I don't think witten is brave enough. While he is a genius, remember what comes with that, a sense of superiority and a touch of insanity. The problem with written is no one is confident enough to really take him on. But I also think witten is used to being unchallenged now. When people have gone against him, don't go at what he knows, go at what is wrong, and where he is questionable. Just keep pressing and questioning. Witten is a strange case of he feels superiority, and normal people feel he is superior. Eric would win against witten
@@ExcaliburGB You make some good points but overall your statements are very subjective and have little substance. People have constantly criticized Witten's ideas about string theory for over 20 years now and some claim he has mislead the community for 50 years down a bind alley, so how can you say he is used to being unchallenged? I think you are right that just about anyone on the planet who understands the latest theory of general relativity, Quantum physics/gravity, string theory and how they could be unified would be reluctant or even terrified to live discuss the problems of string theory with Witten and I include Penrose and Eric in that list. The typical critics like Weinstein, Hossenfelder and Penrose go after "easy target" string theorists like Kaku and Brian Green in live debates but never Witten, why is this? Even if Eric and Ed did debate live, how do you define "would win". Eric doesn't even have the basis of a competitive theory, there are no competitive theories. String theory has lead to 1000's of breakthroughs in physics and ironically even lead to Witten winning a Fields Medal in mathematics, not bad for a theoretical physicist. He is continually working on small provable aspects that one day may lead us closer to a solution. One big example is M Theory. Just because we don't have the tools to prove all 10 dimensions exist in string theory because they are either too small to detect with the LHC or too large to comprehend, does not mean that they do not exist. You attack Witten's character as that of someone who thinks he is superior to everyone else. I've watched 100's of videos of Witten and never seen him act that way. Can you post a link showing otherwise? I believe that Witten is simply ahead of his time and has even won more awards than Captain Kirk showed in the Star Trek episode 'Court Marshall' ua-cam.com/video/W1Y-IpSj7q0/v-deo.html
The man is just brazen. Whether brazenly correct, or brazenly incorrect… it seems that time will only tell. We need more minds of whom will challenge. Which, as of recent, are far and few between😒
The absence of an alternative does not prove the theory. Other than sucking up brainpower and funding, how does it unify quantum mechanics and gravity? Isn’t that the whole point?
@@cameronv320 its baffling the number of idiots with zero credentials on the internet who somehow think they are qualified to have an opinion on the matter
@@cameronv320 How would _you_ know that if you're not qualified either? The argument from authority is still a bad argument because it can always be thrown back at those making it, like I just did.
@@aarondavis8943 Yea i get your point. But OP is just regurgitating talking points from Weinstein without saying anything useful about string theory or its alternatives.
The question he was asked was the wrong question. The problem isn't the exploration of the theory. The problem is the near monopoly on funding the theory holds, and the dismissal of a unified field theory based on the existence of string theory.
So the Unified Field theory lies underneath Superstring theory, in the Unified field there are no strings it is just infinite silence, pure nothingness with Infinite potential. Nobody is taking this away from Einstein, but he didn't really come up with this by himself, It has been in the Vedic culture for thousands of years. Modern-day Humans are just dead set on figuring everything out in order to monopolize the fruits of labor and get closer to figuring out how to understand and manipulate quantum gravity with what the materials and means have on Earth, and We have done it ,just ask Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, but they didn't come up with it on the whim , or with open scientific research, no no, they just copied it from ETs and hid the information under the rug, and no no we didn't figure it out at CERN no matter what they say, but CERN is there just to get the general public comfortable, because in order for most humans to really understand things out of this common world , it seems we have to physically produce it in a lab .. and in my opinion it is a total disregard to subjective knowledge and traditional wisdom we gain form understanding how our universe works. Dr. John Hagelin explains this best , and he isn't out for people's money , and he's been in Superstring theory for decades, and even he admits that the possibility of finding all the different spin types of all the Bose and Fermi fields that superstring theory presents within the laws Supersymmetry is literally impossible with the modern scientific approach, It calls for 70 Higgs bosons for crying out loud , we have only found one after all these years , but maybe thats just a fragment of what a Higgs Boson really is , maybe we just got one type with a 0 spin type ? So it is safe to say that we really need help from outside of our solar system , in which we will have if people can open their hearts to such truths, and let the ETs that have figured it out help us, but I don't think they will help unless enough of us want their help , it will be too detrimental to our sociological structure unless there is enough of us who can gain the wisdom needed to obtain the knowledge and encounters. Thanks have a nice day , Powhatan Wayne
Wrong. There is a reason why it is the front-running theory. Because no other theory that has been presented is better, or explains more, than String Theory. The moment it is presented - in a serious manner - String Theory may lose the throne. But until then - get to work! And all other issues aside - I like Witten's demeanor and attitude towards other's than I do Weinstein, and that in itself is extremely important. Witten is clearly reserved and humble, and that is why Weinstein is terrified of him. Weinstein honestly seems disgruntled that he wasn't born a century earlier and lost the W in his last name.
I don't find any destroying force in his answer , his answer is just description of ST us usually ( ST is already a description of mathematically possible particles) so Edward Witten hadn't, hasn't and will not have any force of legitimacy to defend ST till his weapon is always: description of possibilities ( EXP500 possibility of vacuum states)😮😮😮
I have noticed people confronting Edward Witten in many forums. He is sincere on the stand of String theory. For any scientific discovery, one should not have bias. He is open and practical about where the theory stands. It would be good to go from his last comment to understand this better. No one has come up with an alternate theory that is appealing. Just contesting String theory based on individual notions comes from the personal bias of the individual insight based on their comtemplation of physics. He is clear that this theory needs to be better established.
Hey, he just said it wasn't a theory. I's a "framework" 🤣you see? Doesn't have to meet the standards for successful / acceptable theories either. Another layer of unfalsifiability 🤣
@@longhoacaophuc8293 Good question. Also, since when was any idea that didn't make testable predictions considered a "theory"? It sounds more like philosophy than a scientific theory to me.
@@longhoacaophuc8293it's not about proving anything. There have been many respected dissenters and ground shakers in science who were respected and other physics enjoyed debating and testing their theories. This dark enlightentment guy is not going to be one of those. First of all he's ugly. Second of all laymen is his audience and his audience thinks he's ugly. I'd be willing to give him a chance but he needs to be less arrogant. He's just too ugly to be so confident without people thinking he's up to some grift. I'm not saying he can't be a villain but be a competent villain.
@@DC-zi6se He is. Read Three Body Problem. The Aliens plan there is about confounding human science to slow down Human development. My suspicion is that he is an infiltrator.
I was eagerly anticipating the destroying part, but it never happened. This is an embarrassing title for a video regarding an intellectual and academic topic in the natural sciences. I have also noticed there appears to be a concerted effort by some people to present this man as the genius mind of our time. I hope they’re right, and he can further science like the great minds of the past.
“That doesn’t mean it should be everyone’s cup of tea or that everyone should work on it. with that said though, I’ve noticed the critics don’t seem to try very hard to work on a competing theory or to suggest one” I wouldn’t call it destroying but it’s a firm statement.
@@will.42069 He is a scientist I suspect he does not engage in silly things as “destroying“ but rather conduct research and engage in academic discussions. I would label his response as a gentle defence of the field of his study and research, which is a reasonable thing to do. I do not have any strong feelings about string theory, but lack of alternatives is not the greatest praise of something.
@@mrgyani I’m afraid your comment doesn’t relate to anything I’ve written. I assume that your comment “he did“ means that you believe he destroyed people who criticise string theory. This is incredibly childish and immature way to think about science and scientists. As for the rest of your comment, unfortunately I don’t know what you’re talking about.
He presented a very clear, concise and compelling rebuttal. 1. String theory forces quantum gravity 2. It would have been neglectful to not investigate it 3. The detractors still don’t have any respectable alternatives What were you expecting?
String theory poisoned the well of physics. It's easy to say, 'you're not smart enough' when you peddle nonsense that has never been testable, or verifiable in any way.
@morganlee2806 There are many aspects of string theory that can be tested. Some have been without success thus far with many other falsifiable predictions waiting for better technology.
@@morganlee2806 Technically, you're wrong, because you can derive the field equations of gravity purely by applying string theory to quantum mechanics. General relativity has been experimentally verified, so you are completely wrong and it is clear that you have no rudimentary understanding of the topics that you are attempting to discuss.
