Has Theoretical Physics Lost Its Mojo?
Yesterday Quanta Magazine sent me an email saying that I might be interested in a new article they had published: “There Are No Laws Of Physics. There’s Only The Landscape.”
I did not pay much attention to the offer because it sounded like the usual string theory pseudo-science. However, the Quanta piece was later reviewed at one of the most reliable anti-hype blogs in theoretical physics: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10327 . This physics blog is always worth reading, and the review of the Quanta piece points out that it is more than the run-of-the-mill string theory pipe-dreams written by the usual perps.
The Quanta article was written by Robbert Dijkgraaf who is a respected and influential theoretical physicist, and who is also Director of the Institute Of Advanced Study in Princeton! One would expect that after so many disappointments connected with string theory, supersymmetry, WIMPs, … that theoretical physicists might be inclined to show a bit less arrogance with regard to their understanding of nature.
Basically, string theorists have come up with some very slick mathematics for abstract “worlds” with double-digit dimensionality. However, their attempts to make empirical contact with nature, or even come up with some definitive predictions have met with failure. So the latest gambit of the “often wrong but never in doubt” theoreticians is to say that we live in a multiverse of 10⁵⁰⁰ universes, each with different physics. So there are no unified laws of physics, only a smorgasbord of whatever you like. Failure interpreted as success?
You might wonder what this would do to science if these wizards of Oz carry the day. I recommend that interested readers should read the review linked above for more on these issues. Be sure to also check out the comments below the review for interesting and entertaining thoughts on the matter at hand.
Dijkgraaf also fosters the false impression that string theory is “the only game in town”. I beg to differ: http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw . It may be a diamond in the rough, but if you give me hundreds of physicists improving this paradigm over a period of roughly 40 years, I think you would have something of unique value.