The Not Even Wrong Guy has a blog up at columbia. http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/
He's been blogging on this for some time.
I don't understand strings or superstrings. But this is a golden age 0f math. So there should be some practical fallout from string theory.
The main arguement against string theory is that it hasn't produced any practical applications.
I don't know if this counts as a practical application. Could someone coment?This is the
link to the article
Mathematician uses topology to study abstract spaces, solve problems
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Studying complex systems, such as the movement of robots on a factory floor, the motion of air over a wing, or the effectiveness of a security network, can present huge challenges. Mathematician Robert Ghrist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is developing advanced mathematical tools to simplify such tasks.
Ghrist uses a branch of mathematics called topology to study abstract spaces that possess many dimensions and solve problems that can't be visualized normally. He will describe his technique in an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians, to be held Aug. 23-30 in Madrid, Spain.
Ghrist, who also is a researcher at the university's Coordinated Science Laboratory, takes a complex physical system – such as robots moving around a factory floor – and replaces it with an abstract space that has a specific geometric representation.
"To keep track of one robot, for example, we monitor its x and y coordinates in two-dimensional space," Ghrist said. "Each additional robot requires two more pieces of information, or dimensions. So keeping track of three robots requires six dimensions. The problem is, we can't visualize things that have six dimensions."
Mathematicians nevertheless have spent the last 100 years developing tools for figuring out what abstract spaces of many dimensions look like.
Thanks. This is from his blog:
"Lemonick describes both Smolin and me as having worked on string theory. Smolin has done original research on the subject, but I certainly haven’t. I don’t agree at all with Sean Carroll that the problem is that not enough string theorists “take the goal of connecting to experiment more seriously”. Many of them take it very seriously, but the fact that it is a failed idea that doesn’t work is what has forced them into the landscape nonsense and other complicated, unworkable schemes.
"The quote from me is a little bit out of context. I was making the point that physicists necessarily often start out with speculative ideas that are “not even wrong”, in the sense that they are so poorly understood that one can’t tell where they will lead, and that this is very much legitimate science."
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/