No it's not. By your logic, Schrödingers should have tossed out his equation when he derived it. It was wrong! It took an intuitive hunch that the theory he was basing his work on, wave particle duality, was sound that encouraged him to keep looking at, which eventually led to Dirac formalizing it's implication that the electron had a spin Until Schrödingers equation, no one had known that, it was a completely theoretical prediction that violated observations based on prior models. It turned out to be more correct than those. There are problems with our model of the universe. Do you have a better idea? Let people come up with a theory to make predictions from. We have an idea that we don't understand math well enough to bring into fruition. Can we work on that without being told it's stupid by people who can't do math? Watch Dirac's 1982 interview. He said he suspects the constants that should be applied to Einstein's general relativity (the theory in the most abstract sense, for Dirac also doubts there's only 4 dimensions) are most likely different than those we have, which were derived disregarding general relativity, which is a highly successful theory and what Einstein believed to be his most important gravity is a glaring omission from the standard model. Dirac is responsible for most of the theoritcal formalization of Quantum Field Theory, including Quantum Chromodynamics. His equations found predicted infinite answers, which is obviously a problem. Detour. Another theory famously does this. Einstein's theory of general relativity. Many insisted early on that made it wrong. Instead, black holes were discovered as Einstein predicted. Eventually a process called "renormalization" was discovered to remove those infinites and make predictions. Dirac never liked that, and sure enough renormalization of GCD remains a highly active field in physics, as the technique has needed to be refined, and now it appears to be giving us a wrong prediction possibly, for the experimental data for the magnetic moments of the gluon is not matching what QCD predictions using these renormalization techniques, and the data is getting close to the accuracy needed to be considered a breakthrough (and also sigma 5 being super special is completely arbitrary so if you think freely, there's that and a lot of other handwaving of anomalies deemed not statistically significant enough). Another solution to Einstein's general relativity is Einstein's-Rosen bridges, i.e wormholes, existing at those infinites. It is completely theoretical, but does that mean it's wrong. Spacetime is warped by mass. Mass is the product of interactions at the quantum scale, mostly the strong force, governed by GCD, which if we ignore renormalization as Dirac suggested we should, also predicts infinites. Hmmmmmmm.... Quantum Field Theory was developed largely after the famous 1935 paper by Einstein Podowsky and Rosen predicting Quantum entanglement. What is often handwaved is that that paper was arguing that those observations proved quantum mechanics was somehow incomplete. That is in part, because Einstein's assumption he thought was it's error turned out to be incorrect, but nevertheless the general argument stands. So let's go back to how according to general relativity mass warps spacetime, and mass is largely a product of quantum field interactions, mainly those of GCD and the strong force, which also predicts infinites like general relativity does. There is a conjecture in theoretical physics that perhaps there's a connection between Einstein Rosen bridges and Quantum entanglement, ER = EPR. That seems like a genius idea to follow up on, and sure enough it is, it is based on explorations of Anti de sitter space, which seems to correspond to the symmetries in conformal field theories, aka GED (which governs both the electromagnetic field and the weak interaction, the higgs mechanism explains this) & GCD, & along Yang Mills n=4 theory aka supergravity which is completely theoretical. (FYI n=3 is GCD, n=2 × n=1 in QED). Guess how was the first to have a hunch Anti de sitter spaces might be important? Dirac. That's right, string theory is the brain child of the genius who MADE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS YOU USE. What an idiot.
I like to think of the quest of humanity to understand the universe as a toddler building an epic jigsaw puzzle. Newton provided a wonky table, then Einstein fixed it. Quantum physics has provided the pieces, and we have verified that lots of pieces are there but suspect there will be some missing. Now we are trying to start building the puzzle but lack the dexterity (experimental capability) to make a lot of progress. So we imagine building it instead, and sometimes our imagination runs wild and skips to what it might look like at the end. String Theory is one way in which we are looking at the pieces and imagining putting them together without worrying about what it will look like at the end, we just want them to fit and may need to imagine some of those missing pieces. It may take a 100 years, or a thousand, but a successor to today's embryonic imaginations will complete the puzzle. It just depends how long it takes for the toddler to grow up.
No the problem is that scientists won't admit when the data, observations, or evidence falsifies popular theories. BBT should have been put out to pasture 30 years ago never mind ST which was capable of only 1 prediction, falsified in 2012. They've all decided to... ignore reality and persist.
You know that a significant majority of physicists don't work on string theory, right? It's a subfield of a subfield. I think it's pretty presumptuous for you to prescribe what academic researchers should or shouldn't work on. Also worth noting that a ton of useful tools have come out of string theory research, including the BCFW recursion relations used to calculate amplitudes at the LHC. I'm not a string theorist, but that doesn't mean I can't acknowledge it as a worthwhile use of human intellect.
@@morganlee2806: Because we know that gravity interacts with quantum fields. And that's just on a purely empirical level, we can also look at it metaphysically and consider how any two real things must somehow relate to each other simply by virtue of being part of the same reality. That a unified field exists is obvious; it's finding out how it works and how gravity and quantum physics both fit into it that's the challenge. String theory has made great strides in that challenge.
"The critics don't try very hard to work on a competing theory or suggest one" Einstein-Podowsky-Rosen 1935, Quantum Mechanics is incomplete. What's your suggestion?
@@randomchannel-px6ho my theory is that we move back to classical physics also known as Newtonian physics and try describing things that we can actually measure and see.
@kennethgee2004 Gerard 't Hooft believes there's deterministic systems underlying quantum mechanics. Einstein always believed that as well. He spent his later life exploring Kaluza-Klein Theory which doesn't work and he was wrong about QMs lack of local realism being a fundamental error in the theory, but his view that QM is an approximation of so deeper underlying physics has always been shared by others. There are philosophical questions there though. A large quantum mechanical system, i.e the universe, has an extremely high degree of complexity. Chaos theory tells us that systems that display chaotic seemingly random behavior can actually be deterministic. However, deterministic predictions about the future evolution of such systems can only be made if the initial parameters are known. Additionally, being part of the universe ourselves, there's physical limitations to what we can observe at the microscopic scale. It is quite possible the universe is fundamentally deterministic, but we may never be able to have a complete theory reflecting that. I am very excited for the future of physics as I believe Quantum Computers have an immense potential to increase our understanding.
@@kennethgee2004: Unobservables became part of physics with Huygens and his wave model of light; Newton himself acknowledged the correctness of this. Since then unobservables have been a core part of science, and are not considered something one needs to remove or something bad, it's just accepted not all phenomena are directly perceivable by humans and that certain phenomena must be modeled using reasonable ideas about their underlying causes.
He admits they haven't figured anything out in 70 years, than tries to make a little dig at the end by saying the dissenters haven't come up with a competing idea. Maybe if his folly hadn't sucked up generations of the brightest minds in physics we would have another idea.
if you smoke DMT and enter a space that's more real than our present reality and you understand that consciousness is primary or foundational, then you realize that classical physics with only 4 dimensions is stupid
String theory has a major competitor, Loop Quantum Gravity, and some minor competitors, such as the work of Alain Connes. Also, I would like to see a second edition of Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics."
String Theory is not a well established physical theory, in fact it's not even one physical theory, it's a framework. A framework for gaming the scientific publication system and building a career in today's scientific community.
@@oldoddjobs So open minded on your part. I vote for the same, at this point its the only reasonable theory (pun intended). But I will vote the malice out of the equation. These scientists, who pride themselves on being penetrating and smart, are lost now but wont admit it. They just cant.
I am curious as to how many PhD level physicists - or more pertinently - physicists approaching Ed Witten's knowledge on this topic are in this thread. From my standpoint, the number of people on planet earth who can conceivably challenge Ed Witten on string theory could be counted on one hand. The likelihood that any of these appearing in this thread is virtually zero.
Current ST need 10 dimensions to work, some even more. That’s right kids, this brilliant ‘theory’ exists only as highly abstract mathematical models in the minds of string theorists. An unfalsifiable theory of strings based upon the arbitrary existence of unfalsifiable higher dimensions. This isn’t physics. C’mon.
Critics don't try to work hard on a competing theory because string theory sucks up all of the available brain potential. You would basically need a new Einstein wonder to pop up in order to get something revolutionary... and chances of that are rather slim.
String Theory ignore dimensional analysis , temporal and spacial structure of empirical dynamic bodies , ignore gravitational n body problem , ignore extensive and intensive magnitude difference and don't fit in any form of testable experimental physics frame work .
Witten gave the best response possible. String theory does produce a seamless connection between QM and GR. Anyone for whom the unification of QM and GR is important should definitely feel the force of Witten’s response. Those supposing that ST should be dismissed because it is just a mathematical framework sound like those who said that Newtonian Mechanics should be rejected because it is just a mathematical framework that relies on occult forces” for gravitation. In a way ST doesn’t have to make any predictions if it offers a consistent framework that explains how QM and GR are actually just features of a more general picture of physical reality. By so doing ST may give experimental physicists the very framework necessary for even imagining what would constitute an experiment for, say, testing for quantum gravity, or, how to even conceptualize it. It is, of course, obvious that QM and RT form a seamless whole. The problem is to find a descriptive framework from which nature’s unity is obvious to the human mind. This is the real glory of the scientific enterprise according to Feynman.
Science should be talked through civilly without politics. Just pure observations and theories. For what reason do we need to yell and fight? Where does that take the conversation? Ill tell you. Somewhere besides the main point most times. Keep science civil. That is how we make progress.
@@quarkravena theory predicts something given a model that can be tested string theory can't as ed wittens himself said it's not much of a. Theory but that does not mean it's uselesss
@@farzamimran3960 string theory can be tested, but it is difficult to test. It has the potential to produce more insights which could be testable if it is developed more. If you believe it has been totally useless, it shows your ignorance about the field.
string theory has not discovered a manner in which grrvity and quantum mechanics can work together . String theory is a paradigm that appears to simply invoke the unobservable and untestable to sidestep any problems it encounters. The maths may be beautiful but it is meaningless if it is an avenue to one again sidestep any problems it encounters. the point he makes about competing theories is a little trite insofar as for the last thirty years string theory has consumed very nearly all the available resources for work on the foundations of QM.
Maybe at 0:23, he should have specified that "String theory is ONE OF the frameworks in which humans have been able to imagine how QM and gravity can work together consistently."
His argument was kind of bad to be honest. He is basically saying String Theory seems promising and nobody he knows has a more promising alternative. Moving past his eloquence, his argument is not reassuring or scientific.
I dont know the math involved with string theory or other theories....or actually very little math at all. But assuming it is true that no one has a more promising alternative and its not just a subjective thought he has then the argument is quite valid. As far as the unknown is concerned you'd like to work in the most promising direction. caveat, what he said about it being the most promising direction must be true.
@@dco1019 A theory being promising is not the same thing as a verified theory. Verification requires evidence in the form of data from an experiment that confirms predictions made by your theory. A lack of alternative theories is irrelevant to this verification process. I’m not a physicist but I think the claim that there aren’t other promising theories is also probably not true.
For most of us, our CPU and RAM gets used up pretty easily making it harder to articulate our thoughts and ideas in a coherent and effortless manner. Ed's RAM and CPU are such that the effort he requires is equivalent to reading the pages of a book that's been laid out before him. It's no wonder everyone fears his intellect.
Yes! but what most people do not realize is the fact that any theory explaining phenomena at the Planck scale will be immeasurable, just as string theory is. The best we can do is to confine ourselves to theories that predict phenomena we can measure. There is hope though, dark energy and dark matter need an explanation, unless they are related to Planck energy too.
