“because the people who work on string theory are physicists, and physicists want to make contact with physical reality.” But what has happened since the 1980s is that the theory has gone through “what we call revolutions in our thinking time and time again, which has given a surge of energy, a surge ofinterest in the theory, which has kept us going even though we’ve yet to make that desired contact with experiment. Our understanding of the underlying theory, our understanding of the equations, our understanding of the fundamental ideas and how they relate to one another—we’ve made great strides.
“We have an international meeting every year, a string theory conference that has something like fifty talks. And these talks are generally amazing. They’re generally showing how people are making great progress in spite of not having the guide of experiment. So if it turns out, as Lee is saying, that some of the experiments he’s describing or the experiments of the Large Hadron Collider, if in the next couple of years these experiments bear fruit and begin to show us some of the features of the theories that we’ve been working on for a long time, things will definitely take a major leap forward.
“So it’s a very exciting time, waiting to see the results of those experiments. And in no way would one want to say that the theory is moving slowly. It perhaps is moving slowly toward these experiments, which are coming online. But the theory itself is developing rapidly. In fact, it’s hard to keep up. The theory is able to embrace all of the major developments in physics having to do with the elementary particles in quantum mechanics that were discovered before string theory in the middle of the twentieth century, leading up to the end of the twentieth century. They all naturally find a home within string theory. And that’s very compelling to us because usually a revolution doesn’t actually erase the past. It embraces the past but goes further. And that’s what string theory seems to be doing.
“The other side of it is that even without the experimental confirmation, string theory has a very intricate mathematical structure that holds together with a kind of tight, logical cohesion. There are checks and rechecks in the calculations, enormous number of consistency checks, and they’ve all passed. The theory comes through with flying colors every step of the way. And that again keeps us going, keeps us thinking that this theory is at least heading in the right direction.”
To hear Krauss talk about string theory, it sounds more like a solution in search of a problem.
“It still amazes me, when you think about it, that string theory arose in the 1970s when people were trying to understand all this host of new elementary particles that were being discovered in accelerators and they couldn’t make sense of it. This theory came along that looked like it might help you make sense of it, but, by the way, it required twenty-two extra dimensions. And I’m amazed in some sense that physicists were willing to automatically assume that maybe all those extra dimensions exist just to solve that problem. It turned out it wasn’t the solution to that problem. But then a decade later, physicists realized maybe it was the solution of another problem involving gravity. And physicists, many of them, are convinced those extra dimensions are out there.
“And to the credit of the physics community, there are some people who are actually trying to think of experiments that might actually be able to test this, so it isn’t just metaphysics.”
IS NEW SCIENCE SUFFERING?
Smolin says that he would never tell Greene or anyone else working on string theory to drop what they are doing and head into something else. “Certainly time will be the judge. If somebody feels that string theory or anything else is the most promising thing they know about, certainly they should work on it.
“But there is another level, and
“We have an international meeting every year, a string theory conference that has something like fifty talks. And these talks are generally amazing. They’re generally showing how people are making great progress in spite of not having the guide of experiment. So if it turns out, as Lee is saying, that some of the experiments he’s describing or the experiments of the Large Hadron Collider, if in the next couple of years these experiments bear fruit and begin to show us some of the features of the theories that we’ve been working on for a long time, things will definitely take a major leap forward.
“So it’s a very exciting time, waiting to see the results of those experiments. And in no way would one want to say that the theory is moving slowly. It perhaps is moving slowly toward these experiments, which are coming online. But the theory itself is developing rapidly. In fact, it’s hard to keep up. The theory is able to embrace all of the major developments in physics having to do with the elementary particles in quantum mechanics that were discovered before string theory in the middle of the twentieth century, leading up to the end of the twentieth century. They all naturally find a home within string theory. And that’s very compelling to us because usually a revolution doesn’t actually erase the past. It embraces the past but goes further. And that’s what string theory seems to be doing.
“The other side of it is that even without the experimental confirmation, string theory has a very intricate mathematical structure that holds together with a kind of tight, logical cohesion. There are checks and rechecks in the calculations, enormous number of consistency checks, and they’ve all passed. The theory comes through with flying colors every step of the way. And that again keeps us going, keeps us thinking that this theory is at least heading in the right direction.”
To hear Krauss talk about string theory, it sounds more like a solution in search of a problem.
“It still amazes me, when you think about it, that string theory arose in the 1970s when people were trying to understand all this host of new elementary particles that were being discovered in accelerators and they couldn’t make sense of it. This theory came along that looked like it might help you make sense of it, but, by the way, it required twenty-two extra dimensions. And I’m amazed in some sense that physicists were willing to automatically assume that maybe all those extra dimensions exist just to solve that problem. It turned out it wasn’t the solution to that problem. But then a decade later, physicists realized maybe it was the solution of another problem involving gravity. And physicists, many of them, are convinced those extra dimensions are out there.
“And to the credit of the physics community, there are some people who are actually trying to think of experiments that might actually be able to test this, so it isn’t just metaphysics.”
IS NEW SCIENCE SUFFERING?
Smolin says that he would never tell Greene or anyone else working on string theory to drop what they are doing and head into something else. “Certainly time will be the judge. If somebody feels that string theory or anything else is the most promising thing they know about, certainly they should work on it.
“But there is another level, and
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