String Theory starts to unravel

Philadelphia Inquirer ^ | Dec 18, 2006 | Fred Bortz

[djf]

I recently completed writing a high school/college-level history of physics in the 20th century. It was a great opportunity to catch up on developments in the field.

The biggest surprise turned out to be historical. For the first three-quarters of the century, progress in both theoretical and experimental physics steadily transformed our fundamental understanding of the physical universe. Then a multidimensional mathematical approach called string theory caught fire. To many physicists, it appeared to be the path to their science's holy grail, the "grand unification" of all known forces and fundamental particles into a single theory.

But, instead of continuing the advance of theoretical physics, the rise of string theory began a period filled with tantalizing near-miss formulations that continues until today. That is The Trouble With Physics, according to the title of a new book by Lee Smolin, a onetime physics wunderkind who in mid-career founded the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario.

Smolin hasn't completely given up on string theory but is clearly pessimistic. His central argument is that it is time to start asking whether too many people are putting too much effort following ideas in string theory that seem promising at first but inevitably lead down blind alleys.

Smolin's assessment is downright rosy compared with the critique offered by Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit in Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. He draws his title from a famous remark by Wolfgang Pauli, who once described a particularly poorly written paper as "not even wrong." A wrong idea can be valuable if it ultimately leads one in a productive direction. String theory is not even wrong, Woit asserts, because each refinement seems to lead physicists further astray.

[D Rider]

So where does chaos theory stand?

It has come down to randomness being an allusion.

Since Einstein, all the great advances in physics have been solved by adding an extra dimension. Superstrings, is the search for the next one.

Personally, I think that the next step in string theory is like too much LSD... you see God and then die.

[AdmSmith]

Yes, and first you have to read Quantum Field Theory. I suggest this http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~mark/ms-qft-DRAFT.pdf It is 616 pages that will ruin your Christmas holiday ;-)