@@trounbyfire as you probably know, “can do math” is something of an understatement-he won the most prestigious award in the discipline despite being a physicist
You dont work on a competing theory. You let the data guide your hand. What you are trying to do is backward. You are asserting a theory and then looking for the data.
@@Daniel-ih4zh I've just remembered I think cause UA-cam has suggested me a short called "Roger Penrose: string theory is not physics". If you don't know, I'll tell you: this probably means that you can't "test" string theory with real-life data. Well yeah- the structure of string theory is simple for the purpose but it doesn't deal with real-life dimensions, it's dimensions aren't about real measurable existence, so does it make sense to use it when we can use something that means exactly what it means and falls in real-life experience all the time?
@PuppetMasterdaath144 dimensional gobbledygook is string theories primary modus operandi. Penrose, who has a Nobel prize in physics, rightly points out that string theory has never been validated by experiment and consistently fails to produce anything of predictive power. There are vastly more productive avenues of physics to pursue.
Read Paul Diracs 1963 Article reflecting on the previous 60 years of theoretical development. When Schrödingers equation was first developed, it was "wrong". Except Dirac discovered it predicted the spin of the electron, which until then wasn't known. Experiment confirmed the electrons spin. String theory might be wrong. We don't know. But saying it should stop is dumb
it’s easy to keep a nonsense solution so that you don’t have to search for a new one all those sayings are bs. ST is rightfully criticized. Science seems for some to be about butting your head against a nice wall that brings payment, for others it may be looking for a way that brings real answers
What the heck is so epic? Mr. Platitude here talks more like a corrupt politician defending indefensible budgets than a scientist. "Duty" 🤣 "The fact that we have nothing to show for it is proof we have to go on" 🤣
Please help me here; how is it possible to say that in string theory quantum mechanics and gravity work together consistently if one cannot make consistentncalculations that point to those accessible regions of the energy scale at which quantum effects cause physically measureable deviations from canonical general relativity? Isn't this just a case of mathematical consistency without physical intuition? A series of increasingly mathematical steps that become parched of physical intuition? Is it not our job, professionals and amateurs, to find applications of mathematics in the physical world rather than vice versa? We need to break apart string theory into smaller manageable bits that can be understood by undergraduates. There is clearly something intuitively wrong with it. It does not help to invoke extra dimensions as a starting point. If instead we started with an experiment that found hints of extra dimensions then proceeded from there as a hypothesis, this would seem more appropriate. Or, perhaps, it is simply the manner in which introductory texts to string theory open the subject that leaves much to be desired.
He's not even trying to defend string theory that hard, like you got to realize this guy feels himself the intellectual king of the castle, it's rather beneath the dignity of a king to have to defend his kingdom to others Needless to say, not a whole lot can be communicated in a brief tv interview, but this clip is hardly a strong defense of string theory or his instrumentality in its dominance
I discovered this theory all by myself, independently. Logically, at Big Bang, everything was One for we are talking about singularity. It is logical to assume existence of the Law of Preservation of Oneness, just like we propose the Law of Conservation of Energy. We posit that energy cannot be destroyed nor created - it can only take different forms. In the same token, Oneness cannot be destroyed nor created. We do not know the mechanism of preservation of Oneness, but we do not really know what energy really is. Since Existence precedes Essence (lat. "esse"), we posit that Oneness is and will always be. Hence, there must be some configuration space ensuring preservation of both Oneness and energy. This configuration space underlies QM and it represents it's "internals".
I remembered when a teacher asked me what 2+2 is. I told her the best answer is 9-5. You can have an infinite number of theories to satisfy merging of qm and gr, mathematically.
I love his language, talking about string theory being discovered when it has no expression in the real world beyond our minds. It was invented, and its wrong.
Did you even listen to Ed? You’re completely dismissing the fact that the mathematics of string theory are consistent with our quantum mechanical understanding of the universe and it offers invaluable solutions to certain phenomena. It is by no means appropriate to say that’s it’s proven wrong, when it currently has a great deal of support. Understanding the nature of gravity is such an enormous undertaking that it requires time and patience to fully formulate but we are currently going in the right direction. Frankly you need to understand patience on scientific matters. Discoveries and formulations don’t always happen overnight or with decades of research. Think about Euler when he formulated some of his equations. It took centuries to fully realise that you could understand the strong nuclear force with Euler’s equations. By your logic, Euler shouldn’t have bothered because it didn’t yield any significant result for decades. Sorry buddy, but this stuff takes time.
@@JackLWalsh Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes you also have to admit you've been travelling down the wrong path for a long time and need to restart the process of seriously looking at alternatives. Question is, how to tell if it is the wrong path? And how much have alternatives been tested and exhausted to the similar extents? No doubt many minds are pondering these questions constantly already, and would be better positioned to provide clarity for those outside the field.
@@hyperfluous4751if you don't like playing the fiddle because you would rather fiddle with your asshole all day, then don't join music school. You don't have to conclude that everyone in music school has taken the wrong path just because you prefer fiddling with your asshole. Get an argument
The critics argument: Every single prediction the string theory ever made was wrong. His response: Well, but it is beutiful and at least we try to do a thing that is not really necessary.
Isn’t it all quite simple? There are only waves and energy and electromagnetism etc. Matter doesn’t really exist, it’s just waves and vibrations. Colors doesn’t exist, they are just vawes etc. Matter is just clusters of energy and if you zoom in close enough you will see that there is nothing solid. But big enough clusters will act as they are solid, and interact with gravity/gravitational forces etc. and also others forces like air resistance in the atmosphere if it is in motion. But at the sub particle level there will never be friction, and that’s why energy is constant. I don’t know what I am talking about, it’s just ramblings 😅
The problem is over specialization. Theorists are useless without experimentation. You can not divorce the two things and work out of concert. This is a complete waste of everyones time and resources.
@@a-iz4pg Yeah, no. We can. It's called using indirect measurements and understanding the underlying principles which is what they're trying to do in foundation physics. We don't need to physically see Mars for our own eyes to know it's there. We know it's there because the body orbits a star causing a gravitational pull that we can measure, indirectly. We use all sorts of tools to understand bodies throughout the universe without needing to physically and directly confirm them. Same concept applies here. What has made String Theory so beautiful, and by far the biggest candidate to the theory of all - is that general relativity seems to emerge from their simulations even when they try to omit gravity entirely. That's a very, very good sign that they're on to something here. We need to also understand just how monumental Einstein truly was - and what he gave us we still do not fully understand, and neither did he. It's taken a century of thousands of physicists to chew on general relativity and make it work with atoms. String Theory does this - but unfortunately for us - it also gives an infinite, or a very very large unimaginable number of possibilities that could arise from the moment of conception of a universe- aka - what occurred the instant of the Big Bang and before it.
So what you're saying is that string theory is the result of looking at the gaps of our understanding of the universe and filling it with math. And not just any math but an equasion that fits every one of our observations extrodinarily well.
So the basic premise is that: In small enough areas ...one finds extra dimensions. Dimensions which 'curl' around the one dimension represented as the 'string'....
Apparently the reality is, anyone in their field that goes against string theory, and wants to explore different possibilities is put to the side, largely ignored..makes you wonder whats going on there
The only thing he destroyed was the notion that String Theory is actual science (rather than just basically modern Natural Philosophy, not much different from the speculation of the ancient Greeks) and worth devoting such a massive amount of funding to.
@@carlgauss1702 ”needlessly”? You are 100% clueless about what you’re talking about and literally. Please, don’t tell a nuclear engineer how a reactor should be built, nor a theoretical physicist how to develop models. It is so incredibly ridiculous that you think you should express an opinion on a matter you haven’t taken the time to understand even for a second.
@@RP-ch8yn Am I? AM I? You like to think complicated stuff but also pretend it to be somehow valuable. It isnt, and in the same vein; all your assumptioms about me, are wrong. Nothing surprising from this source.
@@carlgauss1702 What even is your argument? That complicated mathematics is some useless egoism? My guy, the whole world runs on complicated mathematics that few understand. And the simple formulas engineers and finance people get to use were derived by mathematicians with more complex techniques. I don’t get your point. Mathematics is the single most important factor in the technological and scientific revolution and nothing else even comes close.
@@RP-ch8yn I am a mathematician, thats why my nickname is Carl Gauss, I ve dealt with very convoluted structures and characterized them all. But I am intelligent enough to see that more complication doesnt mean extra value in the real world. Its just a game after some point.
Not really. He is smart, and he is capable of great mathematical sophistication. That doesn't mean that him saying "others are not working hard in developing alternatives" is a smart thing to say. Especially since their arguments are largely based on the claim that String Theory has too much emphasis and takes up too many of the resources/too much of the attention of researchers. (I'm not in a position to assess that claim.)
Well, if saying “it is not a well established theory, it is a speculative idea that we have hardly understood” is your idea of a destruction of dissenters, string “theory” (Brian Green also suggested to drop the term theory because it is doesn’t apply) might be exactly your cup of tea.
The problem with critiquing a theory like superstrings is that you essentially have to ignore the decades worth of very tantalizing developments that happened in the field only to base your arguments on what experiments couldn't falsify. If you don't do that you'd realise that string theory is perhaps the most mathematically consistent theory humans ever created. Just to give you a taste of this, quantum field theories which are extremely successful in their own rights have issues with UV/IR divergences. They also tell you nothing about the dimensions of spacetime you're operating on. And of course there's the whole issue with non-renormalizable field theories an example of which will be any naive second quantization of Einstein's field equations. String theory avoids divergences in a really elegant way and the number of free parameters is essentially just one which is the string length. Putting consistency checks on the ghost states, you can easily see that the theory only holds in 10 dimensions. Additionally compactifying the some of these dimensions can lead to very powerful dualities between two completely different theories. AdS/CFT is a result of this which has very interesting experimental implications and variations (broadly called holographic theories) of it is actually in some sense verified via results in condensed matter physics and QGP. String theory for a very long time was the only theory which could generate a concrete formulation of holography. Later holographic theories outside of strings were found out (like JT/SYK). However all these theories can also be derived from some variant of string theory. Let me tell you, in this context LQG isn't very prominent because it couldn't give us any meaningful results in holography. In fact no other theory could. And all this is just one very tiny aspect of the ocean of achievements that string theory holds. Yes current experiments can't verify this but theoretical physics has its own consistency checks. That's why most physicists doing theory aren't super bothered with experiments.
