Posted on 07/10/2004 3:31:48 PM PDT by ckilmer
Science as Metaphor Where does Brian Greene stand in the pantheon of physicists? By Amanda Schaffer Posted Tuesday, July 6, 2004, at 6:16 AM PT
With his 1999 best seller The Elegant Universe, a NOVA special, and the recent release of a second book, The Fabric of the Cosmos, Columbia professor Brian Greene has become the closest thing that physics has to a pop star. A Harvard grad and former Rhodes scholar, lured in 1996 from a professorship at Cornell to a tenured position at Columbia, he has emerged as the chief ambassador of string theory, bringing cutting-edge work to the public in a series of TV appearances and lectures around the globe. His celebrity can be attributed to a widespread popular appetite for avant-garde science dressed in neat metaphorical packages: The universe is elegant; the cosmos is like a string symphony. Yet there is plenty to be suspicious of in Greene's unself-conscious romanticismhis unnuanced use of terms like elegance and beautyand his teleological approach to the history of physics. Where, exactly, does he stand in the pantheon of physicists?
http://slate.msn.com/id/2103335
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.msn.com ...
Greene may be treated as a kind of New Age, scientific guru by the public, but scientists disagree about the significance of his scholarly work. Each time Greene is featured or reviewed on television or in a magazine, one of string theory's aged, cranky critics is trotted out to offer harsh assessments. (These seem to have had no impact on the public's fascination.) In the NOVA special, Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow drove home the obvious but downplayed fact that string theory has not beenand may never beexperimentally verified, and that it may be more philosophy than physics. More recently, in the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson, an octogenarian and self-proclaimed "old conservative, out of touch with the new ideas," suggested that string theory may simply be one of history's "fashionable" ideas, the kind that flourish briefly, then forever fade away. Glashow and Dyson raise important points. But in the eyes of a captivated public, such reservations appear to be little more than theoretical technicalities.
First, a quick bit of background: String theoryand superstring/M theory, a variantboth propose a scheme that encompasses two major and previously incompatible scientific frameworks, general relativity and quantum mechanics. General relativity describes gravity in terms of the curvature of space-time by matter/energy and successfully quantifies the very large. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, explains the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles, characterizing the very small. String theory seeks to unify the mathematics of these colliding theories by positing that all matter and all fundamental forces can be described in terms of the vibrations of tiny, one-dimensional strings. (Mathematically, the theory also requires the existence of multiple, extra dimensions, said to be "curled-up" and as such beyond the realm of our sensory experience.) Greene likens the wiggling strands of string theory to the strings of musical instruments. In his telling, not only do different patterns of vibration produce different particles, but the whole universe is "akin to a string symphony vibrating matter into existence."
Continue Article
A couple comments:
1. At this point it's very unclear what people mean when they say string theory is "elegant". There are aspects of the theory that are mathematically very compelling, but these don't look at all like the real world (e.g. they have a lot of supersymmetry). If you try and relate string theory to the real world, the most popular way to do that now involves what Susskind calls the "Landscape". He explicitly argues that this picture of reality is highly inelegant and Rube-Goldbergesque.
2. The historical analogies are very strained. String theory is nearly 35 years old, has had literally thousands of very talented people working on it for 20 years (since the fall of 1984), and has produced not a single prediction of anything.
In the case of GR, there was one person working for 12 years, at which time he had real predictions and postdictions that could be checked.
In the case of QED, the theory was written down within a few years of QM, and it made a huge number of verifiable predictions. It did take 15-20 years to sort out renormalization, but those were years when many physicists were occupied with other things (staying alive, developing ways of killing large numbers of people, etc.)
The standard model took another 25 years, but even before it reached its final form, parts of it were making all sorts of detailed predictions that could be compared to experiment.
http://davidappell.com/archives/00000167.htm
As it happens, I'm about two thirds of the way through this book (one of my sons gave it to me for Father's Day).
I've just gotten to the M-theory part, so I don't have any comments about that as yet, but I was surprised by his description of what he calls the "Higgs Ocean." This is similar to the old idea of the "aether," but doesn't serve as a medium for light waves -- rather, it seems to embody the concept of inertia by resisting acceleration.
In short, he says that whenever something accelerates, the Higgs Ocean (or Higgs Field) resists that acceleration, and the resistance is proportional to the mass of that being accelerated. It doesn't resist constant motion, and it doesn't resist massless particles.
I can't remember ever seeing this particular concept before. Have you? Anyone?
I simply don't have a strong enough background in math to comment on this stuff with anything more than superficial observations. ie You're not the first to have said that string theory sounds like ether theory of the 19th century. Nor is it the first time I've seen it commented that string theory doesn't have legs. That is, it can't be tested or verified and it hasn't enabled anything practical--unlike (GR), quantum mechanics and a host of other theorums it purports to explain/encompass/displace.
In short, he says that whenever something accelerates, the Higgs Ocean (or Higgs Field) resists that acceleration, and the resistance is proportional to the mass of that being accelerated. It doesn't resist constant motion, and it doesn't resist massless particles.
/////////
I'd have to know how this adds anything to some of the law of motion set down a couple centuries back.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.