Entering the blogosphere

A mere 3 years ago, I had never heard of the word "blog." Now, I'm a daily visitor to Josh Marshall's TPM and Bob Somerby's Daily Howler. Still, I didn't anticipate actually writing one, myself.

But that changed when I came across a recent article that the tastefully named Gregg Easterbrook wrote on Slate.com.

Now, I've followed Easterbrook for a while, and I enjoyed his early days of TMQ on Slate. To be honest, I have recently found his I'm-way-smarter-than-football-people shtick a little grating -- and he should stick a post-it note to his monitor that says "Stop me before I write 'Stop me before I blitz again' again.") Still, I can stomach one or two of his 5000-word columns per season.

But I can't stomach his writing on most non-football issues. That goes for his opinion on Jewish executives in Hollywood, and that goes for his opinion on String Theory.

If you don't feel like ploughing through his Slate article, titled "The Trouble With String Theory," I'll summarize it. In the guise of a review of a recent book by physicist Lee Smolin, Easterbrook harshly criticizes the current state of affairs in physics, comparing physicists to Medieval mystics. Here's a particularly telling excerpt:

string theory seems to contain significant helpings of blather designed to intimidate nonscientists from questioning the budgets of physics departments and tax-funded particle accelerator labs. And consider this. Today if a professor at Princeton claims there are 11 unobservable dimensions about which he can speak with great confidence despite an utter lack of supporting evidence, that professor is praised for incredible sophistication. If another person in the same place asserted there exists one unobservable dimension, the plane of the spirit, he would be hooted down as a superstitious crank.

Finally, he objects to the term word "theory," since as he says, "Darwin's defenders have rightly replied that in science, "theory" does not mean idle speculation. Rather, it is an honored term for an idea that has been elaborately analyzed, has not been falsified, and has made testable predictions that have later proven to be true."


As a PhD candidate in astrophysics, I have a little bit of experience with the hooded monks of string theory. I recently went to a lecture on string theory that began something like,

"It is a bit embarrassing that the first task of string theory is to explain why one of its basic assumptions, which is manifestly wrong, is in fact not necessarily wrong. I'm talking, of course, about the plainly absurd suggestion that our universe has not 3 spatial dimensions, but 10 or more."

The speaker then went on to describe very quickly the standard story of how there might be other dimensions that we'd never notice, and some of what makes string theory so exciting and some of the more serious challenges to it.

If Mr. Easterbrook wants to argue that it should be called "String Conjecture", that's fine by me. Plenty of people have worked on the Riemann Hypothesis and the Poincare Conjecture. Plenty of people also worked on Fermat's Last Theorem, which probably would more appropriately have been called Fermat's Well-Tested Conjecture (credit: Douglas Hofstadter). There's nothing wrong with working on a conjecture or a hypothesis.

But what else of content is he saying? He wants physics to get back to actually figuring stuff out. But guess what: With the standard model of particle physics, a lot of people were heralding "The End of Physics!" As in, there was nothing else to figure out. But of course there was -- most prominently, How does gravity work on the smallest scales? Does Easterbrook propose using God Theory to explain quantum gravity?

See, there's a big difference between God Theory and String Theory. String theory actually does make predictions about our universe that are in principle testable, and many people are working on figuring out various clever ways to test these predictions. Of course, these people are hooded alchemists in Easterbrook's opinion. It's my understanding that string theory has generated enough interesting mathematics that it will continue to be pursued by mathematicians, even if future observations fail to confirm any of its predictions. But the important thing is that physicists CAN give it up, depending on if our universe is consistent with it or not. There would be no reason ever to give up the single extra explanatory dimension that has no predictive power.

Also, he chides string theorists for failing to predict the observation that the universe's expansion seems to be accelerating. But string theory is still in its infancy. Heck, Einstein and Newton didn't predict that, either. Let's throw out gravity with the bathwater.

Finally, he says that the last third of the 20th century was not very productive, because people were "hit over the head by the unexpected, such as dark energy," as though that weren't an important discovery by physicists, but rather something that some idiots who were partially blinded by their droopy hoods stubbed their toes on. As though a key feature of important discoveries is that they be predicted in advance. Right. How many physicists were expecting the electron, or quantized light, or that Newtonian gravity is incommensurate with Maxwell's Equations? By that standard, the first third of the 20th century sucked for physics, too.

It might turn out that in the next decade or so, as tests are developed and performed for String Theory's predictions, that String Theory is not consistent with our universe. If so, then physicists will be forced to turn their attention elsewhere. But not to the plane of the spirit.

Now that Mr. Easterbrook has forced me to turn my attention to the sphere of the blog, I suppose I'll be back soon.