- #1
g.lemaitre
- 267
- 2
It's really difficult as a layman trying to find out who is right and wrong in this debate as far as string theory. I find it kind of hard to believe that string theory is just simply completely wrong and has no relevance whatsoever to reality. After all so many theorists and so many papers have been written about it, it just seems a bit far-fetched that so many smart people could be heading down a blind-alley. It's much more likely that they have uncovered bits and pieces of the truth. I've read quite a lot of pro-string theory books: Greene, Susskind, Kaku, Hawking and I've only read one anti-string theory book: Woit. There is one argument by Woit that I find very disturbing:
I think this is a very serious objection. If you've come up with a description of reality that can describe anything then there's no way that I can prove you wrong. It's almost like they have a theory a bit like Max Tegmark's dictum: everything exists. A theory that posits everything exists and that which we cannot observe is in principal unobservable but exists nevertheless I find very dubious.
The possible existence of, say, 10^500 consistent different vacuum states for superstring theory probably destroys the hope of using the theory to predict anything. If one chooses among this large set just those states whose properties agree with present experimental observations, it is likely there still will be such a large number of these that one can get just about whatever value one wants for the results of any new observation. If this is the case, the theory can never predict anything and can never be falsified. This is sometimes known as the “Alice’s Restaurant problem,” from Arlo Guthrie’s famous refrain, “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.
I think this is a very serious objection. If you've come up with a description of reality that can describe anything then there's no way that I can prove you wrong. It's almost like they have a theory a bit like Max Tegmark's dictum: everything exists. A theory that posits everything exists and that which we cannot observe is in principal unobservable but exists nevertheless I find very dubious.