Martin Brown:
String theory might be right. Who knows? Even the best mathematicians on
the planet can't actually make any useful or novel predictions with it
as yet that are amenable to experimental testing.

Davoud:
That means that it's not a theory.

Martin Brown:
String conjecture is perhaps too much of a mouthful. The mathematics
might or might not describe our universe but you can still play around
with it to see if anything useful falls out.

"String fantasy" has as many syllables as "string theory." How about
"string guess," "string dream," or "string religion?"

I don't think it's possible at this time to say whether this is despair
or realism. We're approaching 100 years of trying to unite
GR--gravity-- with quantum theory, and we're no closer than we were at
the beginning; we have nothing that qualifies as a theory of quantum
gravity in the way that Newtonian mechanics, evolution, GR, the germ
theory of disease, et al. qualify as theories.

And it took over 2000 years to get from the Greek philosophers rough and
ready explanations of the universe to where we are now. You cannot
predict when the next great paradigm shift or breakthrough will be made.
It could be tomorrow or not for another hundred years or more.

But today's investigators are not starting from the 1 BCE knowledge
base.

No-one would have guessed at high temperature superconductors...

Experimentalists at IBM and other places who were searching for
high-temperature superconductors were not making a stab in the dark;
they had some expectations of finding them. Not one experimentalist is
working on string fantasy because the fantasy presents no evidence to
be tested. That would support calling it "string religion." In the
course of 35 years of guesswork, there has been not one proposal of a
means of detecting any of the conjectured six curled-up dimensions of
space, e.g.

String theory may yet win out. I personally don't like them. I do know a
few top cosmologists including one practitioner. He is *very* bright and
so I do not rule out the possibility he might be right.

I couldn't say because you didn't name the art or science at which he
is a practitioner. I know it isn't string fantasy, though; at that he
can only be a guesser, a fantasist, or a priest.

--
I agree with almost everything that you have said and almost everything that
you will say in your entire life.

usenet *at* davidillig dawt cawm