String Theory Update

[pianoman1976]

Hello friends,

I need to be updated. My last check in took place in the era of Brian Green's 'The Elegant Universe'.

Are strings dead? Are we onto thinking in terms of a monster membrane - or is the membrane dead too?

What about supersymmetry and the Higgs Boson? Has the LHC fired up yet?

Are we in a stagnant state of progress, or are there any exciting new developments in theoretical physics?

Where does popular opinion land right now?

Thank you for taking the time.

Ryan

[von Faulkenstein]

Has string theory become a "philosophy" or no longer considered a science whereby one can measure events?

[snoopy]

Originally Posted by pianoman1976

Hello friends,

I need to be updated. My last check in took place in the era of Brian Green's 'The Elegant Universe'.

Are strings dead? Are we onto thinking in terms of a monster membrane - or is the membrane dead too?

Yeah difficult questions, can string theory ever be considered dead ?
There is an infinite amount of them so they can't be killed off completely.

Is string theory right ?

The original Bosonic String Theory was very nice it looked like a move in the the right direction mathematically it looked beautiful.

However it only described Bosons.

Then came Superstrings by adding Supersymmetry to string theory it explained the bosons and the fermions.

It all looked so good.... but there were three different flavours of Superstrings and from mixing them two more Heterotic string theories emerged and things got complicated because no one knew why this should be so and if you plugged in different values you got slightly different variations of the five string theories.

Along came M-Theory adding yet another hidden dimension of space moving from 10 to 11 dimensions seemed to suggest that the five flavours of string theory were actually five different aspects of the same theory.

At the moment M-Theory is finding an application in understanding the entropy of microscopic black holes but whether this will ever be testable or useful to anyone is not clear.

What about supersymmetry and the Higgs Boson? Has the LHC fired up yet?

Supersymmetry is alive and well.

The LHC doesn't fire up till the end of the year.

Hopefully the Higgs boson will be found and the standard model will survive.
Don't expect this to happen until 2010 or 2011 though.

Are we in a stagnant state of progress, or are there any exciting new developments in theoretical physics?

Well I think we are all still hoping for a theory that replaces Quantum theory and Relativity and explains both inside the same framework.

Personally I think we are in a period of stabilization right now like the first part of 19th Century and are waiting either for mathematics to come up with a new principle or another Einstein with an idea generated from first principles. In this era physics made hardly any progress but came up with new technologies. I think we are like that now.

Personally I don't think we have the mathematics yet to go further and experiments 'like' the LHC will eventually throw up questions that don't fit current theory and some bright spark will come up with an idea to explain it that will explain QM and Relativity under the same framework.

I don't expect this to happen till 2050 though.

I don't expect this to be M-Theory or Superstring theory but something that will be derived from them. Or will contain principles derived from them.

Where does popular opinion land right now?

Usually on some new controversial 'internet based' theory.

Cheers

(The above are my 'views' only and should not be taken as the 'gospel on physics')

[pianoman1976]

Originally Posted by snoopy

Personally I don't think we have the mathematics yet to go further and experiments 'like' the LHC will eventually throw up questions that don't fit current theory and some bright spark will come up with an idea to explain it that will explain QM and Relativity under the same framework.

I don't expect this to happen till 2050 though.

According to Ray Kurzweil, the Singularity date is 2045. (This event should come long after we've found the TOE). Maybe he's a bit more optimistic than you.

Thank you very much for taking the time to share your take on this.

Ryan

[snoopy]

Originally Posted by pianoman1976

According to Ray Kurzweil, the Singularity date is 2045. (This event should come long after we've found the TOE). Maybe he's a bit more optimistic than you.

Thank you very much for taking the time to share your take on this.

Ryan

Yeah, I would be willing to go along with 2045, its not that far off 2050 I was only being general and am more than willing to compromise to a more precise date of June 16th 2047 around teatime .

Cheers

[Bob Eldritch]

There are exciting new developments in theoretical physics if theoretical physicists did but know. Google > foranewageofreason

[Farsight]

I think the Standard Model will survive the demise of the Higgs Boson myself. It'll just need a bit of a makeover.