Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "Does beauty deceive physics? | Michio Kaku, Sabine Hossenfelder, Max Tegmark, Juan Maldacena" video.

  1. He is mostly selling Michio Kaku. Having said that, his string theory textbook is actually an OK read.
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  2. The problem with your argument is that string theory actually follows directly from Galileo's work. Even though this was known before him, Galileo was the first to give a modern description of relativity. It took almost 300 years to extract a mathematically precise physical theory from that description. That was Einstein's theory of special relativity. Einstein then upgraded that to a version that also includes classical relativity. In parallel we learned how to formulate all of matter and radiation with a relativistic theory that is called quantum field theory. If we try to include gravity into the quantum field theory framework, then we end up with string theory as one possible solution. So, yeah, string theory was implicitly already present in Galileo's work, he just didn't know how to tease it out.
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  3. The problem with string theory is that it hasn't even reached the level of a hypothesis, yet. It is still a "not even wrong". I think that rubs a lot of people the wrong way round emotionally. There is nothing to be emotional about. String theory is simply yet another representation of the Poincare group. It may or it may not be realized by nature. There is no need to get upset about that.
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  4.  @Thomas-gk42  Yes, and Trump "wrote" a book about the art of the deal. ;-)
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  5. @ His science writing is similar to Sabine's. ;-)
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  6. The problem with string theory is that there is nothing to criticize. It's not even wrong. I fully trust that the formalism they have come up with is solid. There is a mathematical there there, it just doesn't translate into physics.
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  7. I didn't think of Kaku much, either, until I read his introductory string theory book. It contains quite a few intuitive insights that show that he is better as a physicist than he is an entertainer.
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  8. The only people who think there is beauty in physics are the people who have never done any. ;-)
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  9. Let's put it this way. Artistic beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Just like Rembrandt would have scoffed at modern abstract painting, so would Newton have at modern physics. It would have been beyond the sense of "beauty" of their time. That doesn't mean that one can't appreciate modern art and modern physics today. It just takes a lot more "getting used to". Although I am sure that there were plenty of people at Newton's time who were probably appalled that the man had condensed god's work on the heavens into a single 1/r^2 law.
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  10. String theory is simply one solution of relativity. That solution exists as a mathematical fact, whether nature cares about implementing it or not.
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