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NASA's FERMI, Space, and Time

October 21, 2008 by CambridgeBlog

In these posts I have emphasized ideas on the cutting edge of fundamental science which have testable predictions or other contact with experiment, rather than being merely fashionable. Now, up until recently it was widely assumed that ideas for the ‘Mount Everest’ challenge of quantum gravity, as Martin Rees puts it in his review of the multiauthored book On Space and Time, could never be tested experimentally.

Accordingly, theoretical physicists in the last two decades have often given up on serious experimental contact and based their ideas on fashion or ‘elegance’. This, unfortunately, is not by itself a reliable indicator as it rather depends on what maths you are familiar with, something which tends to be rather hit and miss in the theoretical physics community. I consequently agree with Martin Rees that we are nowhere near the ’summit’ as it were.

For example, I remember at the turn of the millennium waking up to a respectable BBC radio chat show, I believe it was In Our Time, in which a string theorist explained that string theory tries to unify quantum theory and gravity. When asked what was the evidence for string theory, the individual replied “well, there is evidence for quantum theory and there is evidence for gravity, so there is evidence for string theory.”

This was pretty shocking for me and for most of my colleagues (including my string theory colleagues) because a theory has to be judged by how it goes beyond what is known, not by the mere wish to succeed. It’s no doubt tough being on the radio and probably the interviewee was trying too hard to oversimplify, but it illustrates the problem. I should say that I am not against string theory per se, though I do agree with those who say that it should be judged in perspective and not to the exclusion of other approaches.

How can we return to experiment, as we surely must to make genuine progress in quantum gravity? In my own chapter of On Space and Time, I explain that one can make certain quantum gravity predictions without knowing quantum gravity and without pretending to have a theory of everything at all.

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