Is String Theory Real Science or Just Speculation?

[Anticitizen]

Ah, the all-too-common phenomenon of informally swapping the words hypothesis and theory.

From http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistry101/a/lawtheory.htm" :

A hypothesis is an educated guess, based on observation. Usually, a hypothesis can be supported or refuted through experimentation or more observation. A hypothesis can be disproven, but not proven to be true.

A scientific theory summarizes a hypothesis or group of hypotheses that have been supported with repeated testing. A theory is valid as long as there is no evidence to dispute it. Therefore, theories can be disproven. Basically, if evidence accumulates to support a hypothesis, then the hypothesis can become accepted as a good explanation of a phenomenon. One definition of a theory is to say it's an accepted hypothesis.

So yeah, it should be called the string hypothesis, one that can't, as of yet, offer any testable predictions. It can be disproven through mathematical proofs (but then it just gets modified).

But, you have to accept that people are going to use theory as synonym for hypothesis.

If you really want a headache, look up 'literary theory' and tell me what testable predictions it's supposed to make. :)

A problem or danger, however, is attempting to dismiss something like the string hypothesis just because it's 'not a theory' and to say it's 'not scientific'. By that, I mean campaigning against it. I don't see that as being much different than creationists who always rally the cry that 'evolution is just a theory!' The action speaks more to an agenda than a legitimate concern over its validity.

I would personally call almost any hypothesis scientific, whether testable or not (it doesn't lend it any undue credibility and you don't have to believe it if you don't want to). A great deal of postulates or axioms in the field of psychology, for instance, are unable to be tested scientifically because it's impossible to supply a controlled experiment - or make testable predictions - in many cases. For example, there's an idea that the men or women who always end up in consecutive abusive relationships have had their 'warning systems' that would normally alert them to abusive behavior in their mate have been desensitized due to being broached in the past, so they always end up with the same type of guy/girl and wonder why they didn't realize it sooner.

How would you test the validity of this theory in controlled conditions? You really can't, it's just one of those ideas based on looking for patterns in behavior that serve as a reasonable, likely explanation and 'make sense'. A therapist could ask a patient to have one of his/her friends try to help them 'screen out' their potentional mates for them instead of relying on their own (possibly damaged) judgement, and see if the abusive cycle ceases; but who's to say it wouldn't have ceased anyway? No predictive power.

My advice is not to worry over what it's called, but to ask 'is it true or not?' The answer: Who knows? :) It may offer testable predictions at some point, but not yet. However, I think it's a little disingenuous to say it's 'not science'.

 

[DaveC426913]

So yeah, it should be called the string hypothesis, one that can't, as of yet, offer any testable predictions.

I like that. String hypothesis.
Rings pleasantly on my sensibilities.

But, you have to accept that people are going to use theory as synonym for hypothesis.

Do not. Can't make me.

People are still going to swap "you're" and "your" too - and I'm still going to wince.

 

[Evo]

Oh look what's appearing in the lastest issue of the Journal Science.

Physical reality of string theory demonstrated

Published: Monday, July 6, 2009 - 08:36 in Physics & Chemistry

Although the mystery of high temperature super-conductivity isn't fully resolved, the findings do show that major problems in physics can be addressed using string theory. And this is just the start, Zaanen believes. 'AdS/CFT correspondence now explains things that colleagues who have been beavering away for ages were unable to resolve, in spite of their enormous efforts. There are a lot of things that can be done with it. We don't fully understand it yet, but I see it as a gateway to much more.' The fact that Science was keen to publish this discovery early confirms this.

Source: Leiden University

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/07/06/physical.reality.string.theory.demonstrated

 

[humanino]

Oh look what's appearing in the lastest issue of the Journal Science.

Thank you for the link. I'd like to point out that this is what I referred to in

illustrated by the recent calculations related to high temperature superconductivity

It was also discussed earlier on PF in [thread=323585]Physical reality of string theory demonstrated[/thread]
Again, it tells us that the mathematics uncovered by string theory smell right, but it is not a full fledged test of the idea that strings are relevant at a fundamental level. It must also be acknowledged that the mathematical field in string theory is so large that this may as well be a coincidence (not that I wish so).

