https://xkcd.com/2933

Alt text:

==COSMOLOGY==> ‘Uhhh … how sure are we that everything is made of these?’

  • marcos@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    6 months ago

    AFAIK, every single idea from string theory that could be tested was rejected. And the theory was made more complex, less predictive so that it could still work without the testable idea.

    • mumblerfish@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      6 months ago

      These are very broad statements that are not very easy to comment on. “Every single idea”, makes it sound like they are a lot, I would not say they are. “Was rejected”, depends what you mean… " did not show positiv results", “no longer possible to motivate economically”, sure, " refuted as bullshit", not so much. “Was made more complex”, sounds like there is intent, and/or, depending on what you mean by complex, that it would be necessarily a bad thing to using more advanced maths to formulate things you could not before, and hence solve new problems.

      I can mention two possible avenues of inquiry that are less than 5 years old that has sprung from string theory as possible support for it: signals of black hole structure in gravitational wave ‘ring downs’ of black hole mergers, and the exclusion of a positive cosmological constant. But if you know that these are untestable or rejected, I’d love to hear about it.