Last night dream: have a lesson on some strange political economy x complex system course. In the online course notes shows various chapters of dynamical flow theory with some drawings of chain attractors and streamlines. I then started to wonder whether I should have asked my friend to send me a copy of the whole notes even though it might be big in size

you have weird dreams

I know

@vzn Woit review math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10314 also JD made his way into the comments in motls.blogspot.com/2018/06/… will this turn into an anti-physics wave

@bolbteppa thx for info. hossenfelder seems to have rejected 2 of my (even encouraging/ congratulatory!) comments maybe for linking my blog. would like to see anyone from around here make some comments there.

can't u just say the energy scale isn't high enough

the blog talks about SUSY proponents facing a crisis

now that the LHC hasn't found any SUSY

just say the energy ain't high enough and go on with your life :D

That's certainly a possible solution.

that's the benefit of models that have an infinite parameter space

the energy isn't ever high enough

@enumaris In which case it's not really necessarily fully testable :P

shhhhh

let's not go there

Obligatory reminder that QFT and classical mechanics also have an infinite parameter space

Demanding testability of a general framework for generating specific physical theories is a category error

would u classify SUSY as a general framework

@enumaris Yes. SUSY - in one form - is just a property that a specific Lagrangian possesses or not.

@ACuriousMind hence why I included the words 'necessarily' and 'fully'. If you can show it for some of those values, sure, fine. But if you have to keep changing parameter space in which it could feasibly work...

It's less general than "QFT", but "QFT + SUSY" still encompasses a multitude of specific theories

i.e. if it may be impossible to experimentally prove that it's incorrect, that is a failing in some sense

just cover your ears and go lalala

it seems this is my issue of what I've heard about the likes of string theory as well

or go the Sheldon route and prove super-Asymmetry

@Mithrandir24601 Again, you can make the exact same argument for classical mechanics: If you can't find experimental support for it, it just means you haven't chosen the correct Lagrangian for that experiment :P

SUASI

Now, the argument that we don't know of any specific tested prediction of a string theory that is not already a prediction of a QFT (or of GR) has more teeth, but just talking about "testability" always strikes me as uncharitable.

coming from a string theorist...I expect no less

@ACuriousMind It's not impossible to 'prove' classical physics for a certain relatively well known range of parameters though. I like my experimental predictions clear and verifiable with currently feasible experiments

@Mithrandir24601 Sooo...what would you have said about the Higgs when it was first proposed?

Evidently this is just my personal viewpoint that many theoretical physicists disagree with

I wonder what JD and @vzn said about the Higgs back before it was found

The Higgs mechanism is likewise a very "tunable" framework, since you can adjust the mass and the specific representations to yield a plethora of different predictions.

@ACuriousMind I would probably have said pretty much the same. While it's a nice bit of theory and it's fantastic that it's since been discovered, yeah I would have said the same at the time. I guess I'm just not as into the grand physics as most - I'm quite happy tinkering away at the little details that give minor but interesting results that I can turn to the experimentalist sitting next to me and ask about a plausible experiment/simulation

my theory of physics is "the way things are is the way things are"

my models have no generalizability, each specific experiment is a physical principle of its own.

@Mithrandir24601 Oh, I'm not saying you should be a fan or something. I just find it odd that string theory and SUSY seem to draw such ire regarding their testability when I don't really see much difference between them and e.g. the plethora of (now obsolete) theories physicists came up with to explain the particle zoo

I call it the tauto-enumarian theory of everything

I plan to publish a paper on this within the next 75 years

I think the main issue is that its proponents often seem unreasonably convinced that it "must" be correct, but again, that's not unusual - the authors of theories often are unreasonably convinced that they are true, sorting that out is what the scientific process is for

@ACuriousMind The thing is, now that you mention it, if the people at the time had looked at physics that was experimentally verifiable at the time, would they have ultimately saved all that time they spent looking at those now-obsolete models? I'm probably simplifying too much, but I feel these kinds of things are valid questions for theoretical physicists to think about now and again

(although I am a fan of the derivation of the Higgs - that was one of the great moments of undergrad)

@enumaris I have an absolutely perfect theory of everything. Sadly, the universe is too small to contain the proof :P

(or, I wish :P )

The universe being too small to contain the proof of its own correctness seems like the ultimate manifestation of Gödel's theorem :P

@ACuriousMind Sounds about right as well :P

@bolbteppa am a big fan of higgs discovery + LHC & have watched numerous documentaries & blogged on them & cited them in here. however, LHC is "long in the tooth" as expr goes... think the way fwd may not be higher energies. think a pivot to larger-scale simulation is called for.

Clearly string theory wont be experimentally validated until there are 100 of these books against ST

On the other hand, for my rambling comment above, is time spent on obsolete models really wasted, as it can often give interesting pointers for where to go and what (not) to do in more current physics?

I prefer my theory of everything

@Mithrandir24601 If the time spent on obsolete models is wasted, then I submit that the time of almost all non-famous theoretical physicists of the last century was wasted.

The literature is chock full of models that just didn't go anywhere

@ACuriousMind comparison of string theory to "plethora of now obsolete theories physicists came up with"... referred to in past tense? o_O

The gigantic difference with them and strings/susy is how much of an effect on math the latter are having

@vzn You left out the exact part of the quote that explains the past tense - the particle zoo is "solved" with the advent of the Standard Model, in particular quarks.

@ACuriousMind Then again, maybe I'm biased in that I just find physics interesting and aren't overly concerned about which specific area I'm looking at (as long as it's within a fair number of broad topics that I like), while maybe many people just really like some really specific thing and only want to do that, in which case it's not wasted anyway? I'm really rambling now, aren't I?

@ACuriousMind the simple question is, does string theory have a future or not from your pov?

yes

@bolbteppa How seriously do hardcore pure mathematicians take the maths of string theory? (this isn't a rhetorical question this time, I'm actually curious)

@Mithrandir24601 string theory is mainly studied in math departments its taken that seriously

@Mithrandir24601 They are very interested in making the formulae physicists discover there rigorous, since they uncover interesting interplay between various kinds of geometries.

@ACuriousMind That's fair. Pretty much like the rest of physics, like condensed matter then? :P

@bolbteppa To be fair, the "string theory" a mathematician studies is often as unrecognizable to the average string theory physicist as the "gauge theory" a mathematician studies is to the average quantum field theorist.

@bolbteppa I've heard of it in more applied maths departments, but I don't know so much about pure maths departments

I have a theory of math too

@enumaris Ooh, I've got one! 'the mathematical result is whatever the maths tells you it is' :)

Yeah, now you're getting it :D

I call it the tauto-enumarian theory of math

Can I count on you as a disciple to disseminate my theories to the masses?

@enumaris You can count me as your disciple if I can be counted among your disciples

awesome

:)

hmmm...not sure what I did all day...