 

[Topher925]

I always thought string theory was so far just a postulate?

And does anyone even call it string theory anymore? I thought it was called M-theory or Super String Theory?

 

[JoeDawg]

So yeah, it should be called the string hypothesis, one that can't, as of yet, offer any testable predictions. It can be disproven through mathematical proofs (but then it just gets modified).

Even if one tests a hypothesis, and everything supports the hypothesis, its still a hypothesis. There is a lot of disagreement as to whether a hypothesis is the derived from data or a simple prediction. 'Proof' is only really useful in math. An experiment doesn't really prove anything, rather it provides evidence for or against a hypothesis.

Even if the evidence doesn't support it, one could claim an error occured, or that some external unknown factor affected the outcome. So I don't think based on those general definitions that 'string hypothesis' is better.

The reason 'string theory' gets used, at least as far as I can tell, is that strings are an 'explanation' of what is occurring, not just a prediction.

Theories explain why something happens.
Hypotheses just predict that something will be a certain way, given certain criteria, whether one has the ability to test or not.

 

[OB 50]

I think you guys are too caught up in the specifics and relative validity of the two competing ideas, and have lost sight of the actual question at hand.

Science is a process.

String Theory and Intelligent Design are ideas.

An idea, in and of itself, cannot be science.

What one does with that idea, however, is what determines if it is a part of the scientific process. With String Theory, we have a set of hypotheses which are constantly being revised and tested according to the latest findings. However accurate or inaccurate the idea of string theory turns out to be, as long as it is being tested and revised according to the scientific method, it is part of science. Even if it is demonstrated to be 100% false, the process which arrived at that conclusion was science.

Therefore, in its present state, regardless of accuracy or validity, String Theory is science.

If the process had worked differently, string theory could just as easily be religion. If the originator of string theory had simply said, "This is it. This is the answer," and no effort to prove or disprove it had been made, yet it was accepted as fact, then you have religion.

The actual idea is exactly the same, but the process used to verify or falsify the idea determines if it is in fact scientific.

Intelligent Design could very well be considered science if a specific aspect of it were tested according to the scientific method. That wouldn't make it true, but it would be science.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

there is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that evolution was responsible for life on Earth.

I was under the impression that evolution is a theory of the origin of species, not the origin of life.

 

[Anticitizen]

You're correct, the theory concerning the origin of life is abiogenesis. Wiki does say it's also called 'chemical evolution', but it's a separate entity to the theory of evolution.

 

[DaveC426913]

Would you call mathematics a religion??

The real debate is whether string theory is more math than physics or vice versa. But I don't think it makes sense to lump string theory with religion.

I was not claiming string theory was a religion, I was clarifying the OP's question.

His question committed a logical fallacy: it had embodied in it an assumption - that ID is a religion. I restated the OP's question to remove that red herring.

 

[DaveC426913]

I was under the impression that evolution is a theory of the origin of species, not the origin of life.

I missed that.

Then again, I also missed

It is a proven mathematical fact that evolution could have been responsible for the diversity on Earth

 

[JoeDawg]

it had embodied in it an assumption - that ID is a religion. I restated the OP's question to remove that red herring.

ID is creationism, which is religion. If you look at the history of court cases, all the creationism people did was change the wording from religious language to sciency sounding language. Intelligent Designer = Creator = God. Its all euphemism and spin, no substancial difference.

Its not science, and it is religion.

The difference between ID and string theory is that the latter focuses on mathematical relationships which may or may not describe reality, but the former only pays lip service to math and science jargon, and ignores any evidence that refutes creationist beliefs.

ID is a religious shell game.

 

[Kilyke]

At the risk of exposing my ignorance, what exactly is string theory?

I'm not talking about the idea that everything's made of tiny multidimensional vibrating "strings"...
that part I got (though didn't really understand)... and, arguably, that's just speculation.

But even if the "theory" (hypothesis) doesn't have any predictive power, it must have some sort of explanatory power... perhaps the math verifies measurements taken in high temperature superconductivity tests? Does anyone know? Which major problems in physics can be addressed using string theory? How?

I'm not really interested in whether string theory is science or not.

 

[Evo]

At the risk of exposing my ignorance, what exactly is string theory?

