Heaven knows I'm not a proponent of string theory, based largely on its ad hocicity (is that a word?). What I mean by that is that the "theory" makes no concrete predictions, and even if you can somehow get it to hint at something that is subsequently proved wrong by experiment, the practitioners just say "Oh, well, we'll tweak the parameters of the Calabi-Yau manifolds and select a different one of the 10E2500 possible string theories." (It may not actually be 10E2500 possible string theories - but it's 10Ea_whole_bunch either way.)
I think the phrase "wishful thinking" is more appropriate than "theory", so we should really be talking about "superstring wishful thinking" (superstring theory is, basically, string theory plus supersymmetry, which among other things posits the existence of a supersymmetrical "partner" for every existing particle - none of which have ever been observed, and isn't it awfully convenient their masses are all far too large to be produced in modern particle accelerators? And even more convenient that even when the most powerful collider, the LHC, fails to find them, the math can be tweaked so that they remain tantalizingly out of reach?)
But here's a link to a CNN story about a string theorist who purports to have made actual predictions, predictions that - even better - are testable at the energy limit of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. This is a breath of fresh air from the string theory camp. Predictions? Experiments? Holy shit! If this keeps up, we'll end up doing real science! So maybe I'll stop snickering and pay attention for a change.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/05/09/physics.nima/index.html
Is That All?
11 years ago
1 comment:
I am skeptical too and I worked on some very speculative alternatives at bigcrash.org > Inertia (open source speculative models...)
But my concern is that we now expect that micro black holes might be created and we have zero peer reviewed studies addressing possible dangers if we were actually able to create this type of exotic matter, and CERN appears to be in a big hurry not to create another project delay.
We don't have any reasonable evidence that micro black holes evaporate or grow too slowly to be a threat, cosmic rays impacts with stationary particles could not create the same type of exotic matter that head on collision in colliders can, and head-on collisions create some results moving slow enough to be captured by Earth's gravity.
What do the scientists say who have done the math (CERN has not published the math...)?
Dr. Adam D. Helfer's [http://www.math.missouri.edu/personnel/faculty/helfera.html ] thesis found no basis in science to support Hawking Radiation http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0304/0304042v1.pdf, http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0503/0503052v1.pdf, and Dr. Otto E. Rossler's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_E._Rossler] thesis calculates that Earth accretion time could be as short as 50 months http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/ OTTOROESSLERMINIBLACKHOLE.pdf.
JTankers
LHCConcerns.com
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