Thread: String Theory

Do you believe in String Theory? Do you not know what it is?

If you don't know what string theory is.. here it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYbJkKMpPPc

Originally Posted by verzen

Do you believe in String Theory? Do you not know what it is?

If you don't know what string theory is.. here it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYbJkKMpPPc

String theory, like any scientific theory, is not something one believes in. It is not religion. My understanding is that at present there has not been any experiment that shows that string theory is wrong. On the other hand, string theory has yet to make a testable prediction of anything. In essence, string theory is a complicated mathematical development, which remains untested as a physical theory.

Originally Posted by mathman

Originally Posted by verzen

Do you believe in String Theory? Do you not know what it is?

If you don't know what string theory is.. here it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYbJkKMpPPc

String theory, like any scientific theory, is not something one believes in. It is not religion. My understanding is that at present there has not been any experiment that shows that string theory is wrong. On the other hand, string theory has yet to make a testable prediction of anything. In essence, string theory is a complicated mathematical development, which remains untested as a physical theory.

It is my understanding that string has made several predictions -- none correct. Hence the theory keeps changing to try to find a version that can make correct predictions, that is mathematically consistent, and that incorporates general relativity, the electroweak theory and quantum chromodynamics. The latest version seems to be something called M-theory, which involves entities of higher dimension than simple strings.

you can't really prove string theory, just keep messing with it until all the internal arguments have a logical consistency

I think you can, in theory, test string/brane/M theory. It's just that most definitive tests require equipment that is prohibitively expensive to build at the moment. (At least this is my understanding of the situation.)