"Yes current experiments can't verify this but theoretical physics has its own consistency checks. That's why most physicists doing theory aren't super bothered with experiments." Oh my god. Translation: "I am confused about the difference between physics and mathematics."
@@chuckles960 It translates into what I wrote. Your strawman-ing doesn't hold here. Physics isn't all about experiments. The Higgs boson was predicted in theory, not in experiments. It was confirmed in experiments. The entropy function of Ising models is predicted in theory, exotic phase transitions are predicted in theory, symmetry breaking is predicted in theory. None of those are "predicted" in experiments as a first go to. Yeah they are confirmed there. But if someone can't perform an experiment to confirm that symmetry breaking does occur would you stop doing theory altogether when the entire idea of symmetry breaking is theoretically absolutely sound? The classic example of this is in the difference between LQG and Strings. LQG fails the math consistency checks that general relativity puts forward. It predicts the violation of Lorentz invariance. Experiments doesn't have to rule it out when the math itself is inconsistent. A lot of development, some of the biggest of this generation in fact, happened solely on the basis of theoretical studies. We have AdS/CFT, tensor networks, topological quantum computation, Chern Simon's theory and topological insulators, time crystals, etc, all of which were theories that people worked on way before any kind of experimental evidence showed up as confirmation. In fact for topological quantum computation Majorana fermions are still not found and yet people are hopeful about it. Even nuclear fusion is a tech which isn't fully implemented in experiments and the breakthroughs that are happening in the last one or two years are happening after decades of developments.
@@sambitsarkar5190 It has been so long since I’ve seen a person on UA-cam actually get what string theory’s merits are. In my opinion, just AdS/CFT in itself is incredibly powerful, giving us ways to compute explicitly the entanglement entropies via RT and HRT. Are you aware of the recent works in dS as well?
@@vaibhavk2400 I have heard that people are focusing on dS these days although I haven't checked anything closely. I am aware that post 1997 there were couple of interesting papers on dS variants by Strominger and Witten. I have heard that supersymmetry isn't totally compatible with dS? And there were also issues with defining the boundary theory. Although in this regard I have better idea of non supersymmetric AdS/CFT variants like the JT/SYK. I assume studying these models may prove beneficial towards getting the dS picture.
You can rephrase it better. Even Astrology has had centuries worth of research and work into it, but does it make it right? String theory or these extra dimensions is plain BS
That would be like watching Lebron James vs. Danny DeVito playing basketball. I actually agree with Weinstein that string theory is a waste of time and talent, but Weinstein just isn't in Witten's league. Weinstein is a hedge fund manager and podcaster, not a theoretical physicist. I would rather see someone who is a real player in theoretical physics, like Lee Smolin, debate Witten.
@ienjoyapples is this true? Im a moron and uneducated past gcse /low alevel understanding of phyiscs. So when listening to eric wiestein he comes across as a very smart person trying to pass himself off a insanely smart person. Is he full of shit? Or is he seen by physicists as a genius that just happens to have an unorthodox theory/set of ideas?
@@2xjsf83f2 Weinstein has a Ph.D in mathematical physics, but after getting his degree, he didn't go on to have a career as a mathematician or a physicist. He spent most of his career working in finance. Most physicists didn't know who he was until he started going on Joe Rogan bashing the physics community. He's certainly a smart guy and knowledgeable about physics, so he's not completely full of shit, but he's not a physicist. He likes to paint himself as some unrecognized genius, but nobody in the physics community regards him as such.
Anyone catch that mic drop at the end? 1:32 “..with that said though, I’ve noticed that generally speaking, the critics don’t seem to try very hard to work on a competing theory or to suggest one.”
He destroyed any notion that he will ever be able to see what the problem with string theory is. He doesn't look well either. Sic transit gloria filorum.
How to get an endless source of funding. Find a problem that you think is most likely to be impossible to solve. Create or find a mathematical model that makes it work even though the model predicts things that are not observable and then claim that its the best we have so although we don't have the answer we should continue research and continue to get funding. Oh and hint that everyone else is dumb.
I respect all of these great physicists and mathematicians. But still cant ignore the fact that, decades have passed without any proven predictions done in The String Theory🤔
Whoa, after decades of work Whitten states he has no idea of where to begin if he had not started on string theory? Is that what holding theoretical physics hostage looks like? I hope I'm wrong, but it sounded like Dr. Whitten was saying that the problem of "getting quantum mechanics and gravity to work together consistently", given string theory holds some of this together, is "our" (all theoretical physicists?) duty to explore it further? Then goes on to say something to the effect of if he had not started down that path, he wouldn't know where to start, somehow implying that without his theories theoretical physics would be in a ... what? holding pattern or something? this blows my mind
Good point, but the problem is that the theoretical particle physics departments are full of string theorists that hire only string theorists. How come new ideas emerge from such closed environment? Why string theorists do not work on other alternatives? Perhaps the lack of research grant? or lack of other researchers willing to participate?
We need the JRE Eric Weinstein and Ed Witten Episode.
I don't think witten is brave enough. While he is a genius, remember what comes with that, a sense of superiority and a touch of insanity. The problem with written is no one is confident enough to really take him on. But I also think witten is used to being unchallenged now. When people have gone against him, don't go at what he knows, go at what is wrong, and where he is questionable. Just keep pressing and questioning. Witten is a strange case of he feels superiority, and normal people feel he is superior.
Eric would win against witten
@@ExcaliburGB You make some good points but overall your statements are very subjective and have little substance. People have constantly criticized Witten's ideas about string theory for over 20 years now and some claim he has mislead the community for 50 years down a bind alley, so how can you say he is used to being unchallenged?
I think you are right that just about anyone on the planet who understands the latest theory of general relativity, Quantum physics/gravity, string theory and how they could be unified would be reluctant or even terrified to live discuss the problems of string theory with Witten and I include Penrose and Eric in that list.
The typical critics like Weinstein, Hossenfelder and Penrose go after "easy target" string theorists like Kaku and Brian Green in live debates but never Witten, why is this?
Even if Eric and Ed did debate live, how do you define "would win".
Eric doesn't even have the basis of a competitive theory, there are no competitive theories.
String theory has lead to 1000's of breakthroughs in physics and ironically even lead to Witten winning a Fields Medal in mathematics, not bad for a theoretical physicist.
He is continually working on small provable aspects that one day may lead us closer to a solution. One big example is M Theory.
Just because we don't have the tools to prove all 10 dimensions exist in string theory because they are either too small to detect with the LHC or too large to comprehend, does not mean that they do not exist.
You attack Witten's character as that of someone who thinks he is superior to everyone else. I've watched 100's of videos of Witten and never seen him act that way. Can you post a link showing otherwise?
I believe that Witten is simply ahead of his time and has even won more awards than Captain Kirk showed in the Star Trek episode 'Court Marshall'
ua-cam.com/video/W1Y-IpSj7q0/v-deo.html
it will never happen because Eric is a coward and a liar for fame
@@Mewsashi-cz9fo he does seem to be a fame seeker for sure.
@@ExcaliburGB Just listen him, nobody is can argue anything against him.
Click-bait title. Witten didn't "destroy" anything. And string theory still has a lot of problems and criticisms of it are still valid.
He didn't destroy jack squat. He said if people have a better theory, then present it. That destroys dissenters now, eh....
Context.. I think it was more the way he said it.. it still didn't "destroy" anyone.
The man is just brazen.
Whether brazenly correct, or brazenly incorrect… it seems that time will only tell.
We need more minds of whom will challenge.
Which, as of recent, are far and few between😒
this guy vs penrose in a 10 hour long think tank session
@@PuppetMasterdaath144 I hate to say it but, Witten would eat Penrose for breakfast and then defecate Dyson
@@HeckYesHeIsUnbannedcool
The absence of an alternative does not prove the theory. Other than sucking up brainpower and funding, how does it unify quantum mechanics and gravity? Isn’t that the whole point?
I think its safe to say that ed witten has a much better grasp on this stuff than anyone in this comment section
@@cameronv320 its baffling the number of idiots with zero credentials on the internet who somehow think they are qualified to have an opinion on the matter
@@cameronv320 How would _you_ know that if you're not qualified either? The argument from authority is still a bad argument because it can always be thrown back at those making it, like I just did.
@@aarondavis8943 Yea i get your point. But OP is just regurgitating talking points from Weinstein without saying anything useful about string theory or its alternatives.
The question he was asked was the wrong question.
The problem isn't the exploration of the theory.
The problem is the near monopoly on funding the theory holds, and the dismissal of a unified field theory based on the existence of string theory.
So the Unified Field theory lies underneath Superstring theory, in the Unified field there are no strings it is just infinite silence, pure nothingness with Infinite potential.
Nobody is taking this away from Einstein, but he didn't really come up with this by himself, It has been in the Vedic culture for thousands of years. Modern-day Humans are just dead set on figuring everything out in order to monopolize the fruits of labor and get closer to figuring out how to understand and manipulate quantum gravity with what the materials and means have on Earth, and We have done it ,just ask Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, but they didn't come up with it on the whim , or with open scientific research, no no, they just copied it from ETs and hid the information under the rug,
and no no we didn't figure it out at CERN no matter what they say, but CERN is there just to get the general public comfortable, because in order for most humans to really understand things out of this common world , it seems we have to physically produce it in a lab .. and in my opinion it is a total disregard to subjective knowledge and traditional wisdom we gain form understanding how our universe works.
Dr. John Hagelin explains this best , and he isn't out for people's money , and he's been in Superstring theory for decades, and even he admits that the possibility of finding all the different spin types of all the Bose and Fermi fields that superstring theory presents within the laws Supersymmetry is literally impossible with the modern scientific approach, It calls for 70 Higgs bosons for crying out loud , we have only found one after all these years , but maybe thats just a fragment of what a Higgs Boson really is , maybe we just got one type with a 0 spin type ?
