Redirecting resources away from string theory
Hilary Wu
For decades, string theory has been hailed as a potential Grand Unified Theory. A theory that can complete what Albert Einstein could not, to incorporate his theory of General Relativity into the framework of quantum mechanics, uniting all four known forces into a single structure. However, for years, more and more physicists have been doubting whether the scientific community should continue to research string theory. This included Sheldon Glashow, who viewed string theory as a dead end and thinks obsession with string theory hinders scientific development. During an interview in 1987, Glashow compared string theorists’ largely theoretical approach with ‘ people [who] did not see the great supernova of 1054, for they were too busy arguing howmany angels could dance on the head of a pin ’ . 1 The most obvious criticism of string theory comes from the fact that the theory proposes that we live in a universe with multiple dimensions where subatomic particles are tiny one-dimensional strings instead of zero-dimensional points. Since the strings are theorized to be 10^-35 metres in thickness (in the region of Planck length), it makes the theory impossible to be directly confirmed via experimentation since there is no way to measure an object in that scale. Also, the 11 dimensions suggested by M-theory seem to defy common sense: to most people, we live in a world with 4 dimensions, 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time; it is hard to imagine that there are 7 microscopic dimensions around us. Moreover, according to string theory, we live in one of 10^500 different possible universes calculated by string theorists. This contradicts the belief of a portion of the scientific community, for suggesting 10^500 scenarios where only one is correct is simply irresponsible and examining all the different possible universes and rejecting them one by one is an impossible task even with the combined computing power of all supercomputers in the world. Another reason why some physicists want to divert budget from string theory research into other fields of physics is the lack of progress made to confirm the validity of string theory. String theory was first proposed by Gabrielle Veneziano in the 1960s as a mathematical model to explain the short lifetimes of hadrons and was later adapted as a bridge linking General Relativity and QuantumMechanics. After decades of research, string theorists have yet to decide on a single model to describe our universe and the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva has failed to find any of the supersymmetric particles predicted by string theory. Moreover, the cosmological constant calculated using string theory is 55 orders of magnitude larger than the value observed by using supernovae in 1999. 2 To some scientists, the absence of significant breakthroughs in string theory implies two possibilities: either we do not yet possess the mental and technological expertise to fully understand the mathematics behind string theory and build suitable experiments to test it, or worse, the scientific community has wasted years researching a theory that is inherently wrong.
1 Davies, P. and Brown, J., 1988. Superstrings: A Theory Of Everything? Cambridge. 2 Woit, P., 2002. Is String Theory Even Wrong? American Scientist , 90(2), p.110.
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