3/23/2023 0 Comments The cosmic secret![]() He addresses criticism of the anthropic principle as unscientific by denouncing the field of philosophy of science, and the criterion of falsifiability in particular:įrankly, I would have preferred to avoid the kind of philosophical discourse that the Anthropic Principle excites. Susskind’s argument that string theory’s compatibility with just about anything is actually an advantage is based on the fact that this makes a place for Weinberg’s 1987 anthropic principle argument for the size of the cosmological constant (which from what I’ve seen gets it wrong by at least one to two orders of magnitude if you only vary the CC, more if you vary other parameters). He seems to have forgotten about at least one particular vulture, who back in 2003, tried to make this point at the question session after one of his colloquium talks. This remark was written in the spring of 1994, but by the time I completed writing ‘The Cosmic Landscape’ a year later, the vultures had descended in force. String Theory is dead.”Īdding a footnote to this paragraph in proof: I suspect that now that it is becoming public, partly through my own writings and lectures, the kibitzers on the sidelines will be grinning and loudly announcing, “Ha, ha, we knew it all along. Perhaps part of the reason that the enemies haven’t pounced is that string theorists have kept their Achilles heel under wraps until fairly recently. Either of these tendencies might be thrown back at the string theorists as evidence that their own hopes for the theory are misguided. What I have never heard is criticism based on the unfortunate inelegance or the lack of uniqueness of String Theory. He remarks with surprise that no one has drawn the obvious conclusion that these arguments just imply that string theory is wrong: ![]() And yet the more I think about this unfortunate history, the more reason I think there is to believe that String Theory is the answer. Judged by the ordinary criteria of uniqueness and elegance, String Theory has gone from being Beauty to being the Beast. More and more “moving parts” had to be introduced to account for all the requirements, and by now it seems that no realistic model would pass muster with the American Society of Engineers - not for elegance in any case.įrom this he draws the following bizarre conclusion: In searching the Landscape for the Standard Model, the constructions became unpleasantly complicated. The theory also exhibited a nasty tendency to produce Rube Goldberg machines. String theorists watched with horror as a stupendous Landscape opened up with so many valleys that almost anything can be found somewhere in it. He goes on to argue that the laws of physics implied by string theory have turned out to be highly non-unique:ĭuring the 1990s the number of possibilities grew exponentially. We know neither what the fundamental equations of the theory are nor even if it has any. With all the years that String Theory has been studied, no one has ever found even a single defining equation! The number at present count is zero. On this score, one might facetiously say that String Theory is the ultimate epitome of elegance. ![]() Five is better than ten, and one is better than five. He answers these questions by first making fun of the supposed mathematical elegance of the theory:Įlegance requires that the number of defining equations be small. He asks:īut is String Theory beautiful? Does String Theory live up to the standards of elegance and uniqueness that physicists demand? Are its equations few and simple? And, most important, are the Laws of Physics implied by String Theory unique? Susskind devotes quite a lot of space to attacking the argument that the string theory picture of unification is “elegant”, instead promoting the idea that the properties of the universe come from some more or less random very complicated “Rube Goldberg” construction of a vacuum, one whose nature is just constrained by the anthropic principle. In short, the argument is that the compatibility of string theory with an essentially infinite variety of different physics is not a bad thing (because it can’t predict anything), but a good thing (because it allows an anthropic argument for the small size of the cosmological constant). ![]() It’s basically a lengthy version for the general public of the argument that he has been, with some success, trying to sell to the physics community for the last few years. Susskind’s new book, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design is now out. ![]()
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