String Theory is Falsifiable After All, String Theorists Say

String Theory our best hope for a theory of everything has been criticized for being impossible to falsify but a group of string theorist now say that this isn't so they just came out with a paper titled how to falsify String Theory at a collider well that sounds like fun let's have a look String Theory as a theory of everything should contain all the elementary particles that we have already observed and that we collect in the standard model of particle physics these particles are not all independent of each other they're related by symmetry Transformations that we

collect in groups called U1 su2 and su3 no wait don't leave I swear you don't need to know exactly what that means just that the numbers in the group names tell you the size of the group the smaller the number the smaller the group as you can tell the real world seems to make use only of very small symmetry groups this brings us to the new paper in string theory one strictly speaking doesn't have particles everything is made of strings it's just that some of those strings resemble particles but they still must be related by

these symmetry groups to correctly reproduce the standard model no one so far found a way to exactly reproduce the standard model from String Theory however string theorists have found a lot of similar models and once you have these models you can calculate how many particles should appear together in sets at a collider these sets of particles are called multiplets the quarks and the standard model for example form a triplet the authors of the new paper now say let's conjecture the particle models derived from String Theory only have small sets of particles so small multiplets I

doubt that this is correct but let's just go with it then so they say we should never find a large set of new particles related by symmetry group with a large number so if a particle collider found evidence for something like that this could rule out String Theory well this is just nonsense let's say I have a theory According to which the large hron collider will not produce unicorns if it does produce unicorns that'll rule out my theory therefore unicorn theory is great that's the logical equivalent of their argument except that they covered their nonsense

up with maths distributed it over 30 pages ran a computer simulation to go with it and got paid for doing all that by the US Department of energy though I have to give it to them they invented an entirely new sort of nonsense you see the normal nonsense in the field is to invent new unnecessary things claim that they make predictions which can be ruled out and then pretend it's great if they're ruled out the authors of the new paper on the other hand invent unne Necessary Things claim there's something they don't predict and then

they pretend it's great if we don't see what they don't predict imagine the potential no longer do you need a theory that predicts something new it's sufficient to predict nothing new which you could just have done by sticking with the standard model you might think that this is a particularly extreme example of physics Gone Wrong by a basic misunderstanding of how science works but in the foundations of physics this is unfortunately the rule rather than the exception to just give you two other recent examples take the paper that made headlines with the title Dark Matter

may have existed before the Big Bang if you look at the paper you'll see that the lead author is the same person who claimed last week that dark mattera was produced in a second big bang after the first two ideas that directly contradict each other this is not that uncommon in this field you can just make up some new maths calculate some things and publish a new paper the stunning thing about this is that it doesn't even occur to them that this isn't how science works this research was funded by the Swedish research Council and

also by the doe another paper which I read last week hoping it would be interesting enough to talk about is about a pixelated Universe something with dark energy a top down strength Theory construction it's the classical example of adding unnecessary assumptions that don't solve any problem and then making predictions to claim that it's science because it can be falsified this was financed by the NSF and the doe most of this paper production in the foundations of physics stems from a very basic misunderstanding of the philosophy of science is that they think it's sufficient for a

theory to be falsifiable but just being falsifiable doesn't make a theory scientific most importantly a scientific theory should not make unnecessary assumptions like particles are made of strings or dark energy is pixelated or maybe God made it so but then I repeat myself now look I'm not saying that everything in the foundations of physics is nonsense I'm trying hard to find some interesting things to highlight in my science news but damn it is hot did do you know there's a free and easy way to learn more about the science behind all the videos that you've

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