Kind of like the last posting, but this time you get two worthwhile items to make up for one that’s not.<\/p>\n
The problem shows up clearly at 10:23 of the first talk where he’s talking about his goal, which gives up on studying all or even representative string theory solutions and tries just to find any “valid solutions”. But what is a “valid solution”?<\/p>\n
And by valid solutions, we should say what equations are we trying to solve? And, it’s not the case that we can currently think about finding cosmological solutions of the exact theory in any non-perturbative sense.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
McAllister artfully avoids saying what everyone at the talk knows (after all, the talk is part of a program entitled “What is String Theory?”): you can’t look for solutions to the theory because there is no theory. More specifically, no “exact” theory, just a long list of possible theories that one hopes might be in some sense approximations to a real theory. He then goes on to specify the extremely complex approximate theory he wants to work in, chosen by the “look under the lamppost” method as something you could actually imagine calculating. Whenever I look at things of this kind I’m completely mystified why anyone thinks it make sense to embark on insanely complicated calculations like these with essentially zero credible scientific motivation. Somehow though, he has a whole group of people doing this<\/a>. By the end of the second talk he’s giving his vision of the future, which features an old photo of a room of hundreds of men in suits and ties calculating with pencil, paper and slide rules.<\/p>\n
I was mystified twenty years ago why anyone thought this was a good idea, and the whole thing has just gotten stranger and stranger…\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kind of like the last posting, but this time you get two worthwhile items to make up for one that’s not. Dan Garisto has a very good article here examining the present state of high energy experimental particle physics and … Continue reading