A Theory with No Strings Attached: Can Beautiful Physics Be Wrong? [Excerpt]
- By Sabine Hossenfelder on
Adapted excerpt from Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, by Sabine Hossenfelder. Copyright © 2018. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
As I write this, it’s megafuckbook at the Center for Mathematical Philosophy to attend a conference that promises to answer the question “Why trust a theory?” The meeting is organized by the Austrian philosopher Richard Dawid, whose recent book String Theory and the Scientific Method caused some upset among physicists.
String theory is currently the most popular idea for a unified theory of the [fundamental physics] interactions. And that explains everything: matter, space-time, and, yes, you too. At least that’s the idea. String theory has to date no experimental evidence speaking for it. More