Yesterday we discussed an “opinion-field inversion” in theoretical physics: in the prestige news media and publicity complex (NPR, Ted, etc), string theory reigns supreme; in elite physics departments, string theory is where it’s at, but then there’s a middle range of skeptics ranging from my Columbia colleague Peter “Not Even Wrong” Woit to xkcd columnist Randall Munroe who characterize string theory as an overhyped nothingburger. I guess that Woit would be cool with some elite physicists studying string theory as part of the overall portfolio of theoretical research, but he and others in this middle ground think that whatever profile string theory should have, both in academia and in public perceptions of physics, should be much lower.
I referred to this sort of layered difference in public opinion as an opinion-field inversion, by analogy to the phenomenon of temperature inversion that is a precursor to tornadoes.
The theory crisis in physics
Before going on, let me emphasize that I know nothing of theoretical physics. I find Woit’s writing on the topic persuasive, but I’ve not tried to understand any of the debate in physics terms. I’m only discussing this from the perspective of sociology of science.
I’ll call it the theory crisis in physics, by analogy to the replication crisis in social science and medical research. The string theory thing isn’t a replication crisis—indeed, one of the main criticisms of string theory is that it does not make new testable predictions, so there’s no possibility of replication or falsification–but it’s still a crisis. I think the term “theory crisis” is about right.
Arguably the replication crisis in psychology and economics is also a theory crisis, in that the work is based on broad theories such as embodied cognition and evolutionary psychology that have major problems of the sort that they can be used to explain any possible result, but it was the failed replications that were the convincer to many people, hence the term “replication crisis” rather than “theory crisis” or “methods crisis.”
The replication crisis as another opinion-field inversion
In any case, another example of an opinion-field inversion in science, at least until recently, was woo-woo psychology such as social priming and walking speed, ovulation and voting, air rage, power pose, himmicanes, ages ending in 9, signing at the top of the form, etc. The news media and associated institutions (Ted, Freakonomics, etc.) were all-in on these things; informed scientists such as Uri Simonsohn, Anna Dreber, and various other so-called methodological terrorists were very skeptical; and the power centers at Harvard, PNAS, etc., were a mix of head-in-the-sand true believers (claiming the replication rate “is statistically indistinguishable from 100%”) and I’ve-got-mine-don’t-rock-the-boat nudgelords, who seemed to be more concerned about keeping their Henry Kissinger party invitations and positions on NPR speed-dial than in cleaning up their house.
With junk science, things have changed–more and more reporters seem to be tired of having their chains yanked by whatever Psychological Science and PNAS happen to be promoting this week–and I guess that’s partly a consequence of the opinion inversion. Shaking up the power centers might be more of a challenge.
Differences between the theory crisis in physics and the replication crisis in psychology and economics
What will happen with string theory, I don’t know. One difference is that in psychology and economics, my impression is that the people who do this sort of headline-bait are not taken very seriously at an intellectual level. They may have institutional power (hi, Robert Sternberg!) and others in their field may enjoy the reflected glow of their TV appearances, but nobody would consider them to be the brightest lights in the chandelier. In contrast, it seems that many of the physicists who work in string theory are considered to be brilliant, most notably Ed Witten—I know nothing of his work, it’s all beyond me, but he’s always described in superlatives.
So if string theory really is a hyped dead end, it’s a much sadder story than junk econ and junk psychology, which seem more like the products of ambitious careerists who, for a couple of decades, stumbled upon a way to hack the system of scientific publication and publicity at the nexus of academia and the news media.
The other twist is that even the opponents of string theory still characterize it as having some mathematical interest–their criticism is not that string theory is being done, so much with that too much is being claimed for it. That’s different than research in himmicanes, air rage, beauty-and-sex-ratio, extra-sensory perception, etc., which is pretty much unmitigated crap, whose only contribution to science has been to reveal the rotten core of science as it is often practiced.
