Just finished Lee Smolin's book The Trouble with Physics. The book ponders why no new advances in our fundamental understanding of physics has occurred in the past 30 years.
The reason? According to Smolin, the structure of physics academia has been struck down with a bad case of 'sociology'. This is to say the processes of hiring physicists and funding scientific research has been biased towards physicists inclined towards those with hierarchical and herd mentalities (them physics wolves like to run in packs!), and against visionary thinkers. Essentially, the physics has been hijacked by the politics of the humans doing the physics. String persons are full of confidence even when what they are promoting isn't even a theory but a theory about a theory. Smolin laments that the obfuscation going on to explain why string theory hasn't gotten anywhere has now got to the point that theorists aren't even bothered trying to come up with testable string theories; instead they airily invoke the Anthropic principle as the new paradigm for doing business. If you thought string theory's extra, conveniently hidden dimensions (7 of them) was preposterous, you'll be amazed to learn that in response to the recently (1998) observed dark energy, string theorists bolted on 10500 possible string worlds to make their toy work. These people have clearly not heard of Occam's razor.
Why can't string theorists pull their heads in? Why didn't alarm bells go off when dark energy was discovered? Why wasn't it recognised that giving up on falsificationism and falling back on the anthropic principle was actually crossing a line between the tenable and untenable? Smolin's view is that string theory has so many research grants and careers riding on it that it's not in anyone's interest to try something different.
Still, it's not all bad news. In the next few years new experiments are likely to be undertaken that will hopefully provide new experimental data for those physicists to work with, most notably the opening of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN this year, which will search for mighty Higgs boson. The physicists who will have something to work with will be those few not engaged with string theory, since as string theory isn't currently falsifiable, whatever is discovered at CERN can be easily incorporated into string theory, by tweaking any number of constants. This fact alone should be enough for you to smell a rat.
I've read several rebuttals to Smolin's book and the basic gist is that he has misrepresented string theory. Since I'm not a specialist I can't pass judgement, but Smolin's portrayal of a venal academy has a ring of truth about it. The hope for physics now is that a new, more fundamental theory, which has no need to appeal to an infinite number of Cloud Cuckoo Lands, will come along and save the day. We may have to wait a while.
You can read a more detailed review of Smolin's book at the New Yorker. Tally ho!
Posted by stuart at May 27, 2007 1:43 PM