What happened to string theory and the birth of a dream particle: the super speck.
Hello!
This is an interesting, though complex, story!
Between the late eighties and the early 2000s I was totally into string theory. I was there for the five different theories, the bane worlds and M-theory that combined the five theories. The downfall of superstring theory, at least for myself, was only months away but, in reality, for myself anyway, was already happening due to a number of items.
I had no issue with string theory’s biggest problem, which was that it could not make any predictions that could readily be tested. Because I was a ‘believer’, I even had my own arguments for this quandary. They went like this: in fact, there were predictions strings could make… it’s just that Relativity and/or quantum mechanics and/or QED had already made these predictions and lab tests had already confirmed them. Not only did it sound good, it was true…for instance, ‘strings’ could absolutely predict gravity but so could an apple.
The first crack in my stringy beliefs was no more than just an uneasy feeling I got when I heard Mr. Stringman himself--Brian Green—pronounce, “(string theory) is too elegant to be wrong.” OK, I’ve been sitting here for many minutes trying and I cannot explain why this hit me as so wrong.
There were other minor things—especially ‘M-Theory’ that supposedly explained the five different string theories but not, it seemed, itself. However, the absolute showstopper was the big lie and I’m just now realizing it’s something that’s going to be a little hard to explain but I’ll do my best.
One of the bedrocks of any theory’s reliability is that the math behind it is finite. That is to say, that it produces few or no answers that are infinite. It’s called or referred to as the theory’s level of approximation. The leading contenders in quantum physics—superstrings and Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG)—had both been proven ‘finite’. Article after article since the mid-80s had stated that the superstring theory was proven finite. That foundation supporting string theory, after all these years, was simply a given or, so they said.
Around 2002 a physicist named Lee Smolin—a giant in the field--was asked to write a report on the state of all the different quantum theories currently on the table and, to make a long story short, he discovered that no one had ever proven any of the five string theories to be finite! To my knowledge, no one has done it yet. Evidently, someone, somewhere, at some time had just stated this and everyone had just jumped on board--unbelievable!
Personally, I pretty much gave the big finger to string theory.
Understand that I had based The Spiral Slayers universe on string theory! Bane worlds were playing key parts in the story. I almost completely give up on the story…hell, I almost decided to chuck science and writing sci-fi completely. I went into a deep depression and stopped all work on The Spiral Slayers book, the trailer and definitely on my reading of science books.
Perhaps three months later, I tried to convert to LQG but my heart wasn’t into putting my faith into any quantum theory being worked on. I needed my own and I remember thinking, I’ll have to sleep on it and believe it or not the weirdest thing happened. That night I had a dream in which I was talking to a scientist in a white lab coat who told me that the universe was just a reflection of itself and that this was why every part of the universe was like every other part. I proclaimed ‘the holographic theory’ but he shook his head. He went on to say that, this was because the most elementary particle was a new type of particle called a refection particle and that it reflected itself and this was the reason for the universe’s past expansion periods. Also, and this made perfect sense, this most elementary particle contained all the information needed to build our universe. This data, he continued, was not stored like data on a disk drive but rather within the way the particle’s vibrations affected and fit or didn’t fit with the other vibrating particles around it. Also, any change to one particle affected every reflection of itself and this changed propagated very quickly defining, btw, the speed of light. The particle was called…
And, I woke up. I looked over at my wife next to me in bed and she reached over and rubbed the tip of my nose. I jerked away from her and give her a quizzical look and she said that I had had a speck of something on my nose…
…and right then the super speck particle replaced string theory.
In the next post, well see how this new ‘dream’ particle fit perfectly with my story even solving some problems I’d been agonizing over.
r
This is an interesting, though complex, story!
Between the late eighties and the early 2000s I was totally into string theory. I was there for the five different theories, the bane worlds and M-theory that combined the five theories. The downfall of superstring theory, at least for myself, was only months away but, in reality, for myself anyway, was already happening due to a number of items.
I had no issue with string theory’s biggest problem, which was that it could not make any predictions that could readily be tested. Because I was a ‘believer’, I even had my own arguments for this quandary. They went like this: in fact, there were predictions strings could make… it’s just that Relativity and/or quantum mechanics and/or QED had already made these predictions and lab tests had already confirmed them. Not only did it sound good, it was true…for instance, ‘strings’ could absolutely predict gravity but so could an apple.
