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Re:What every physicist should know about string theory by Retra on Monday February 11, 2019 @06:10PM (#19139432)
It's not so impressive if all you're doing is generalizing frameworks or cherry-picking the subsets that happen to agree with experiment. You have to show something new.

For example, (going from memory here, so don't quote me), your basic (Von Neumann's?) formulation of quantum mechanics was basically a generalization of Newtonian physics that specified an unreasonable number of non-real possibilities, and you can only recover meaningful results by taking Newtonian physics as an axiom a la the 'classical limit'. This would have just been mathematical over-complication had it not been for the fact that this model predicted things that differed from Newton physics in measurable ways.

So to reiterate, if your theory is unfalsifiable, it is not impressive that it agrees with every measurement. All you'd have achieved is restating what is already known in a language nobody wants to use.

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