This also gives different flavors to the discussions in these two fields. With psychology and economics, the frustration is mostly external, with observers being bothered that bad work gets so much publicity, that methodological criticisms and unsuccessful replications get less notice than problematic work, etc. With physics, the frustration seems mostly internal, with people bothered that the top physics students are going into what they perceive as a dead-end world. In physics, the concern is with the misuse of human resources in the form of brilliant Ph.D. students. In psychology and econ, the concern is with the bad work giving the general public a misleading view of science and perhaps leading to bad policies (Excel error, anyone?). Nobody’s saying it’s too bad Brian Wansink and Dan Ariely got into this social priming stuff or otherwise they could’ve made major discoveries.
I claim we can unify this theory of theory crises by stating a necessary condition for a scientific field to not be in crisis.
The empirical condition of scientific non-crisis is as follows:
Let N be the number of publications from a field of science, Y the number of replicable publications, and θ the replication rate. We model Y ~ Binomial(N, θ). For a field to be in a state of non-crisis it is necessary that N > 0 and that θ >> 0.
Ideally, θ will be statistically indistinguishable from 1.
The concept of “replication” has already been gamed so hard, and we still see these replication issues.
All you need these days is statistical significance in the same direction.
Take the 1919 eclipse experiment. Both Einstein and Newton predicted deflection inward. Just one was twice the magnitude of the other.
Using NHST methods, any observations capable of distinguished between the theories would be considered equivalent.
I actually don’t think Peter would express much hope for the mathematics coming out of what passes for String Theory these days, either. The mathematical proofs tend to get hand-waved away with physical arguments, but the physical argument don’t have any empirical support, so… a kind of reinforcing cycle of bunk.
I’m not going to say there wasn’t anything. It wasn’t my field and I seem to recall a fair amount of cross-interest when I was in grad school. Though one of my fondest memories was of being in a seminar by Shing-Tung Yao about some D-brane-M-theory-something-something that was well beyond me at the time. And he was discussing some conjecture and made the remark that, at this point, we have no reason to believe that it is true. And Brian Greene spoke up and said actually, we do have some reason to think it’s true. And Yao stopped for a moment and then said, well we have no good reason to think that it’s true. So there must have been at least a fair degree of skepticism at the time about the mathematical value of string theory.
It’s worth keeping in mind that string theory is a small fraction of high-energy theory, and high-energy physics (theory + experiment) is a minority of physics. Most physicists (including me) work on things like materials, optics, biophysics, etc., and we’d also argue that many of the deepest and most important questions in the field are here: how does combining quantum mechanics with information theory give new ways to compute? How do laws of physics govern how life works, and how it can and can’t work, at scales from molecules to ecosystems? Where’s my room temperature superconductor?
It’s in this context that the concern about where the “top physics students are going” is important: the disconnect between what beginning physics students think physics is and what physicists think physics is causes frustration for everyone, and a big contributor to this is the pop-science hype for things like string theory. Coincidentally, I’m writing this from a conference on “Stochastic Physics in Biology” (weird name but fascinating topics), where the difficulty of finding students keen on (or aware of) biophysics already came up at my first breakfast conversation!
Raghu:
Your comment reminds me of another weird thing, which is the phenomenon of pop-science physicists hyping non-physics junk science. See this story of physicist and media personality Sean Caroll hyping the work of psychologist Ellen Langer.
This stuff is much worse than string theory could ever be. Woit refers to string theory as “not even wrong,” but Langer’s work is actually wrong! It’s so bad that even a physics dropout such as myself could see its problems.
Sean Carroll may well be a good physicist and a nice guy, but it seems that his primary loyalty here is to celebritydom rather than scientific inquiry.