So it is safe to say that we really need help from outside of our solar system , in which we will have if people can open their hearts to such truths, and let the ETs that have figured it out help us, but I don't think they will help unless enough of us want their help , it will be too detrimental to our sociological structure unless there is enough of us who can gain the wisdom needed to obtain the knowledge and encounters.
Thanks have a nice day , Powhatan Wayne
They are cutting away their funds fast, finally. Many strings collegues at uni now switched to classical gr.
this is hardly a true statement in 2024
Wrong. There is a reason why it is the front-running theory. Because no other theory that has been presented is better, or explains more, than String Theory. The moment it is presented - in a serious manner - String Theory may lose the throne. But until then - get to work! And all other issues aside - I like Witten's demeanor and attitude towards other's than I do Weinstein, and that in itself is extremely important. Witten is clearly reserved and humble, and that is why Weinstein is terrified of him. Weinstein honestly seems disgruntled that he wasn't born a century earlier and lost the W in his last name.
@@CFLsurfr You are either: a bot, trying to start an argument for the shits and gigs, terribly informed, or a moron.
I don't find any destroying force in his answer , his answer is just description of ST us usually ( ST is already a description of mathematically possible particles) so Edward Witten hadn't, hasn't and will not have any force of legitimacy to defend ST till his weapon is always: description of possibilities ( EXP500 possibility of vacuum states)😮😮😮
I have noticed people confronting Edward Witten in many forums. He is sincere on the stand of String theory. For any scientific discovery, one should not have bias. He is open and practical about where the theory stands. It would be good to go from his last comment to understand this better. No one has come up with an alternate theory that is appealing. Just contesting String theory based on individual notions comes from the personal bias of the individual insight based on their comtemplation of physics. He is clear that this theory needs to be better established.
Hey, he just said it wasn't a theory. I's a "framework" 🤣you see? Doesn't have to meet the standards for successful / acceptable theories either. Another layer of unfalsifiability 🤣
since when does a theory need a competitor to be proven bad/wrong?
@@longhoacaophuc8293 Good question. Also, since when was any idea that didn't make testable predictions considered a "theory"? It sounds more like philosophy than a scientific theory to me.
@@longhoacaophuc8293it's not about proving anything. There have been many respected dissenters and ground shakers in science who were respected and other physics enjoyed debating and testing their theories. This dark enlightentment guy is not going to be one of those. First of all he's ugly. Second of all laymen is his audience and his audience thinks he's ugly. I'd be willing to give him a chance but he needs to be less arrogant. He's just too ugly to be so confident without people thinking he's up to some grift. I'm not saying he can't be a villain but be a competent villain.
Well said. It's not much different from what the ancient Greeks were doing. @@michaelhill6451
he destroyed nobody and failed to refute the critiques of string theory.
this man would made a fantastic super villian
He is regarded as genius.
This guy is an alien.
He is pretty much slowly discrediting science. With this model that hasnt delivered squat im not saying any other model is beter but still
Very dumb people will never understand someone like Witten.
@@DC-zi6se He is. Read Three Body Problem. The Aliens plan there is about confounding human science to slow down Human development. My suspicion is that he is an infiltrator.
String theory has done nothing to advance anything.
I was eagerly anticipating the destroying part, but it never happened. This is an embarrassing title for a video regarding an intellectual and academic topic in the natural sciences. I have also noticed there appears to be a concerted effort by some people to present this man as the genius mind of our time. I hope they’re right, and he can further science like the great minds of the past.
“That doesn’t mean it should be everyone’s cup of tea or that everyone should work on it. with that said though, I’ve noticed the critics don’t seem to try very hard to work on a competing theory or to suggest one”
I wouldn’t call it destroying but it’s a firm statement.
@@will.42069
He is a scientist I suspect he does not engage in silly things as “destroying“ but rather conduct research and engage in academic discussions. I would label his response as a gentle defence of the field of his study and research, which is a reasonable thing to do. I do not have any strong feelings about string theory, but lack of alternatives is not the greatest praise of something.
He did.
It's funny how youtube and social media equalizes everybody where a random youtube commentor gets to judge Wittens words and his intelligence.
@@mrgyani
I’m afraid your comment doesn’t relate to anything I’ve written. I assume that your comment “he did“ means that you believe he destroyed people who criticise string theory. This is incredibly childish and immature way to think about science and scientists. As for the rest of your comment, unfortunately I don’t know what you’re talking about.
He presented a very clear, concise and compelling rebuttal.
1. String theory forces quantum gravity
2. It would have been neglectful to not investigate it
3. The detractors still don’t have any respectable alternatives
What were you expecting?
String theory poisoned the well of physics. It's easy to say, 'you're not smart enough' when you peddle nonsense that has never been testable, or verifiable in any way.
or you are just dumb
String theory has big problems and he cleverly did not mention those.
Right. And you seem to know those??
@@shyamfootprints972I do. The main one is simple: it can't be tested! That's a pretty big deal in science.
@morganlee2806 There are many aspects of string theory that can be tested. Some have been without success thus far with many other falsifiable predictions waiting for better technology.
@@morganlee2806 Technically, you're wrong, because you can derive the field equations of gravity purely by applying string theory to quantum mechanics. General relativity has been experimentally verified, so you are completely wrong and it is clear that you have no rudimentary understanding of the topics that you are attempting to discuss.
No it's not. By your logic, Schrödingers should have tossed out his equation when he derived it. It was wrong!
It took an intuitive hunch that the theory he was basing his work on, wave particle duality, was sound that encouraged him to keep looking at, which eventually led to Dirac formalizing it's implication that the electron had a spin
Until Schrödingers equation, no one had known that, it was a completely theoretical prediction that violated observations based on prior models. It turned out to be more correct than those.
There are problems with our model of the universe. Do you have a better idea? Let people come up with a theory to make predictions from. We have an idea that we don't understand math well enough to bring into fruition. Can we work on that without being told it's stupid by people who can't do math?
Watch Dirac's 1982 interview. He said he suspects the constants that should be applied to Einstein's general relativity (the theory in the most abstract sense, for Dirac also doubts there's only 4 dimensions) are most likely different than those we have, which were derived disregarding general relativity, which is a highly successful theory and what Einstein believed to be his most important gravity is a glaring omission from the standard model. Dirac is responsible for most of the theoritcal formalization of Quantum Field Theory, including Quantum Chromodynamics. His equations found predicted infinite answers, which is obviously a problem.
Detour. Another theory famously does this. Einstein's theory of general relativity. Many insisted early on that made it wrong. Instead, black holes were discovered as Einstein predicted.
Eventually a process called "renormalization" was discovered to remove those infinites and make predictions. Dirac never liked that, and sure enough renormalization of GCD remains a highly active field in physics, as the technique has needed to be refined, and now it appears to be giving us a wrong prediction possibly, for the experimental data for the magnetic moments of the gluon is not matching what QCD predictions using these renormalization techniques, and the data is getting close to the accuracy needed to be considered a breakthrough (and also sigma 5 being super special is completely arbitrary so if you think freely, there's that and a lot of other handwaving of anomalies deemed not statistically significant enough).
Another solution to Einstein's general relativity is Einstein's-Rosen bridges, i.e wormholes, existing at those infinites. It is completely theoretical, but does that mean it's wrong.
Spacetime is warped by mass. Mass is the product of interactions at the quantum scale, mostly the strong force, governed by GCD, which if we ignore renormalization as Dirac suggested we should, also predicts infinites. Hmmmmmmm....
Quantum Field Theory was developed largely after the famous 1935 paper by Einstein Podowsky and Rosen predicting Quantum entanglement. What is often handwaved is that that paper was arguing that those observations proved quantum mechanics was somehow incomplete. That is in part, because Einstein's assumption he thought was it's error turned out to be incorrect, but nevertheless the general argument stands.
So let's go back to how according to general relativity mass warps spacetime, and mass is largely a product of quantum field interactions, mainly those of GCD and the strong force, which also predicts infinites like general relativity does. There is a conjecture in theoretical physics that perhaps there's a connection between Einstein Rosen bridges and Quantum entanglement, ER = EPR.
That seems like a genius idea to follow up on, and sure enough it is, it is based on explorations of Anti de sitter space, which seems to correspond to the symmetries in conformal field theories, aka GED (which governs both the electromagnetic field and the weak interaction, the higgs mechanism explains this) & GCD, & along Yang Mills n=4 theory aka supergravity which is completely theoretical. (FYI n=3 is GCD, n=2 × n=1 in QED). Guess how was the first to have a hunch Anti de sitter spaces might be important? Dirac.
That's right, string theory is the brain child of the genius who MADE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS YOU USE. What an idiot.
Nor even a theory
I like to think of the quest of humanity to understand the universe as a toddler building an epic jigsaw puzzle. Newton provided a wonky table, then Einstein fixed it. Quantum physics has provided the pieces, and we have verified that lots of pieces are there but suspect there will be some missing. Now we are trying to start building the puzzle but lack the dexterity (experimental capability) to make a lot of progress. So we imagine building it instead, and sometimes our imagination runs wild and skips to what it might look like at the end. String Theory is one way in which we are looking at the pieces and imagining putting them together without worrying about what it will look like at the end, we just want them to fit and may need to imagine some of those missing pieces. It may take a 100 years, or a thousand, but a successor to today's embryonic imaginations will complete the puzzle. It just depends how long it takes for the toddler to grow up.
Wow, well put
No the problem is that scientists won't admit when the data, observations, or evidence falsifies popular theories. BBT should have been put out to pasture 30 years ago never mind ST which was capable of only 1 prediction, falsified in 2012. They've all decided to... ignore reality and persist.
