String Theory Unveiled and Challenged
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After several great revolutions in modern physics, a large and expanding community of scientists believes that the basic stuff of our universe is ‘strings’. These are no ordinary strings. The physicists envisage tiny, vibrating, folding and elongating coils of energy, each 100 billion billion times smaller than the protons at the nucleus of an atom; so small, indeed, that they can be understood only in terms of extremely sophisticated mathematics impenetrable to all but the elite of specialists.
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String theory, which nowadays dominates the research programmes and main funding of theoretical physics in many Western universities, was not so much discovered as invented in order to solve a vexing explanatory deficit. In the early 1970s, physicists announced the so-called ‘standard model’ – a theory that seeks agreement between the contrasting realms of super-huge objects, such as stars and planets, (known as relativity) and the super-small realms of the subatomic (known as quantum). The standard model, however, failed to explain gravity. Enter string theory to rectify the problem. In its simplest terms, this complex set of notions claims 10 or 11 space dimensions (as opposed to the three of everyday human perception), and assumes a ‘landscape’ of myriad elementary bundles of energy (strings) that interface not only with the universe we inhabit but a multiplicity of unseen and unknowable parallel universes.
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But is string theory true? Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia University, has challenged the entire string-theory discipline by proclaiming that its topic is not a genuine theory at all and that many of its exponents do not understand the complex mathematics it employs. String theory, he avers, has become a form of science fiction…
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Woit’s book is designed to give a short history of recent particle and theoretical physics. Ultimately, he seeks not only to rattle but to dismantle the cage of the string theorists. He grants that an explanation for gravity is usefully embedded in string theory, but he challenges its authenticity as proper science. In his view, string theory offers no foreseeable prospect of making predictions due to a large number of available choices, a crucial criterion for any theory worthy of the name.
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Woit’s most compelling accusation, however, is that the domination of string theory in universities has stifled progress in alternative research programmes within theoretical physics. As long as the leadership of the physics community refuses to accept that string theory is a ‘failed project’, he writes, ‘there is little likelihood of new ideas finding fertile ground in which to grow’.
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Now that Woit has thrown a wild cat among the theoreticians, we can be sure that the ruffled string-theory advocates will be preparing a rebuttal. Woit, a humble math instructor, has nothing to lose in terms of academic standing, but physics might have much to gain from his boldness. While his book tends to be negative, it may well shake up a community of scientists that has evidently become complacent if not entirely ossified in its thinking. If he can encourage string theorists to acknowledge the true difficulties of their discipline, and encourage young researchers to try neglected but promising alternatives, he will have succeeded in an important task.