I'm not talking about the idea that everything's made of tiny multidimensional vibrating "strings"...
that part I got (though didn't really understand)... and, arguably, that's just speculation.

But even if the "theory" (hypothesis) doesn't have any predictive power, it must have some sort of explanatory power... perhaps the math verifies measurements taken in high temperature superconductivity tests? Does anyone know? Which major problems in physics can be addressed using string theory? How?

I'm not really interested in whether string theory is science or not.

Here you go, from page 1.

String theory is essentially a mathematical model constructed by physicist to address specific technical problems. Although string theory has still after decades of developments it own problems, it is wrong to simply state that it can not make any definitive unambiguous prediction.
It can not make any NEW prediction (yet). The difference is not subtle. For instance, it might be some day that string theory has finalized the reformulation of the standard model of particle physics, but has not allowed for new experimentally testable predictions (not in principle, but in practice). However, string theory is definitely already useful for scientists, as it has triggered the developments of many new pieces of mathematics on its own, some of which are not pure game of thoughts, as illustrated by the recent calculations related to high temperature superconductivity, or holographic models of QCD (for instance). If the situation continues like this, it is possible that, although string theory would NOT produce genuine new predictions which we could verify (this scenario is to illustrate what is wrong with the above discussion), we would still trust string theory at very high energy where it would be self-consistent and today's standard model would not (and that is not a religious form of science, that is rational and reasonable).

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

At the risk of exposing my ignorance, what exactly is string theory?

I'm not talking about the idea that everything's made of tiny multidimensional vibrating "strings".

But that is exactly what string theory is. As I understand it, QFT makes the assumption that particles are points. A natural extension would be to assume that they are lines (strings) and from there balls of ever greater dimensions. The advantage of strings over points as I understand it, is that certain calculations that diverge in QFT remain finite in string theory. I'm told that this is related to the fact that all observers agree where the incoming path of a point particle bifurcates into two paths of outgoing particles, while that point is frame dependent in string theory. So why not ball theory, or theories of greater dimension. As I understand it, these theories (hypotheses) bring nothing to the table that strings don't already bring.

 

[ideasrule]

Since Evo allowed discussion of the term "theory", I'll take a risk here and talk mainly about evolution.

I'm not puzzled that creationists keep repeating the same, stupid arguments, like saying "evolution is just a theory" while having no idea what a theory is. For people who refuse to accept reality, ignorance is not surprising.

What I am surprised by is scientists' willingness to say that they're not 100% certain the theory of evolution or the big bang theory is true. If someone asks a scientist, "Are you 100% certain you gave me the right address?", you'd hardly expect him to reply, "Well, nothing's known for sure; we could live in the Matrix, or God could have manipulated the atoms in my brain so that I remembered the wrong address." Anybody who makes that reply would be immediately called a smartass. So why do scientists, when talking about theories supported by many decades or centuries of evidence and not just the memory of a single person, say nothing is known for certain?

I'd ask everybody here to stop this. When we tell others how sure we are that evolution is real, we should firmly say that there we are absolutely, 100% certain. Saying something like "oh, but we can't PROVE that god didn't temper with the evidence" is not called being honest; it's called being misleading and being a smartass.

 

[Evo]

I'd ask everybody here to stop this. When we tell others how sure we are that evolution is real, we should firmly say that there we are absolutely, 100% certain. Saying something like "oh, but we can't PROVE that god didn't temper with the evidence" is not called being honest; it's called being misleading and being a smartass.

If we had enough evidence to say anything with such certainty, it would no longer be called a theory, it would be a law.

 

[humanino]

I'd ask everybody here to stop this.

The problem is with people not understanding even basic statistics although it is useful even in daily life.

 

[Anticitizen]

There is one prediction that I know of - it predicts a certain value for the highest possible temperature achievable, which I believe is quite a bit higher than the Planck temperature. I don't think there's much chance of testing it, but if we develop a method and achieve a temperature higher than the Planck temperature, then it would go some ways into supporting it (but not proving it, unless the max temperature ceiling we hit is exactly in line with string theory predictions, and even then it would only verify part of the theory).

 

[humanino]

it predicts a certain value for the highest possible temperature achievable

It looks quite suspicious as such. If you could be more specific, maybe ?

