;ve been writing less and less here and elsewhere about the issue of evaluating string theory as physics, for several reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>String theory has effectively gone completely post-empirical, decoupling from any possible relation to experiment.  <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?cat=8\">This Week&#8217;s Hype<\/a> used to be a regular feature here, devoted to debunking the numerous bogus claims regularly being made for how to &#8220;test string theory&#8221;.  One rarely sees these anymore, with the string theory community now having given up on this and somehow comfortably moved into a completely post-empirical mode.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m actually much more sympathetic than most people to the idea that there is a serious and very interesting question about how to evaluate ideas about theoretical fundamental physics in the absence of viable experimental tests.  But I haven&#8217;t had much luck finding others who share my views.  The reaction to blogposts like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12341\">this recent one<\/a> tends to be pretty uniformly scornful, that I&#8217;m just <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10314\">Lost in Math<\/a>.  The post-empirical philosophers of science deal with me differently, pretty much doing their best to ignore me (I don&#8217;t make it into the extensive bibliography of the new paper on the arXiv).<\/li>\n<li>There are two other projects that seem to be a much better way to spend my time (the twistor unification stuff, and improving the textbook on QM and representation theory).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>By the way, I notice that there is an <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/tb\/2105.14342\">arXiv trackback already for another blog entry about this paper<\/a>, wondering <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?faq=why-dont-trackbacks-to-your-postings-appear-at-the-arxiv\">if trackbacks here are still censored<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Well, that&#8217;s all about this for now, best to take my own advice and go think about something else.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  I just ran across this <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aip.org\/history-programs\/niels-bohr-library\/oral-histories\/45439\">AIP interview with John Schwarz<\/a> from last year.  Schwarz seems to feel that string theory unification is a huge success, despite the testability problem. On the failure to find the superpartners he and other string theorists expected, that&#8217;s a problem for experimental physics, not for string theory:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>As I said, if supersymmetry is not discovered, there\u2019s a danger that experimental particle physics will die. If that happens, it would be tragic, but it wouldn&#8217;t be the end of string theory. String theory will continue, regardless, and will continue to advance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>On the topic of answering those who argued that superpartners would not be found back in the 2000s, and who have put forward detailed criticisms of string theory unification, here&#8217;s what he has to say:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There were a couple popular books that attacked string theory about a decade or so ago. The authors clearly had chips on their shoulders. For people without a physics background it\u2019s not possible to assess whether what they\u2019re reading makes sense or not. But anyone with at least an undergraduate education in physics I think can recognize that they should not be taken seriously.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;t been paying much attention in recent years to the philosophers of science studying &#8220;Non-empirical&#8221; or &#8220;Post-empirical&#8221; physics or theory confirmation. At various times I did write fairly extensively about this, see for instance here, here and here. By &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12353\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12353"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12370,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12353\/revisions\/12370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}