A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

"String conjecture"?

Thomas at Without Authority, himself an honest-to-goodness scientist, points us to this article from Gregg Easterbrook about a new book arguing that string theory isn’t really science, but something more like metaphysical speculation.

I’d be the last one to claim anything more than a layman’s knowledge of current physics (at best), but it has always raised my suspicions when scientists start talking about unobservable other dimensions (or whole other universes) to account for the existence and/or specific structure of our cosmos. It starts to look like any theory, no matter how farfetched, is okay if it keeps God out.

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6 responses to “"String conjecture"?”

  1. Chris T.

    Yeah — I’ve heard more than one philosopher of science (or historian of the philosophy of science) describe string theory as pseudo-science. For all the craziness that surrounds the ID/creationism movement, I think they do have a few valid critiques of science in terms of its reaching outside its purview. Especially against sociobiology and string theory (which is taught in high school science classes, rather alarmingly — its proponents are pretty effective).

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  2. Thomas Adams

    It starts to look like any theory, no matter how farfetched, is okay if it keeps God out.

    My thought exactly. I was struck by the line in Easterbrook’s article that “in recent decades, it has become essential at the top of academia to posit utter meaninglessness to all aspects of physics.” I find this quite strange, since there is no scientific rationale for insisting that the universe be meaningless. But many physicists are letting their atheism influence their scientific conceptions, to the extent that “meaninglessness” is considered a valid criterion by which to distinguish between competing theories. In essense, the purposelessness of the universe has become an axiom in scientific circles – something that is accepted but never proved. And anyone who questions this axiom is immediately labeled a creationist, even if they don’t believe in a literal interpretation of the Genesis story.

    Obviously this is a subject that gets me worked-up. To calm my nerves, I’m going to pour a drink and fall asleep reading John Polkinghorne.

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  3. c matt

    I always thought it odd that its ok to speculate about parallel universes and other things that cannot possibly be tested and call that science, but anything positing God is not science because it can’t be tested.

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  4. John

    The Poincare Conjecture, presumably proved by the now-legendary recluse Grigory Perelman, is important in part because of its relevance to string theory. The Chinese team claiming that Perelman’s proof is inadequate is led by Sing-Tung Yau, who proved another key string theory mathematical conjecture. Maybe the zeitgeist is ripe for solving these longstanding problems.

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  5. Thomas Adams

    John — Thanks for the link. I’ve posted some thoughts back on my site.

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  6. ktismatics

    String theory illustrates the importance of imagination in science. Scientific theories are tested empirically, but the theories themselves are ideas, created by scientists to make sense of the world. It sounds like string theory is in the imaginal rather than the empirical phase. Still, string theory is a response to empirical findings that more well-tested theories cannot explain. If string theory ultimately fails, other scientific imaginations will learn from the failure and eventually come up with something better.

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