For lurking spectators, can you explain what you mean by "remaining"?

Terry Trowbridge Hellow Terry.

by "remining" I meant that the part of the "string theory" community was smart enough to let it go in time. Some stubborn subset of that community refuse to let it go and therefore I want to take on them.

This is not science of our universe with several billions of galaxies...Our universe is like anything else.. growing, getting old on time.

This is not a science of our universe

I am trying to find a citation that says string theory is abandoned. I can't find anything that says so. The closest I can find is this YouTube video from 5 months ago, with Michio Kaku:

https://youtu.be/y0mkR9_HmhU?si=DiftLY0M1oAIcWAK

The complaint Michio Kaku makes is basically that the equations are currently intractable.

But intractable equations are always part of Physics, and of Cosmology. That in itself is never a reason to abandon a theory. A lot of the work is dealing with intractable problems and making them solvable, somehow.

Sabine Hossenfelder has a really clever argument that particle physics is no longer studying anything empirical. She has this video:

https://youtu.be/lu4mH3Hmw2o?si=jqMp7YeBa58nCXZh

But what she really argues is that the search for particles ended with the Higgs Boson in 2012, and that particle physics is merely a discipline that invents imaginary particles in an ongoing series of "straw man" arguments. But that is not really string theory, though, which is more like making arguments about the one-dimensional features of particles that we know exist.

I guess what I am asking for is some kind of reference, or maybe a lit review, so that lurkers can follow your argument?

I am not a physicist, and I would like to know if the entire strong theory paradigm has been chucked in the garbage bin of history.

Hellow Terry. I commend you for your curiosity and desire to know the current state of physics. You don’t have to be a physicist to learn physics and to understand how things work. In response to what you wrote:

1. The person you mentioned, Kaku, is not relevant (or objective), to say the least. He has not published anything scientific in 25 Years. He is a book salesman. Last paper was at 1999; take a look at his record:

https://inspirehep.net/authors/1003894

2. Although not announced yet by the community, I can assure you that it is game over for string theory; it is only a matter of time before it will be completely evaporated from the physics arena.

Hello Ohad,

Okay, I will take your word for it. String theory seems like a paradigm int he classical Thomas Kuhn sense of a paradigm. So, I figured, a paradigm shift away from it would be bigger news, and more obvious to those of us who don't attend the conferences.

1. The person you mentioned, Kaku, is not relevant (or objective), to say the least.

Yes! You see my skepticism partially comes from finding only Kaku in the first 20 Google hits. The guy from the tv show Ancient Aliens doesn't seem like the most...uh, down-to-Earth, grounded individual (although I assume Kaku has a lot of fun on that show).

2. Although not announced yet by the community, I can assure you that it is game over for string theory

I would love to know more. Mere intractable equations are not enough to discount working on a theory. And a lack of instruments for locating empirical data is also not, itself, enough to stop working on a popular theoretical paradigm. I guess your use of the word "evaporated" is apt because little patches of string theory would need to dry up independently, until the whole lake becomes a few isolated intellectual puddles.

That process of evaporation must be widespread, with a few previously fruitful core concepts being disproven. "M-theory" was originally a synthesis of work happening in multiple domains. More than one of those domains would have to fall apart for the synthesis to fall apart. :/ I look forward to reading the first couple of books about the shift in cosmology away from strings.

Anyhow, I haven't read a single book of cosmology since just before the pandemic, so I am totally removed from a deep conversation about what computational analysis might have accomplished since 2020, etc etc etc.

String theory is in trouble because some decades ago string theorists wrongly assumed that the theory was renormalizable, based on a paper by Israel. I recall the time. Lee Smolin discovered this was correct by consulting the author circa 2012. I was never much interested, because they didn't have a field equation. Physics is hard and theoretical physics is harder.

That is dualistic thinking. The material world does exist and we prove it constantly. However, it is equivalent to and indistinguishable from consciousness.

Given that the world is created by our consciousness, so physics is a pseudoscience, it is still not a waste of time to study it because this world still follows some rules (e.g., Newtons laws for some limiting cases). It is both interesting (out of curiosity) and practical (technology depends on it) to study those rules, so the study is not a waste of time.

Ok, I don't think we have an argument if we can agree that "more productive", like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder and different people can disagree on what is more productive.

Whoa unexpected direction, but I think this thread is no longer answering the OP. The OP threw down a gauntlet based on science and pseudoscience. I think we can argue that Consciousness Theory requires Physics to be a science and not pseudoscience.

Consciousness is temporary and disconnected. For examples: I sleep without dreaming; plum trees hibernate in winter but make decision when daylight is long enough; for me, in order to sense what is in the next room I must take the time to leave this room and enter that room (the leaving demonstrates limits based on one dimension of time). Another example: consciousnesses seem to disappear when life forms die, whether that is a process of entropy (see Schrodinger's What is Life?), "entropy" being a synonym for "time" in certain Physics domains. ...Or some other process of consciousness evaporating and re-emerging in reincarnation, etc..

Therefore, one independent variable in consciousness is time. I propose that Physics is not a pseudoscience if consciousness is reality, because Physics is the study of spacetime and at least time is a dimension through which consciousness is conveyed. Physics has demonstrated that time is not independent of space, so the study of spacetime is the study of conditions that are independent of consciousness itself. Maybe spacetime can only be measured by effects upon consciousness. Consciousness, though, indicates spacetime exists. Therefore Physics is science.

Alternatively, I am all for discussing that time is a product of consciousness, and also that the discrete instances of consciousness are actually illusions cast by a reality of unified consciousness: such as the Hindu concept of Brahman, which this thread is quickly hurtling toward. But then, there are no good scientific terms, and we need to discuss Atman, cycles of Yugas, and need to bust out our copies of the Rig Veda and the Bhagavad Gita, in order to critically examine Consciousness Studies in their proper context. The differences between science and pseudoscience are literally immaterial.

Nonetheless, OP wanted a science vs. pseudoscience debate. If this thread is about debating science and pseudoscience, then I propose that relativistic spacetime is independent of consciousness, that the forms of consciousness we encounter lead to inferences that time exists, and therefore consciousness can invent the domain of Physics as a science rather than as a pseudoscience.

And if someone wants to try throwing Bruno Latour's Science in Action at me, let's remember than Latour never really talks about what a scientist is thinking when they are looking at their instruments, but only at what they write down and pass along, so I think that kind of actor-network theory can also be set aside.

Of course, OP, who accused me of wasting my time (haha get it), might disagree with me.

I enjoyed the video by Sabine Hossenfelder in the link provided by Terry Trowbridge and repeated below:

https://youtu.be/lu4mH3Hmw2o?si=jqMp7YeBa58nCXZh

I enjoyed it because I have the impression that theoretical physics has reached the point where people are now just making stuff up (verifying observations are becoming more difficult). But I don't have the right to say that because I don't understand most of the stuff that people are making up, so I'm glad she said it. With such an enormous number of people working on making stuff up, it is very difficult to understand it all.

Ohad Manor

Last week, the author of the previous video I post in this thread, Sabine Hossenfelder, posted a really good video about string theory's exhausted potential, and where it got stuck.

https://youtu.be/eRzQDyw5C3M?si=oqDiQPrmHmSk8MCd

^There, a citation for when you run into someone like me searching for a published lit review, or Philosophy of Science paper, that maps the problems out.

Hossenfelder's video also gives several names to sub-genres of string theory. You can use those sub-genres to pick fights with their proponents, if that's how you feel like spending your time.

Citations are always helpful. When challenging someone to a duel, it's always better to also name the location you want to throw down.

Peace out!