I think this is something that Woit is getting at. Setting aside the technical aspects of his criticisms of string theory, which, again, I won’t try to evaluate–as the provost of the University of Oregon might say, this is above my pay grade–, I get the impression that Woit is arguing that media attention has corrupted much of the high-energy physics world, so it’s not so much that the hypesters are bad people, as much as that the are comfortable profiting from some level of public misunderstanding, which presumably they justify as a minor or even necessary cost of the larger goal of increasing public engagement in physics.
Andrew: Where would you place Roger Penrose’s ruminations on consciousness in this rubric?
Jonathan:
It’s been a few decades since I looked at Roger Penrose’s ruminations on consciousness, but when I read those ruminations, I found them interesting.
Penrose is nothing like those NPR-bait psychologists. He’s openly doing speculation and not claiming otherwise. They’re claiming evidence where there is none. If the beauty-and-sex ratio guy and the elderly walking guy and the ESP guy and the pizzagate guy and the shreddergate guy and the Bible code team and the ovulation-and-voting team and the critical positivity folks and all the rest of that gang were to just offer theories without claiming they had statistical evidence to back them up, I’d have no problem with them at all. I mean, sure, I’d probably say they’re wasting their time and the taxpayer’s money, but I wouldn’t be annoyed as I am now, with all their hype and claim of evidence when there is none.
Probably similar to Sean Caroll’s mistake. I’ve heard Roger Penrose casually mentioning micro-tubules in cells as a possible ‘place’ where quantum effects might occur, or something to that effect. Basically, he said someone gave him a lowdown on cell biology, and he went from that simplified version to the possibility of consciousness. I am not saying he was hyping anything, but it was clear he wasn’t aware of all other complexities of cellular Biology. It felt like he was simply looking at how consciousness could possibly work.
Navigator:
I think Sean Carroll is worse. Penrose was openly speculating; Carroll was presenting bad work as if it provided empirical evidence.
This was Szent-György’s idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Szent-Gy%C3%B6rgyi
You can check some papers on it here:
1941: https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101584924X158-doc
1958: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC335378/
However, he is best known on this blog for starting the “any map will do” myth:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2012/04/23/any-old-map-will-do-meets-god-is-in-every-leaf-of-every-tree/
Jonathan wrote:
> Roger Penrose’s ruminations on consciousness in this rubric?
Penrose’s argument that consciousness is not algorithmic is based solely on a math error that anyone who has taken a senior-level course in mathematical logic could point out. He has a Nobel Prize, but has written two books based on a math error.
“Not even wrong” is worse than being wrong. It means you haven’t even gotten to the point where you could tell whether it was right or wrong.
String theorists have an outsize amount of power in particle physics, and since particle physicists write essentially all the popular science books (since they need to justify their funding to the public more), the general public knows about them more than other fields. But they have basically no influence in other fields of physics. The chair of my (large) department stated flatly in a department-wide meeting that we would never hire any string theorists.
What we really want to know is how does the half century detour physics took with string theory compare to the century long detour statistics took with frequentism?
Didn’t mean to reply to this specific comment
Maybe string theory is just a funding and employment holding pattern, keeping resources idling in place, until physics enters a new phase of rapid advancement.
It’s funny how in Kepler’s day he knew about the platonic solids, so when it came time to explain the inner workings of the cosmos his first instinct was to found everything on platonic solids.
Physicists aren’t such rubes anymore. Now they base the inner workings of the world on strings (particle theorists), computation (wolfram), ….
How much do you want to bet if there was a mathematical theory of gummy bears there would be physicist claiming that gummy bears were the hidden key needed to see into the mind of God (or whatever)?
Anon:
Wolfram seems to have pretty much figured it all out; see here.
Years ago Wolfram wrote a blog post on special functions, which I liked a lot and revisit every so often. Beyond that … well … his faux humble style has a certain charm:
“even I struggled with this and only just realized God had it wrong all along”
Andrew, I took a long look at that wolfram link. I think he’s loosing it. He can’t keep the grandiose self-important fantasies in check.
