FRESH

Hacker News

Whatever Happened to String Theory?

32 points by signa11

by r721

1 subcomments

by AndrewSwift

0 subcomment

This is a great article — just short texts by experts in their field who really know what they're talking about. It's very refreshing compared to all the rewritten and simplified articles one so often sees.

by 1970-01-01

0 subcomment

by tim333

0 subcomment

It's always seemed to me that string theory was more about "hey this maths is cool" rather than any correspondence to the physical world. I guess that kind of thing goes in and out of fashion.

by user____name

0 subcomment

by aeve890

0 subcomment

>The major objection is that its predictions are for things at a microscopic scale that we cannot yet test
Yet? That's generous. String theory (whichever one you choose) works on the Planck scale regime, around 15 orders of magnitude beyond what the LHC can reach. Just scaling the LHC size you'd need...
27km(10^16TeV/14TeV) ≈ 2.710^13 km ≈ 2.4 ly
Sure technology doesn't scale linearly but come on, string theory testing scale is impossible.

by fithisux

1 subcomments

I initially saw all these maths in books about string theory and was scammed that these people are so clever and found something that it is hard for me to grasp.
I did my MSc and diploma work in pure mathematics inspired by this. then I saw the light and did my PhD in electrical engineering because I felt I was getting a rabbit hole that did not worth it and could ruin my life financially.
Still was convinced that with money and time there was something there. Thanks to all these people that eventually uncovered the scam and gave evidence to see that string theory is indeed a conspiracy theory.