One day when string theory has run its course (hopefully soon), Physicists can get back to real physics.
lol condensed matter physicists go bre
You know that a significant majority of physicists don't work on string theory, right? It's a subfield of a subfield. I think it's pretty presumptuous for you to prescribe what academic researchers should or shouldn't work on. Also worth noting that a ton of useful tools have come out of string theory research, including the BCFW recursion relations used to calculate amplitudes at the LHC. I'm not a string theorist, but that doesn't mean I can't acknowledge it as a worthwhile use of human intellect.
The "real" physics of lacking any coherent unification of quantum physics and gravity? Right.
@@hoon_solWhy does there have to be one?
@@morganlee2806:
Because we know that gravity interacts with quantum fields. And that's just on a purely empirical level, we can also look at it metaphysically and consider how any two real things must somehow relate to each other simply by virtue of being part of the same reality.
That a unified field exists is obvious; it's finding out how it works and how gravity and quantum physics both fit into it that's the challenge. String theory has made great strides in that challenge.
0:30 He said it himself. It's a long term SPECULATIVE enterprise.
Yeah because they reverse engineered UFOs already and have to push out the false cover story 1/2 truth bs to keep the normies chasing their tails
"The critics don't try very hard to work on a competing theory or suggest one"
Einstein-Podowsky-Rosen 1935, Quantum Mechanics is incomplete. What's your suggestion?
@@randomchannel-px6ho my theory is that we move back to classical physics also known as Newtonian physics and try describing things that we can actually measure and see.
@kennethgee2004 Gerard 't Hooft believes there's deterministic systems underlying quantum mechanics. Einstein always believed that as well. He spent his later life exploring Kaluza-Klein Theory which doesn't work and he was wrong about QMs lack of local realism being a fundamental error in the theory, but his view that QM is an approximation of so deeper underlying physics has always been shared by others.
There are philosophical questions there though. A large quantum mechanical system, i.e the universe, has an extremely high degree of complexity. Chaos theory tells us that systems that display chaotic seemingly random behavior can actually be deterministic. However, deterministic predictions about the future evolution of such systems can only be made if the initial parameters are known. Additionally, being part of the universe ourselves, there's physical limitations to what we can observe at the microscopic scale. It is quite possible the universe is fundamentally deterministic, but we may never be able to have a complete theory reflecting that.
I am very excited for the future of physics as I believe Quantum Computers have an immense potential to increase our understanding.
@@kennethgee2004:
Unobservables became part of physics with Huygens and his wave model of light; Newton himself acknowledged the correctness of this. Since then unobservables have been a core part of science, and are not considered something one needs to remove or something bad, it's just accepted not all phenomena are directly perceivable by humans and that certain phenomena must be modeled using reasonable ideas about their underlying causes.
So… string theory ain’t a big deal and only a few people should work on it…. But we take 99% of the funding.
Owned?
He admits they haven't figured anything out in 70 years, than tries to make a little dig at the end by saying the dissenters haven't come up with a competing idea. Maybe if his folly hadn't sucked up generations of the brightest minds in physics we would have another idea.
how, you just sit in your room and act constipated
Did he force people to do string theory? lol
if you smoke DMT and enter a space that's more real than our present reality and you understand that consciousness is primary or foundational, then you realize that classical physics with only 4 dimensions is stupid
@@PuppetMasterdaath144and you sit there wallowing in your shit stains of a theory.
String theory has a major competitor, Loop Quantum Gravity, and some minor competitors, such as the work of Alain Connes.
Also, I would like to see a second edition of Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics."
String Theory is not a well established physical theory, in fact it's not even one physical theory, it's a framework. A framework for gaming the scientific publication system and building a career in today's scientific community.
Secretly Big Ed could solve quantum gravity if he wanted to but prefers to milk his framework for papers, grants & tenure
Stop being such a clown 🤡
@@oldoddjobs So open minded on your part.
I vote for the same, at this point its the only reasonable theory (pun intended). But I will vote the malice out of the equation. These scientists, who pride themselves on being penetrating and smart, are lost now but wont admit it. They just cant.
I am curious as to how many PhD level physicists - or more pertinently - physicists approaching Ed Witten's knowledge on this topic are in this thread. From my standpoint, the number of people on planet earth who can conceivably challenge Ed Witten on string theory could be counted on one hand. The likelihood that any of these appearing in this thread is virtually zero.
Current ST need 10 dimensions to work, some even more. That’s right kids, this brilliant ‘theory’ exists only as highly abstract mathematical models in the minds of string theorists. An unfalsifiable theory of strings based upon the arbitrary existence of unfalsifiable higher dimensions. This isn’t physics. C’mon.
This title is not even wrong.
thank you, I immediately thought of Wolfgang Pauli
LOL! I 😂😂😂👍
Critics don't try to work hard on a competing theory because string theory sucks up all of the available brain potential. You would basically need a new Einstein wonder to pop up in order to get something revolutionary... and chances of that are rather slim.
Those types are driven out of science which brokers no dissent these days.
String Theory ignore dimensional analysis , temporal and spacial structure of empirical dynamic bodies , ignore gravitational n body problem , ignore extensive and intensive magnitude difference and don't fit in any form of testable experimental physics frame work .
The only things that make sense in your post are "and" and ","
Witten gave the best response possible. String theory does produce a seamless connection between QM and GR. Anyone for whom the unification of QM and GR is important should definitely feel the force of Witten’s response. Those supposing that ST should be dismissed because it is just a mathematical framework sound like those who said that Newtonian Mechanics should be rejected because it is just a mathematical framework that relies on occult forces” for gravitation. In a way ST doesn’t have to make any predictions if it offers a consistent framework that explains how QM and GR are actually just features of a more general picture of physical reality. By so doing ST may give experimental physicists the very framework necessary for even imagining what would constitute an experiment for, say, testing for quantum gravity, or, how to even conceptualize it. It is, of course, obvious that QM and RT form a seamless whole. The problem is to find a descriptive framework from which nature’s unity is obvious to the human mind. This is the real glory of the scientific enterprise according to Feynman.
We need trash talk in scientific community..
dId You EvEn coNsIdEr 1/2 sPiN? hehe
Rip Lubos
That’s my whole MO
LMFAO
Science should be talked through civilly without politics. Just pure observations and theories. For what reason do we need to yell and fight? Where does that take the conversation? Ill tell you. Somewhere besides the main point most times. Keep science civil. That is how we make progress.
String theory is not a theory, more a hypothesis/speculation. I am sorry string theory fans but the emperor wears no clothes.
...and how, exactly, do you know this?
It's a theory. It's a robust mathematical model for the unification of gravity and quantum mechanics
@@quarkraven without experimental verification string theory is NOT a physical theory.
@@quarkravena theory predicts something given a model that can be tested string theory can't as ed wittens himself said it's not much of a. Theory but that does not mean it's uselesss
@@farzamimran3960 string theory can be tested, but it is difficult to test. It has the potential to produce more insights which could be testable if it is developed more. If you believe it has been totally useless, it shows your ignorance about the field.
string theory has not discovered a manner in which grrvity and quantum mechanics can work together . String theory is a paradigm that appears to simply invoke the unobservable and untestable to sidestep any problems it encounters. The maths may be beautiful but it is meaningless if it is an avenue to one again sidestep any problems it encounters.
the point he makes about competing theories is a little trite insofar as for the last thirty years string theory has consumed very nearly all the available resources for work on the foundations of QM.
Lol it wasn't discovered. It was literally invented but ok.
Maybe at 0:23, he should have specified that "String theory is ONE OF the frameworks in which humans have been able to imagine how QM and gravity can work together consistently."
What are othets?
@@ibraheemkhan6660 From Wikipedia:
- Loop Quantum Gravity
- Asymptotic safety in quantum gravity
- Euclidean quantum gravity
- Integral method
- Causal dynamical triangulation
- Causal fermion systems
- Causal Set Theory
- Covariant Feynman path integral approach
- Dilatonic quantum gravity
- Double copy theory
- Group field theory
- Wheeler-DeWitt equation
- Geometrodynamics
- Hořava-Lifshitz gravity
- MacDowell-Mansouri action
- Noncommutative geometry
- Path-integral based models of quantum cosmology
- Regge calculus
- Shape Dynamics
- String-nets and quantum graphity
- Supergravity
- Twistor theory
- Canonical quantum gravity
@@ibraheemkhan6660 I think loop quantum gravity is one of the main competing frameworks.
@@ibraheemkhan6660 Loop Quantum Gravity, but that is not going anywhere
Witten proposed M-Theiry which seeks to combine all other “ theories of everything.” It is a umbrella for all other string type theories.
A frame work to imagine … had it not been discovered … sounds like a theory to me papi !!
It's all theoretical. Including evolution.
@@piezra2848 Gravity is also a theory, you are welcome to test it.
Destroying absolutely no one
His argument was kind of bad to be honest. He is basically saying String Theory seems promising and nobody he knows has a more promising alternative. Moving past his eloquence, his argument is not reassuring or scientific.
I dont know the math involved with string theory or other theories....or actually very little math at all. But assuming it is true that no one has a more promising alternative and its not just a subjective thought he has then the argument is quite valid. As far as the unknown is concerned you'd like to work in the most promising direction.
caveat, what he said about it being the most promising direction must be true.
@@dco1019 A theory being promising is not the same thing as a verified theory. Verification requires evidence in the form of data from an experiment that confirms predictions made by your theory. A lack of alternative theories is irrelevant to this verification process. I’m not a physicist but I think the claim that there aren’t other promising theories is also probably not true.
For most of us, our CPU and RAM gets used up pretty easily making it harder to articulate our thoughts and ideas in a coherent and effortless manner. Ed's RAM and CPU are such that the effort he requires is equivalent to reading the pages of a book that's been laid out before him. It's no wonder everyone fears his intellect.
Ed got his ram on dual channel 😂
@@Epilogue_04 he got that DDR7
He is using quantum computing bro.
haha so thats why kaku was so confident when saying almost a copy of what was said here
Yea generally that comes from intelligence. Articulation like that. Its easy to speak clearly when your thinking clearly and are intelligent lol.