The first crack in my stringy beliefs was no more than just an uneasy feeling I got when I heard Mr. Stringman himself--Brian Green—pronounce, “(string theory) is too elegant to be wrong.” OK, I’ve been sitting here for many minutes trying and I cannot explain why this hit me as so wrong.
There were other minor things—especially ‘M-Theory’ that supposedly explained the five different string theories but not, it seemed, itself. However, the absolute showstopper was the big lie and I’m just now realizing it’s something that’s going to be a little hard to explain but I’ll do my best.
One of the bedrocks of any theory’s reliability is that the math behind it is finite. That is to say, that it produces few or no answers that are infinite. It’s called or referred to as the theory’s level of approximation. The leading contenders in quantum physics—superstrings and Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG)—had both been proven ‘finite’. Article after article since the mid-80s had stated that the superstring theory was proven finite. That foundation supporting string theory, after all these years, was simply a given or, so they said.
Around 2002 a physicist named Lee Smolin—a giant in the field--was asked to write a report on the state of all the different quantum theories currently on the table and, to make a long story short, he discovered that no one had ever proven any of the five string theories to be finite! To my knowledge, no one has done it yet. Evidently, someone, somewhere, at some time had just stated this and everyone had just jumped on board--unbelievable!
Personally, I pretty much gave the big finger to string theory.
Understand that I had based The Spiral Slayers universe on string theory! Bane worlds were playing key parts in the story. I almost completely give up on the story…hell, I almost decided to chuck science and writing sci-fi completely. I went into a deep depression and stopped all work on The Spiral Slayers book, the trailer and definitely on my reading of science books.
Perhaps three months later, I tried to convert to LQG but my heart wasn’t into putting my faith into any quantum theory being worked on. I needed my own and I remember thinking, I’ll have to sleep on it and believe it or not the weirdest thing happened. That night I had a dream in which I was talking to a scientist in a white lab coat who told me that the universe was just a reflection of itself and that this was why every part of the universe was like every other part. I proclaimed ‘the holographic theory’ but he shook his head. He went on to say that, this was because the most elementary particle was a new type of particle called a refection particle and that it reflected itself and this was the reason for the universe’s past expansion periods. Also, and this made perfect sense, this most elementary particle contained all the information needed to build our universe. This data, he continued, was not stored like data on a disk drive but rather within the way the particle’s vibrations affected and fit or didn’t fit with the other vibrating particles around it. Also, any change to one particle affected every reflection of itself and this changed propagated very quickly defining, btw, the speed of light. The particle was called…
And, I woke up. I looked over at my wife next to me in bed and she reached over and rubbed the tip of my nose. I jerked away from her and give her a quizzical look and she said that I had had a speck of something on my nose…
…and right then the super speck particle replaced string theory.
In the next post, well see how this new ‘dream’ particle fit perfectly with my story even solving some problems I’d been agonizing over.
r
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message 1:
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Leo
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Apr 20, 2015 07:56AM
Thank you for your commentary on the fate of string theory. I'm not a scientist, much less a physicist but I have a scientifically literate layman's interest in both domains. I had been wondering what had happened to string theory. I remember the 80s and 90s when string theory was the only show in town and Brian Green was its ringmaster. Then it seemed to go from flavour of the month to yesterday's hero. You helped me understand how and why the wheels fell off the shiny stringy machine.
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Leo wrote: "Thank you for your commentary on the fate of string theory. I'm not a scientist, much less a physicist but I have a scientifically literate layman's interest in both domains. I had been wondering w..."Hi Leo! Read a book called, I think, "The Problem with Physics" by Lee Smolin for the unbelievable story of the domination of String Theory over an entire generation of scientists, professors and students (anyone who questioned 'Strings' got fired or blacklisted!) and, when science became fashion setting itself back three decades. In the end, Strings might be the way it is but the politics, tactics, the single-mindedness when combined with the little lie everyone accepted for so long were unforgivable and doomed the theory (so lets hope it was wrong plus...there was never a way to prove it anyway!). To my knowledge, String Theory never made a single testable prediction nor had a single spin off that helped anyone in anyway. If that statement is wrong, I'd love to know about it. I still love the theory but, for myself, it fell from the realm of true science.
Rusty Williamson