 

[Superstring]

What if supersymmetry is discovered? That would be a good case for string theory being more than philosophy.

 

[russ_watters]

Since Evo allowed discussion of the term "theory", I'll take a risk here and talk mainly about evolution.

I'm not puzzled that creationists keep repeating the same, stupid arguments, like saying "evolution is just a theory" while having no idea what a theory is. For people who refuse to accept reality, ignorance is not surprising.

What I am surprised by is scientists' willingness to say that they're not 100% certain the theory of evolution or the big bang theory is true. If someone asks a scientist, "Are you 100% certain you gave me the right address?", you'd hardly expect him to reply, "Well, nothing's known for sure; we could live in the Matrix, or God could have manipulated the atoms in my brain so that I remembered the wrong address." Anybody who makes that reply would be immediately called a smartass. So why do scientists, when talking about theories supported by many decades or centuries of evidence and not just the memory of a single person, say nothing is known for certain?

I'd ask everybody here to stop this. When we tell others how sure we are that evolution is real, we should firmly say that there we are absolutely, 100% certain. Saying something like "oh, but we can't PROVE that god didn't temper with the evidence" is not called being honest; it's called being misleading and being a smartass. [emphasis added]

It is precisely because most crackpots live entirely within those error margins that scientists need to properly frame them. If scientists don't insist on such precision, crackpots will nail them for it and the general public who can't tell the difference will be swayed even further toward the crackpot side. Yeah, it's a double standard that being right once is all a crackpot needs, while a scientist must be right all the time - but it is one that scientists need to accept to win that fight.

 

[humanino]

What if supersymmetry is discovered?

Supersymmetry already has been found in nuclei for instance, so you need to specify that you refer to supersymmetry at a fundamental level, like a supersymmetric version of the standard model of particle physics. On the other hand, string theories only need supersymmetry on the worldsheet, not necessarily in the target space, so our spacetime might not be supersymmetric in string theories. It's not that simple unfortunately.

 

[junglebeast]

Some people on this thread have claimed that string theory is not a theory because it makes no predictions. I would like to point out that falsity of that argument...and I can do so without needing to know any details in the theory.

Simply knowing that string theory is a mathematical model which has equations that are not equivalent to the standard model or GR is sufficient to see the truth in this -- if the mathematics are not equivalent (ie, they cannot be rearranged to be identical to the standard model or GR) then that means there are two equations for the same thing which produce a different number for the output given the same input.

This is a difference in prediction, even if it is something subtle such as a slightly different result for the amount of energy produced during some chemical reaction, rather than some profound insight.

The problem is not that the theory does not make predictions, but that we currently lack the technology necessary to run the experiments necessary to run the distinguishing experiments. Again, it does not require any knowledge of string theory to assert this last statement -- it is evident from the fact that string theory has not been wholly accepted by the experts in that field that they have not been able to perform the defining experiments yet, otherwise it would have been accepted or rejected already.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

If we had enough evidence to say anything with such certainty, it would no longer be called a theory, it would be a law.

Like Hooke's Law. There is no convention to the naming convention.

 

[vanesch]

If someone asks a scientist, "Are you 100% certain you gave me the right address?", you'd hardly expect him to reply, "Well, nothing's known for sure; we could live in the Matrix, or God could have manipulated the atoms in my brain so that I remembered the wrong address." Anybody who makes that reply would be immediately called a smartass.

Nevertheless, that is the answer you almost all the time get from me in real life, if you ask if I'm 100% certain. It made my thesis adviser go crazy, when I said such things in front of a serious audience and some or other person asked me "yes, but are you 100% SURE about that ?" ("Don't mind, Patrick's being philosophical here..." he said then )

(see my signature )

 

[vanesch]

Some people on this thread have claimed that string theory is not a theory because it makes no predictions. I would like to point out that falsity of that argument...and I can do so without needing to know any details in the theory.

Simply knowing that string theory is a mathematical model which has equations that are not equivalent to the standard model or GR is sufficient to see the truth in this -- if the mathematics are not equivalent (ie, they cannot be rearranged to be identical to the standard model or GR) then that means there are two equations for the same thing which produce a different number for the output given the same input.

