Dr Chuck Pearson

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November 24, 2005

String Theory == Intelligent Design?

So I'm enjoying my thanksgiving break into real, honest-to-God contemplative reading (there is a litany of things wrong with that phrase, use your imagination to find them). And at some point, I know, I'm going to have to fix the link to KausFiles in the blogroll, because Slate moves it around every now and again. So I am going to the Slate homepage (and the current KausFiles is here, by the way) and I come across the following headline:

Even String Theorists Don't Get String Theory

Well, THAT'S a relief. I don't feel like a total dope for not getting what everybody and their brother, cousin AND random friend at church are finding so fascinating about teh string theory, then.

But that's not all, oh no! Because what the article really is, is a book review of Hiding In The Mirror by Lawrence Krauss - in which, according to the Slate reviewer, he basically takes this whole string theory mess and rips it a new one, essentially calling it untestable pseudoscience.

Mmmm. Yummy. Here, have a money take:

Elegance is a term theorists apply to formulas, like E=mc², which are simple and symmetrical yet have great scope and power. The concept has become so associated with string theory that Nova's three-hour 2003 series on the topic was titled The Elegant Universe (you can watch the whole thing online for free here).

(Aside: The author doesn't bother to mention Brian Greene's book that spawned the Nova thing, for some reason I don't understand. I expect that would be a far better place to start, if you want the non-scientist perspective on this string theory stuff. Anyway, continuing my quote...)

Yet a demonstration of string theory's mathematical elegance was conspicuously absent from Nova's special effects and on-location shoots. No one explained any of the math onscreen. That's because compared to E=mc², string theory equations look like spaghetti. And unfortunately for the aspirations of its proponents, the ideas are just as hard to explain in words...

String theory proposes a solution that reconciles relativity and quantum mechanics. To get there, it requires two radical changes in our view of the universe. The first is easy: What we've presumed are subatomic particles are actually tiny vibrating strings of energy, each 100 billion billion times smaller than the protons at the nucleus of an atom.

That's easy to accept. But for the math to work, there also must be more physical dimensions to reality than the three of space and one of time that we can perceive. The most popular string models require 10 or 11 dimensions. What we perceive as solid matter is mathematically explainable as the three-dimensional manifestation of "strings" of elementary particles vibrating and dancing through multiple dimensions of reality, like shadows on a wall. In theory, these extra dimensions surround us and contain myriad parallel universes. Nova's "The Elegant Universe" used Matrix-like computer animation to convincingly visualize these hidden dimensions.

Sounds neat, huh—almost too neat? Krauss' book is subtitled The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions as a polite way of saying String Theory Is for Suckers. String theory, he explains, has a catch: Unlike relativity and quantum mechanics, it can't be tested. That is, no one has been able to devise a feasible experiment for which string theory predicts measurable results any different from what the current wisdom already says would happen. Scientific Method 101 says that if you can't run a test that might disprove your theory, you can't claim it as fact.

Well.

There are two points that come out of this worth raising.

One is that, yeah, obviously, string theory is just that, and is pretty hopelessly stuck as that. Which is fine. I can't bring myself to be so bothered about the state of string theory as I can about, say, the state of intelligent design theory, because at least (as I understand it) there is still the prospect of working out the kinks in relativity and quantum in a way that can be tested elsewhere. String theory itself might not be testable, but it can lead to predictions that are testable. (Although, honestly, I'm remiss, because Dean Esmay reads his trackbacks and God bless him for it, if I don't make note of the idea that the ID folk might be on their way to testable predictions themselves.)

But here's the other angle, and the one that is currently breaking my brain.

I've been pretty doggedly avoiding the reading-up on string theory that everybody else is doing, primarily because (a) the school work load has been bad enough, and I was scared of the learning curve that would come with digging into string theory's fine points, and (b) I have a natural aversion to the hip, with-it scientific idea that everybody is talking about. I want to talk to you about chemical thermodyamics and classical mechanics, not superstrings. I got over superstrings in 1988, when I wrote a literature-review on them for something high-school-science related.

But wait. When I studied superstrings in 1988, I was trying to get my hands around the novel idea that there could be these tiny vibrating strings that existed in ten dimensions that could constitute the makeup of all matter.

Reading this, the base idea behind current string theory is that there could be these tiny vibrating strings that exist in ten dimensions that could constitute the makeup of all matter!

Um, have these guys been doing anything for the past seventeen years?

So I'm wondering if I haven't been giving the learning curve for the current state of string theory a bit too much credit. And I think I have my project for Christmas break.

Posted by Chuck at November 24, 2005 09:41 AM

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Posted by: Catie at November 24, 2005 02:30 PM