String Theory destroyed itself.
Yes! but what most people do not realize is the fact that any theory explaining phenomena at the Planck scale will be immeasurable, just as string theory is. The best we can do is to confine ourselves to theories that predict phenomena we can measure. There is hope though, dark energy and dark matter need an explanation, unless they are related to Planck energy too.
@@5678plm pretty sure some quantum effects have been tested at scale in recent history
How to say you don't understand Witten with just one title of youtube video.
String hypothesis ✅
String Theory ❌
What a misleading title
Witten is an actual genius...and he can do math...
Autism with aspergers😊😊 just a thought above 99.01 of us. And a mind we need to hear even if we don't understand.
@@trounbyfire as you probably know, “can do math” is something of an understatement-he won the most prestigious award in the discipline despite being a physicist
@@jd35711 i think he solved string theory equations alone. I did a project in highschool
"Despite being a pbycisist" 😂@@jd35711
Eric Weinstein is an actual genius. And a mathematician.
For 5 decades string theory has done nothing to move humanity forward and closer towards the truth of our physical realm.
it's not a theory, it makes no testable prediction.
It's hardly even a hypothesis.
You're just agreeing with what he said. It's a framework not a theory.
@@missionpupa I know I am agreeing. I am adding to the point, not arguing. Hard to call it science if it's not emergent from hypothesis.
Don't put all your eggs(people) in one basket..
He is backpeddling so vigourously he risks going backwards in time.
Very smart people working on a very hard problem. Let them take their own path.
There is loop quantum gravity a theory that competes string theory.
You dont work on a competing theory. You let the data guide your hand.
What you are trying to do is backward. You are asserting a theory and then looking for the data.
Recent Penrose's answer tho... ("the number of dimensions in string theory is plain wrong")
Why does he think this?
@@Daniel-ih4zh "think" 😂
@@Daniel-ih4zh I've just remembered I think cause UA-cam has suggested me a short called "Roger Penrose: string theory is not physics". If you don't know, I'll tell you: this probably means that you can't "test" string theory with real-life data. Well yeah- the structure of string theory is simple for the purpose but it doesn't deal with real-life dimensions, it's dimensions aren't about real measurable existence, so does it make sense to use it when we can use something that means exactly what it means and falls in real-life experience all the time?
he said this while holding his head up and holding his head in his arms holding it up, then he said some dimensional gabbelgook
@PuppetMasterdaath144 dimensional gobbledygook is string theories primary modus operandi. Penrose, who has a Nobel prize in physics, rightly points out that string theory has never been validated by experiment and consistently fails to produce anything of predictive power. There are vastly more productive avenues of physics to pursue.
Read Paul Diracs 1963 Article reflecting on the previous 60 years of theoretical development. When Schrödingers equation was first developed, it was "wrong". Except Dirac discovered it predicted the spin of the electron, which until then wasn't known. Experiment confirmed the electrons spin.
String theory might be wrong. We don't know. But saying it should stop is dumb
He said it's easy to offer criticism: the hard thing to do is offer a solution.
it’s easy to keep a nonsense solution so that you don’t have to search for a new one
all those sayings are bs. ST is rightfully criticized. Science seems for some to be about butting your head against a nice wall that brings payment, for others it may be looking for a way that brings real answers
What the heck is so epic?
Mr. Platitude here talks more like a corrupt politician defending indefensible budgets than a scientist.
"Duty" 🤣
"The fact that we have nothing to show for it is proof we have to go on" 🤣
This man wouldn’t hurt a fly
To me he looks dangerous
Very@@prity777
Please help me here; how is it possible to say that in string theory quantum mechanics and gravity work together consistently if one cannot make consistentncalculations that point to those accessible regions of the energy scale at which quantum effects cause physically measureable deviations from canonical general relativity? Isn't this just a case of mathematical consistency without physical intuition? A series of increasingly mathematical steps that become parched of physical intuition? Is it not our job, professionals and amateurs, to find applications of mathematics in the physical world rather than vice versa? We need to break apart string theory into smaller manageable bits that can be understood by undergraduates. There is clearly something intuitively wrong with it. It does not help to invoke extra dimensions as a starting point.
If instead we started with an experiment that found hints of extra dimensions then proceeded from there as a hypothesis, this would seem more appropriate.
Or, perhaps, it is simply the manner in which introductory texts to string theory open the subject that leaves much to be desired.
He's not even trying to defend string theory that hard, like you got to realize this guy feels himself the intellectual king of the castle, it's rather beneath the dignity of a king to have to defend his kingdom to others
Needless to say, not a whole lot can be communicated in a brief tv interview, but this clip is hardly a strong defense of string theory or his instrumentality in its dominance
I discovered this theory all by myself, independently. Logically, at Big Bang, everything was One for we are talking about singularity. It is logical to assume existence of the Law of Preservation of Oneness, just like we propose the Law of Conservation of Energy. We posit that energy cannot be destroyed nor created - it can only take different forms. In the same token, Oneness cannot be destroyed nor created. We do not know the mechanism of preservation of Oneness, but we do not really know what energy really is. Since Existence precedes Essence (lat. "esse"), we posit that Oneness is and will always be. Hence, there must be some configuration space ensuring preservation of both Oneness and energy. This configuration space underlies QM and it represents it's "internals".
String Theory was a fantastic idea until it became too ambitious.
Thank you for this. Well spoken as always. Flawless.
I remembered when a teacher asked me what 2+2 is. I told her the best answer is 9-5. You can have an infinite number of theories to satisfy merging of qm and gr, mathematically.
@@crazieeez YES!
I love his language, talking about string theory being discovered when it has no expression in the real world beyond our minds. It was invented, and its wrong.
Did you even listen to Ed? You’re completely dismissing the fact that the mathematics of string theory are consistent with our quantum mechanical understanding of the universe and it offers invaluable solutions to certain phenomena.
It is by no means appropriate to say that’s it’s proven wrong, when it currently has a great deal of support. Understanding the nature of gravity is such an enormous undertaking that it requires time and patience to fully formulate but we are currently going in the right direction.
Frankly you need to understand patience on scientific matters. Discoveries and formulations don’t always happen overnight or with decades of research. Think about Euler when he formulated some of his equations. It took centuries to fully realise that you could understand the strong nuclear force with Euler’s equations. By your logic, Euler shouldn’t have bothered because it didn’t yield any significant result for decades. Sorry buddy, but this stuff takes time.
@@JackLWalsh Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Sometimes you also have to admit you've been travelling down the wrong path for a long time and need to restart the process of seriously looking at alternatives.
Question is, how to tell if it is the wrong path?
And how much have alternatives been tested and exhausted to the similar extents?
No doubt many minds are pondering these questions constantly already, and would be better positioned to provide clarity for those outside the field.
Witten isn't a individual who would admit he's wrong he's too arrogant,"A theory is a tool not a creed"-J.J Thomson.
@@Bendertherobot69420 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣this is a joke or sarcasm right?!?
@@hyperfluous4751if you don't like playing the fiddle because you would rather fiddle with your asshole all day, then don't join music school. You don't have to conclude that everyone in music school has taken the wrong path just because you prefer fiddling with your asshole. Get an argument
The critics argument: Every single prediction the string theory ever made was wrong.
His response: Well, but it is beutiful and at least we try to do a thing that is not really necessary.
Isn’t it all quite simple?
There are only waves and energy and electromagnetism etc.
Matter doesn’t really exist, it’s just waves and vibrations.
Colors doesn’t exist, they are just vawes etc.
Matter is just clusters of energy and if you zoom in close enough you will see that there is nothing solid.
But big enough clusters will act as they are solid, and interact with gravity/gravitational forces etc. and also others forces like air resistance in the atmosphere if it is in motion.
But at the sub particle level there will never be friction, and that’s why energy is constant.
I don’t know what I am talking about, it’s just ramblings 😅
The problem is over specialization. Theorists are useless without experimentation. You can not divorce the two things and work out of concert.
This is a complete waste of everyones time and resources.
Indeed. Egomaniac personalities deached from experimental reality. While the real giants always started from observation.
Terrence Howard should debate with Ed Witten. I am betting on Howard to be smarter than Witten.
That is like saying Trump is smarter that Ed Whitten.
string theory wasn't discovered, it as invented
Still waiting for it to produce verifiable results. It's only been 60 years now.
It is even falsifiable?
It can even tested?
@@racuncai I don't think our species is capable of testing things in 10 dimensions yet. Maybe in 16 generations, we'll get around to it.
so true
that's a wonderful theory to have...one that can never be explained...@@a-iz4pg
@@a-iz4pg Yeah, no. We can. It's called using indirect measurements and understanding the underlying principles which is what they're trying to do in foundation physics. We don't need to physically see Mars for our own eyes to know it's there. We know it's there because the body orbits a star causing a gravitational pull that we can measure, indirectly. We use all sorts of tools to understand bodies throughout the universe without needing to physically and directly confirm them. Same concept applies here. What has made String Theory so beautiful, and by far the biggest candidate to the theory of all - is that general relativity seems to emerge from their simulations even when they try to omit gravity entirely. That's a very, very good sign that they're on to something here. We need to also understand just how monumental Einstein truly was - and what he gave us we still do not fully understand, and neither did he. It's taken a century of thousands of physicists to chew on general relativity and make it work with atoms. String Theory does this - but unfortunately for us - it also gives an infinite, or a very very large unimaginable number of possibilities that could arise from the moment of conception of a universe- aka - what occurred the instant of the Big Bang and before it.
So what you're saying is that string theory is the result of looking at the gaps of our understanding of the universe and filling it with math. And not just any math but an equasion that fits every one of our observations extrodinarily well.
So the basic premise is that: In small enough areas ...one finds extra dimensions. Dimensions which 'curl' around the one dimension represented as the 'string'....
destroyed my dysentery, now I only have diarrhea🍌
If he was a rapper...this would be equal to him saying....they not like us..diss...with a back hand smack..
"The critics don't try very hard to work on a competing theory." BOOOOOOM. Wait, was that a physicist smack down???