This is a difference in prediction, even if it is something subtle such as a slightly different result for the amount of energy produced during some chemical reaction, rather than some profound insight.

The problem is not that the theory does not make predictions, but that we currently lack the technology necessary to run the experiments necessary to run the distinguishing experiments. Again, it does not require any knowledge of string theory to assert this last statement -- it is evident from the fact that string theory has not been wholly accepted by the experts in that field that they have not been able to perform the defining experiments yet, otherwise it would have been accepted or rejected already.

As far as I understood, the problem with string theory (but I don't follow those things since a few years anymore) was/is that it can make any predictions you like, depending on how you tweak it, and that even in that case, it is not really known how to get them out, those predictions. Maybe things changed in the mean time.

 

[Focus]

Some people on this thread have claimed that string theory is not a theory because it makes no predictions. I would like to point out that falsity of that argument...and I can do so without needing to know any details in the theory.

Simply knowing that string theory is a mathematical model...

Theory in mathematics refers to a collection of thoughs, such as Galois theory, probability theory and catastrophe theory. It is perfectly just calling string theory a theory because it too is a collection of thoughts.

 

[Anticitizen]

It looks quite suspicious as such. If you could be more specific, maybe ?

Sorry, I don't know the math. That is something I read in a NOVA article about the theoretical highest temperatures allowed in different schools of physics, here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/zero/hot.html

After rereading it, seems I had it backwards: string theory predicts a highest temperature several orders of magnitude lower than the Planck temperature, not higher. So maybe testing it wouldn't be out of the question for too long.

 

[humanino]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/zero/hot.html

Thanks for the clarification. Honestly it is not a very good article.

wikipedia states that the Hagedorn temperature should not be interpreted as a highest possible temperature, but as a temperature where a phase transition occurs. As far as I can tell, this is the most traditional interpretation. Hagedorn himself held this (correct) view about hadronic reactions (which would later become QCD). In the general case, it is not strictly impossible that a maximal temperature occurs but this is a rather unconventional point of view. One must admit that the situation is far from clear in string theory, and much has been and is still speculated about the Hagedorn temperature. In fact, one may also insist in describing the physics beyond the phase transition in the language before the phase transition and interpret the same physical phenomenon by claiming that the temperature can not increase anymore, although only because one would fail to introduce new appropriate degrees of freedom.

I do not feel qualified to discuss such technical issues. Thanks again for the clarification.

 

[junglebeast]

I just discovered a TED talk video on string theory which I think would benefit everyone following this discussion.

It presents in a clearly understandable way

* why string theory exists
* what it means in terms of representation of the universe
* graphical models of what the universe may "look like" at a small scale in terms of strings
* specifically, how it can be tested and verified

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtdE662eY_M&feature=channel

 

[robheus]

Theory in mathematics refers to a collection of thoughs, such as Galois theory, probability theory and catastrophe theory. It is perfectly just calling string theory a theory because it too is a collection of thoughts.

Yeah, but not every collection of thoughts can be called "scientific".

 

[robheus]

An argument against why string theory is not (yet) a scientific theory is that for a scientific theory you need a unique formulation of the theory, and the theory need to be able to be experimentally verifiable at least in principle.
As of yet, string theory is unconfirmed and also there is not (yet) a unique formulation of the theory.
Instead of a theory I would call string theory a mathematical framework in which maybe the right unique formulation of the theory will come up, which makes definite predictions than can be tested for.

 

[Pythagorean]

ID is not science. It's more of an unobservable interpretation of observations.

I was under the impression that String Theory IS science. It is a (possibly) observable interpretation of observations (That doesn't automatically make it correct, mind you).

String theory does not make a completely unfalsifiable claim. The theory (greatly simplified) is that particles are made of more fundamental "particles" called strings. I'm not sure how you could judge whether it was possible to verify this without verification itself. I'd also thought that CERN had some experiments that (at the least) could be either suggestive or damning for string theory.

If proper theory and experimenting are taking place by people genuinely interested in the answer (rather than people assuming a conclusion and trying desperately to prove it) than it is science, isn't it?

 

[WaveJumper]

It seems there is a party among the string theorists - first near explained phenomenon:

http://www.physorg.com/news166097923.html