I found HN somewhat amusing when it came to physics, now I find it increasingly irritating. I don't think the same arrogant know-it-all attitude coming from laypersons would take place if the topic were neurosurgery or the theory of integro-differential equations. For some reason physics gets the "they don't know what they're doing" treatment by people that haven't bothered to get any formal training on it.

Well I have, and even though I'm not too keen on superstring theory I just couldn't dismiss it like this. It makes sense, it's important and it's a possibility worthy enough to be explored. Will people here just try to understand that they're talking about another profession with a really high skill access barrier that takes many years of hard work to become just acquainted with? Can we please just admit that if we don't know what we're talking about, we really don't know what we're talking about?

> Can we please just admit that if we don't know what we're talking about

Poster you're replying to admits they're a layman. As am I.

Perhaps the people writing articles for the laymen should do a better job explaining the redeeming aspects of String Theory. Because like the OP, I too have been left with the impression (from reading articles targeting laymen) that String Theory is clever math in search of a reality it can describe.

Laypeople can go ahead and express opinions about physics they don't understand, in exactly the same way a layperson can read HN and then go on to express opinions about the merits of Java vs Ruby without ever trying either language. It's a little bit silly, though.

Wait, is Java point particles and Ruby superstrings, with LISP being quantum fields?

Sure! Any two things I don't understand are equivalent to me!

Physics Today isn't for laymen. It's a trade journal, for physicists.

Which it indeed is.

I partially feel the same way. At the same time, there are a lot more people who studied physics commenting on Hacker News than neurosurgeons. So you have people who have passed the skills barrier commenting negatively. Does that encourage people who have not passed the skills barrier to feel safe to comment?

I think one of the frustrations is probably that the tone, and level of nuance and confidence expressed seems to be inversely correlated with level of expertise in the field.

So for example from the current thread:

(someone with training in the field): "It makes sense, it's important and it's a possibility worthy enough to be explored."

versus:

(admittedly uninformed person): "As a layman from a distance, [...] it's total garbage."

I like to read about physics and as far as i understand the energies needed to confirm string theory are so far out that we will potentially never achieve them. I also read that a lot of physicists believe that string theorists have lost touch with reality.

Is there any nearer term benefit that may come out of string theory ? I am honestly curious. Somehow I find it hard to believe that so many very intelligent people are chasing something misguided.

I don't think there's any direct near-term benefit that will come out of it, especially of the engineering variety. Our civilization doesn't even make use of the subnuclear physics described by quantum chromodynamics, which is now nearly 40+ years old. It's likely to be a long time before we 'need' correct physical models on shorter distance scales.

That said, we're not devoting the kind of resources to string theory that we devote to engineering ready problems. Probably somewhere in the ballpark of $10M/year worldwide funding provided by various governments, with a similar amount provided by private donors. This is rounding error. In the US, we spend about 10x this on the National Endowment for the Arts.

You can make an argument that all money spent on extensions of the Standard Model (and there are a lot of them besides string theory) has been wasted. But string theory at least has taught us far more about the structure of the mathematical models we use to describe physics than any of its competitors. This is why people continue to study it, even in the absence of experimental confirmation.

I'm just tired of nonsense. I don't understand what's the point in writing op-eds pontificating about things you have no idea, and now they're coming in every day because for some reason many in the HN community think that you can get an education in theoretical physics by reading popsci and blogs.

I know everybody has an opinion about everything under the Sun, me having an opinion about theirs is only natural. I'm just pointing out the fact that laypersons feel increasingly entitled to dismiss not only the professional work of experts, but whole bodies of knowledge available to them but that they can't be bothered to study. As I don't know whether the professional fields of these people allow for winging it, I'm assuming that maybe they think that you can do that in physics. Well you can't, so if you have a problem with some physical theory the proper way is to engage like everybody else, not trying to kill whatever you don't like because how it sounds from the proudest and laziest outside.

This new sense of entitlement from the opinionated laypersons is actually an antiscience stand, this is what gets you anti-vaxxers and shuts down funding of honest research.

People say it’s not falsifiable but I think it’s underappreciated how difficult it is to create a theory where the standard model plus gravity just falls out of it.

The theories are all falsifiable in that they make lots of testable predictions.

The problem is that there is a family of related theories which all produce the same testable predictions at energies we can probe and there’s no way to use an experiment to rule any of them out.

I'm not sure you can say that the standard model and gravity fall out of a theory if an almost infinite amount of other stuff falls out of it too.

Currently the theory "predicts" around 10^500 vacuum models, all of which have different properties.

That's quite a large number, and makes specific predictions rather difficult.

There was a vague hope that maybe something stringy would fall out of the LHC. That didn't happen. There's now an even more vague hope that it might fall out of Son Of LHC instead.

Outsiders might wonder if this is really just throwing string at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.

It hasn't yet, but it's always possible it might.

Physics has always been throwing math at reality and seeing what sticks. So why is it invalid to come up with a more universal mathematical object and seeing how it converges. Sure 10^500 but how how quickly are we throwing away 10^450 after experiments x, y and z? Perhaps they've invented too flexible an object and so it will never settle down, or perhaps they've invented the perfect mathematical object that will slowly but surely settle down on our reality as long as we keep feeding it experiments. A lot of science is discovering what can't be. Whatever is left is the discovery of something new.

> Outsiders might wonder if this is really just throwing string at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.

Isn't that part of it? Smash particles together at increasingly higher energies, see what happens. I don't think we can pretend to predict everything that will happen.