{"id":14059,"date":"2024-08-07T18:00:36","date_gmt":"2024-08-07T22:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=14059"},"modified":"2024-11-07T09:16:48","modified_gmt":"2024-11-07T14:16:48","slug":"susskind-string-theory-is-not-the-theory-of-the-real-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=14059","title":{"rendered":"Susskind: String Theory is Not the Theory of the Real World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lawrence Krauss has just put up a long interview with Lenny Susskind<\/a>. I was listening to it while doing something else, found myself shocked when the discussion got to the current state of string theory to find that I mostly agreed with what Susskind has to say. Here’s some of it (around 1:23):<\/p>\n

I can tell you with absolute certainty String theory is not the theory of the real world, I can tell you that 100%…. My strong feelings are exactly that String theory is definitely not the theory of the real world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here he’s referring to “String theory” (with a capital S) as the superstring theory which has a known definition, at least perturbatively. He goes on to explain that he thinks it possible that some very different generalized or “string-inspired” theory might have something to do with the real world but that:<\/p>\n

we don’t know and we don’t know if String theory will help us find those things…. We are still uncertain about whether whatever it is: “generalized”,
\n“boundaries pushed”, “string-inspired theories”. We don’t know and I think that’s the bottom line now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As for the idea that we just need to understand how to break the superstring supersymmetry to get the real world:<\/p>\n

People will say oh all you have to do is spontaneously break supersymmetry, blah blah well it’s been 25 30 40 years by now that nobody’s figured out how to do that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the “failure” description, he thinks String theory has not been a failure in the sense of showing gravitation and QM can coexist, but, as for particle theory:<\/p>\n

Whether it’s been a failure in producing a theory of Elementary particles I would guess remains to be seen but String theory (with a capital S) is not the right theory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the wormhole publicity stunt (1:38):<\/p>\n

Not a very good experiment… the experimental implementation of it left more than a little bit to be desired. That got much too much hype, yeah.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Krauss brings up the the string theory hype problem, with <\/p>\n

we owe it to the public I think to be careful in what we say. I understand we get excited and it’s fine for physicists to get excited with each other but we have to be careful of what we say we can do because if we don’t it’ll come down and bite us in the butt.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Susskind’s response is:<\/p>\n

I completely agree with that, but on the other hand there is a tension between that and the importance of keeping excited and letting the public know why we’re excited.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d have liked to hear Susskind’s thoughts on what should be done when a bunch of theorists write popular books hyping ideas that don’t work. Whose job is it to explain to the public that they were misled by overenthusiastic scientists? If he’s not going to do that, would he at least be publicly supportive of those who do this job?<\/p>\n

Another question I’d have liked to ask him would be: given that he agrees that the idea of using string theory to understand particle physics hasn’t worked and we don’t know that “string-inspired” is the right direction to go, what next? If “string-inspired” is not the way to go, should we just give up on going beyond the SM? If not, how would he encourage young people to work on non-“string-inspired” ideas about unification that might take us beyond the SM?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lawrence Krauss has just put up a long interview with Lenny Susskind. I was listening to it while doing something else, found myself shocked when the discussion got to the current state of string theory to find that I mostly … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14059","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\/14059","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=14059"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14065,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14059\/revisions\/14065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}