Apparently the reality is, anyone in their field that goes against string theory, and wants to explore different possibilities is put to the side, largely ignored..makes you wonder whats going on there
Eric Weinstein shouldn’t be afraid of this guy.
Incredible mind.
I would also be afraid to debate this monster
Afraid to debate someone who is stubbornly tied to something that's wrong?
He said it himself. Long term speculative enterprise.
I agree with what you just said, string theory is just hot air.
The only thing he destroyed was the notion that String Theory is actual science (rather than just basically modern Natural Philosophy, not much different from the speculation of the ancient Greeks) and worth devoting such a massive amount of funding to.
Its worse than Natural Philosophy. Its needlesly mathematically complicated.
@@carlgauss1702 ”needlessly”? You are 100% clueless about what you’re talking about and literally. Please, don’t tell a nuclear engineer how a reactor should be built, nor a theoretical physicist how to develop models. It is so incredibly ridiculous that you think you should express an opinion on a matter you haven’t taken the time to understand even for a second.
@@RP-ch8yn Am I? AM I? You like to think complicated stuff but also pretend it to be somehow valuable. It isnt, and in the same vein; all your assumptioms about me, are wrong. Nothing surprising from this source.
@@carlgauss1702 What even is your argument? That complicated mathematics is some useless egoism? My guy, the whole world runs on complicated mathematics that few understand. And the simple formulas engineers and finance people get to use were derived by mathematicians with more complex techniques. I don’t get your point. Mathematics is the single most important factor in the technological and scientific revolution and nothing else even comes close.
@@RP-ch8yn I am a mathematician, thats why my nickname is Carl Gauss, I ve dealt with very convoluted structures and characterized them all. But I am intelligent enough to see that more complication doesnt mean extra value in the real world. Its just a game after some point.
Smartly and subtlety destroyed
Not really. He is smart, and he is capable of great mathematical sophistication. That doesn't mean that him saying "others are not working hard in developing alternatives" is a smart thing to say. Especially since their arguments are largely based on the claim that String Theory has too much emphasis and takes up too many of the resources/too much of the attention of researchers. (I'm not in a position to assess that claim.)
"Destroys." Ah..Nah.
Lol how can there be better theories if any other theory didnt gwt funding..and got labeled as psuedo?
Tell Eric Weinstein what the man with the “terrifying intellect” said.
Has string theory made a single successful prediction?
Should be String hypothesis not theory! It's wrong.
Well, if saying “it is not a well established theory, it is a speculative idea that we have hardly understood” is your idea of a destruction of dissenters, string “theory” (Brian Green also suggested to drop the term theory because it is doesn’t apply) might be exactly your cup of tea.
The problem with critiquing a theory like superstrings is that you essentially have to ignore the decades worth of very tantalizing developments that happened in the field only to base your arguments on what experiments couldn't falsify. If you don't do that you'd realise that string theory is perhaps the most mathematically consistent theory humans ever created. Just to give you a taste of this, quantum field theories which are extremely successful in their own rights have issues with UV/IR divergences. They also tell you nothing about the dimensions of spacetime you're operating on. And of course there's the whole issue with non-renormalizable field theories an example of which will be any naive second quantization of Einstein's field equations. String theory avoids divergences in a really elegant way and the number of free parameters is essentially just one which is the string length. Putting consistency checks on the ghost states, you can easily see that the theory only holds in 10 dimensions. Additionally compactifying the some of these dimensions can lead to very powerful dualities between two completely different theories. AdS/CFT is a result of this which has very interesting experimental implications and variations (broadly called holographic theories) of it is actually in some sense verified via results in condensed matter physics and QGP. String theory for a very long time was the only theory which could generate a concrete formulation of holography. Later holographic theories outside of strings were found out (like JT/SYK). However all these theories can also be derived from some variant of string theory. Let me tell you, in this context LQG isn't very prominent because it couldn't give us any meaningful results in holography. In fact no other theory could.
And all this is just one very tiny aspect of the ocean of achievements that string theory holds. Yes current experiments can't verify this but theoretical physics has its own consistency checks. That's why most physicists doing theory aren't super bothered with experiments.
"Yes current experiments can't verify this but theoretical physics has its own consistency checks. That's why most physicists doing theory aren't super bothered with experiments."
Oh my god. Translation: "I am confused about the difference between physics and mathematics."
@@chuckles960 It translates into what I wrote. Your strawman-ing doesn't hold here. Physics isn't all about experiments. The Higgs boson was predicted in theory, not in experiments. It was confirmed in experiments. The entropy function of Ising models is predicted in theory, exotic phase transitions are predicted in theory, symmetry breaking is predicted in theory. None of those are "predicted" in experiments as a first go to. Yeah they are confirmed there. But if someone can't perform an experiment to confirm that symmetry breaking does occur would you stop doing theory altogether when the entire idea of symmetry breaking is theoretically absolutely sound?
The classic example of this is in the difference between LQG and Strings. LQG fails the math consistency checks that general relativity puts forward. It predicts the violation of Lorentz invariance. Experiments doesn't have to rule it out when the math itself is inconsistent. A lot of development, some of the biggest of this generation in fact, happened solely on the basis of theoretical studies. We have AdS/CFT, tensor networks, topological quantum computation, Chern Simon's theory and topological insulators, time crystals, etc, all of which were theories that people worked on way before any kind of experimental evidence showed up as confirmation. In fact for topological quantum computation Majorana fermions are still not found and yet people are hopeful about it. Even nuclear fusion is a tech which isn't fully implemented in experiments and the breakthroughs that are happening in the last one or two years are happening after decades of developments.
@@sambitsarkar5190 It has been so long since I’ve seen a person on UA-cam actually get what string theory’s merits are. In my opinion, just AdS/CFT in itself is incredibly powerful, giving us ways to compute explicitly the entanglement entropies via RT and HRT. Are you aware of the recent works in dS as well?
@@vaibhavk2400 I have heard that people are focusing on dS these days although I haven't checked anything closely. I am aware that post 1997 there were couple of interesting papers on dS variants by Strominger and Witten.
I have heard that supersymmetry isn't totally compatible with dS? And there were also issues with defining the boundary theory. Although in this regard I have better idea of non supersymmetric AdS/CFT variants like the JT/SYK. I assume studying these models may prove beneficial towards getting the dS picture.
You can rephrase it better. Even Astrology has had centuries worth of research and work into it, but does it make it right? String theory or these extra dimensions is plain BS
We need a Weinstein vs Witten discussion on this.
Eric Weinstein is a charlatan lol
That would be like watching Lebron James vs. Danny DeVito playing basketball. I actually agree with Weinstein that string theory is a waste of time and talent, but Weinstein just isn't in Witten's league. Weinstein is a hedge fund manager and podcaster, not a theoretical physicist. I would rather see someone who is a real player in theoretical physics, like Lee Smolin, debate Witten.
@ienjoyapples is this true?
Im a moron and uneducated past gcse /low alevel understanding of phyiscs. So when listening to eric wiestein he comes across as a very smart person trying to pass himself off a insanely smart person.
Is he full of shit?
Or is he seen by physicists as a genius that just happens to have an unorthodox theory/set of ideas?
@@2xjsf83f2 Weinstein has a Ph.D in mathematical physics, but after getting his degree, he didn't go on to have a career as a mathematician or a physicist. He spent most of his career working in finance. Most physicists didn't know who he was until he started going on Joe Rogan bashing the physics community. He's certainly a smart guy and knowledgeable about physics, so he's not completely full of shit, but he's not a physicist. He likes to paint himself as some unrecognized genius, but nobody in the physics community regards him as such.
@@ienjoyapples thanks 😊
so, he didn't answer the question, right?
Gravity is not a force.
Anyone catch that mic drop at the end? 1:32 “..with that said though, I’ve noticed that generally speaking, the critics don’t seem to try very hard to work on a competing theory or to suggest one.”
That’s a fallacy, science is not a process of comparing different theories each theory must stand on its own merits
That's an appeal to ignorance fallacy the fact there's no evidence against it doesn't mean is true.
@@hosoiarchives4858 Which fallacy is it? He never said science is only a process of comparing different theories. That’s just a strawman fallacy.
@@racuncai Edward Witten never said that. That’s a strawman fallacy.
He literally didn’t even say anything!!!
He destroyed any notion that he will ever be able to see what the problem with string theory is. He doesn't look well either. Sic transit gloria filorum.
How to get an endless source of funding. Find a problem that you think is most likely to be impossible to solve. Create or find a mathematical model that makes it work even though the model predicts things that are not observable and then claim that its the best we have so although we don't have the answer we should continue research and continue to get funding. Oh and hint that everyone else is dumb.
I respect all of these great physicists and mathematicians. But still cant ignore the fact that, decades have passed without any proven predictions done in The String Theory🤔
Still no experimental results.........
Can octonions be used in string theory?
he did not say anything that skeptics who criticise its validity also say (s. Eric Weinstein for instance)
Eric Weinstein isn't a physicist. He's a mathematician who hasn't published crap but talks down to actual physicists while on Joe Rogan.
Dissent is not allowed, all must worship string theory!
Where was the destroying part
I am confused by the of the word ‘discovered’ vs positted
This guy is not human.
Whoa, after decades of work Whitten states he has no idea of where to begin if he had not started on string theory? Is that what holding theoretical physics hostage looks like? I hope I'm wrong, but it sounded like Dr. Whitten was saying that the problem of "getting quantum mechanics and gravity to work together consistently", given string theory holds some of this together, is "our" (all theoretical physicists?) duty to explore it further? Then goes on to say something to the effect of if he had not started down that path, he wouldn't know where to start, somehow implying that without his theories theoretical physics would be in a ... what? holding pattern or something? this blows my mind
Good point, but the problem is that the theoretical particle physics departments are full of string theorists that hire only string theorists. How come new ideas emerge from such closed environment? Why string theorists do not work on other alternatives? Perhaps the lack of research grant? or lack of other researchers willing to participate?