Tuesday, September 26, 2006
just sickening
Yet another hideous article emerged today in Wired:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71828-0.html?tw=wn_index_1
Just when you thought science articles couldn't get any dumber, along comes this one. (Searching for more articles by this author will bring up several stories about the imminent dangers of global warming, so you can probably tell what sort of science journalist he is.)
Anyway, what makes this excuse of an article so extreme is its unconventionality. It actually states that alternatives to string theory are AS PROMISING as string theory itself. I don't think even the most adamant critics of string theory would say anything THAT outlandish. Before anyone says that the quality of being "promising" is in the eye of the beholder, let me offer a less-fatalistic opinion.
I think that some parts of LQG will turn out to be right. I don't think it's as promising as string theory... for too many reasons to list here. I think that twistor (that's right, twistor, not "twister") theory is a great breakthrough in mathematics; as any reader of "The Emperor's New Mind" should recall, twistors are really bizarre constructions. I imagine that some physicists don't think twistors are too useful in the PHYSICAL sense, but that's what a lot of them thought about fractals. Now, of course, we know that fractals are useful in some areas of physics. Since Penrose doesn't yet have a unified theory of twistors, how can the twistor approach be as promising as other approaches to string theory (at the present time)?
The article gets into CDT and non-commutative geometry, which are too complicated to cram into a few paragraphs each (of course, the author doesn't care)... but then, in a fatalistic flourish, it mentions that there may be NO final theory. Well, if we're to accept that argument, we might as well quit physics now and commit mass suicide. What a ridiculous article!
I'm really sick and tired of these anti-string articles; most people have already heard about criticisms of string theory, anyway. We don't need these kinds of articles anymore. If people want to criticize it, they should post on "Not Even Wrong" and see if they can write something that 5,674,234,459 other people haven't already written a variation of. ¶ 7:56 PM
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71828-0.html?tw=wn_index_1
Just when you thought science articles couldn't get any dumber, along comes this one. (Searching for more articles by this author will bring up several stories about the imminent dangers of global warming, so you can probably tell what sort of science journalist he is.)
Anyway, what makes this excuse of an article so extreme is its unconventionality. It actually states that alternatives to string theory are AS PROMISING as string theory itself. I don't think even the most adamant critics of string theory would say anything THAT outlandish. Before anyone says that the quality of being "promising" is in the eye of the beholder, let me offer a less-fatalistic opinion.
I think that some parts of LQG will turn out to be right. I don't think it's as promising as string theory... for too many reasons to list here. I think that twistor (that's right, twistor, not "twister") theory is a great breakthrough in mathematics; as any reader of "The Emperor's New Mind" should recall, twistors are really bizarre constructions. I imagine that some physicists don't think twistors are too useful in the PHYSICAL sense, but that's what a lot of them thought about fractals. Now, of course, we know that fractals are useful in some areas of physics. Since Penrose doesn't yet have a unified theory of twistors, how can the twistor approach be as promising as other approaches to string theory (at the present time)?
The article gets into CDT and non-commutative geometry, which are too complicated to cram into a few paragraphs each (of course, the author doesn't care)... but then, in a fatalistic flourish, it mentions that there may be NO final theory. Well, if we're to accept that argument, we might as well quit physics now and commit mass suicide. What a ridiculous article!
I'm really sick and tired of these anti-string articles; most people have already heard about criticisms of string theory, anyway. We don't need these kinds of articles anymore. If people want to criticize it, they should post on "Not Even Wrong" and see if they can write something that 5,674,234,459 other people haven't already written a variation of. ¶ 7:56 PM
