"Claptrap"

Greg Easterbrook reviews Lee Smolin's book on what's wrong with String Theory.

The Upfront:
Lee Smolin is a brilliant theoretical physicist who has worked for many years in the bowels of string theory. His book and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong are interesting and important, and the point they make is quite possibly correct.

I've read a lot on strings, worked through the math at about a graduate (but not professional) level, understand the main concepts, (at least from the period between the 1920's and the early 1990's) and have tried to form an intelligent, well reasoned opinion on it. I've kind of failed in this. There is a point in string theory past which it is simply black to me. If someone like Smolin, Hawking or Page sketches out a proof for me in some of the really abstract stuff, I might get a glimmer of how this fits in, but I'm incapable of doing this on my own from scratch.

The parts of string theory I understand make sense. I can easily show a unification of gravity and EM in a few as 5-dimensions (hint: Einstein and Kaluza did this in the '30s. It's not rocket science by today's standards). I have no clue if it's right, but I do understand that we're missing something fundamental in physics, much like we missed photon quantization in the 19th century.

The Gripe:
This review is awful.

C'mon who uses the "claptrap"? String theory may be off the rails, it may be overly complex, it might even be wrong, but it's not useless claptrap. It's a fairly useful theoretical framework for understanding the otherwise totally inexplicable.

Then there is this interesting paragraph:
And consider this. Today if a professor at Princeton claims there are 11 unobservable dimensions about which he can speak with great confidence despite an utter lack of supporting evidence, that professor is praised for incredible sophistication. If another person in the same place asserted there exists one unobservable dimension, the plane of the spirit, he would be hooted down as a superstitious crank.

There is so much wrong with this collection of words, so many confabulations of things which don't go together, so many little straw men standing in a wheat field, I don't even know where to begin. He's brought together religion, science, some math he clearly doesn't understand and (seemingly) a general grudge against science into a one entangled knot of ego-satisfying word-salad. How can an editor let this through?

Then there is a whole 'graph on the word "theory" and for the second time a comparison to Darwin and creationists:
Really, string theory isn't a theory at all. Creationists who oppose the teaching of Darwin have taken to deriding natural selection as "just a theory," and Darwin's defenders have rightly replied that in science, "theory" does not mean idle speculation. Rather, it is an honored term for an idea that has been elaborately analyzed, has not been falsified, and has made testable predictions that have later proven to be true. The ordering of scientific notions is: conjecture, hypothesis, theory. Pope John Paul II chose his words carefully when in 1996 he called evolution "more than a hypothesis." Yet the very sorts of elite-institution academics who snigger at creationists for revealing their ignorance of scientific terminology by calling evolution "just a theory" nonetheless uniformly say "string theory." Since what they're talking about is strictly a thought experiment (just try proving there are no other dimensions), from now on, "string conjecture," please.

String Theory is a theory. some of it's aspects are testable, but not yet tested. It's not that people don't want to test them, or are arguing that they shouldn't be tested. I freely grant that the whole of the theory is not testable or for that matter expressible as a simple set of axioms accessible to the general public). It's disingenuous for Easterbrook to suggest that they are unprovable.

Ugh. String theory can be criticized on a lot of points and may quite well be wrong, however Easterbrook doesn't use any of them instead settling for some gratuitous science bashing and equating science and religion.


His review is a piece of shit.