03 Mar 14
The post that was quoted here has been removedI can only shake my head at that. The quota mentality or research institutions and governments is seriously undermining scientific progress. On that page I notice this link:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
Peter Higgs would have been sacked in today's academic system for not publishing enough papers!
Physics in particular seems to be stuck in a superstring theory feedback loop that offers no way forward and no way out. There needs to be fresh thinking, but any particle physicist who doesn't worship at the altar of superstring theory is generally excommunicated (i.e. not given funding). I got this book, "The Trouble With Physics" by Lee Smolin, that I plan to start reading once I get done with the novel "We," which I hope will get me up to speed with what's going on in particle physics (and the areas of cosmology that depend on it) that seems to be causing a major case of constipation.
03 Mar 14
Getting a paper published doesn't mean much. Getting accepted in a conference means even less. There's a lot of junk out there, especially in the lower-tier journals, but experts who read them will dismiss them straight away, and they will be ignored. Still, the way science is funded needs some serious review. Applying performance standards to something which is supposed to give long-term benefits just doesn't work.
03 Mar 14
4 edits
Originally posted by FabianFnasIt is the common criticism of string theory that it cannot be tested. I wondered if that is literally totally true or if there was some very clever way it could be tested so I did a bit of internet research and found this:
Is the general meaning that the superstring theory isn't much better than the good old "God did it that way".
No way to prove, no way to disprove. Even no way to make observations and experiments with?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/stringy-quantum/
So, to my mind, the answer to if it can be tested seems to me to be inconclusive; there may be a way of testing it very indirectly -except not even quite sure if even this example in the link would be really 'testing' it at all!
05 Mar 14
The post that was quoted here has been removedJust reading the introduction to "The Trouble With Physics," Lee Smolin says there are an infinite number of different "string theories," and accounting for the things we know about our own universe leaves us with 10^500 different string theories. No humanly achievable combination of experimental results can falsify all of them, and none of them make an original prediction that can be verified using current or foreseeable technology. The hope, I guess, is that experimentalists or theorists will stumble onto something totally unforeseen that narrows the field to just a few string theories. The impossible becoming possible certainly has happened before in physics.