An interested layman reading that post would be shocked to learn that the Wolfram Project hasn’t increase humanity’s ability to predict, control, or use nature in any way, or added to our body of known physical truths one iota.
Some efforts in science try to break off as big a piece of the “unknown” and bring it into the “known” category.
Other efforts in science are trying to brake off a person in the “regular” physicist category and proclaim them in the “new einstein” category.
These two lines of effort have shockingly little to do either each other.
I’ve struggled putting my irritation with string theory (and other Theories of Everything) into words.
It’s not that string theory (or the Wolfram project, quantum gravity, geometric unity,…) hasn’t increased our ability to predict anything at all. It hasn’t and that bugs a lot people, but it’s not what’s irritating me. Rather it’s that even if they succeeded it would increasing our prediction ability by utterly minuscule amounts at best.
By contrast, if someone created a theory that could predict big earthquakes with a 30 minute warning, that’s an insanely greater increase in our predictive power over nature than Quantum Gravity, string theory, … or whatever.
In practice, “theories of everything” are very very close to being a “theory of nothing”, and that’s if they work.
Anon:
I dunno . . . Newton had a theory that unified gravity and the laws of motion, and that had some real applications. I’ve heard that Maxwell’s equations have been useful too.
I think Anonymous’ point is is that theories of everything are about moving from the world as we know it today… Newton, Einstein, QM, etc to some kind of unification of all that. The unification would be about stuff like quantizing gravity. Gravity is a force so weak that even the entire earth doesn’t attract a basketball player enough that they can’t dunk. Compare to shoving a gram of electrons into a space like a gram of water (1 cm^3). That’d explode practically like a nuke.
Quantization of gravity would be about the smallest possible increment of gravitational potential energy. So kind of tens of decimal places into the roundoff error.
Theories of everything are interesting as theory but offer not much as applied physics.
Consider instead the physics of frictional interactions between rock surfaces that you’d need to predict earthquakes. That would also be interesting for machine part wear, lubrication, material fracture, brake pads, welding, maybe things like bone breakage, and of course the hundreds of billions of dollars per decade we lose on earthquake damage.
Also, if Anonymous is J.W. then hi to him.
Andrew, my point is that “theories of everything” even if successful add very very close to nothing to whatever we already have.
Or put it this way Andrew, the biggest obstacle to creating a theory of quantum gravity is the difficulty of finding any physical situation in which such a theory would make a detectable difference.
So let’s say tomorrow we create a theory of Quantum Gravity that works. By how much has our ability to predict actually been increased?
It has to be almost, or even strictly, nill since otherwise we’d have lots of physical situations in which such a theory would make a difference.
Yes!
Another way to look at this is to point out that QM and the standard model are the most amazingly accurate theories ever, and predict accurately up to any energy level that’s ever been achieved, even by the craziest enourmousest experiments.
Since QM/SM works so well, there’s no new data. And the string theory blokes are left just guessing. And their one guess that was testable and tested (SUSY) failed.
Another thing is that a lot of the popular-press hyped physics stuff doesn’t pass the smell test. The “anthropic principle” and the “multiverse” are so obviously stupid that they should have been laughed out of the room instantly. (I.e., there’s a universe that we live in. There aren’t any others that we will ever have access to. Physics’ job is to figure out our universe, not propose theories about imaginary universes; that’s scifi’s job.)
And don’t get me started on quantum computing or AI hype…
Or to put it into Statistical terms. Image if a significant chunk of the Statistics community decided the ultimate goal of Statistics was to compute the 137th term of the Cornish-Fisher expansion out to 25 decimal places.
They sold this endeavor as the final “statistical calculation of that solves everything” and some guy named Michio Kaku claimed that whoever solves this will be the next Neyman-Pearson and will be the first to see into the mind of God.
You’d be justified in throwing a “hey, no so fast” in their direction.
Another thing to consider. Suppose a “theory of everything” is found tomorrow and the entire physics community concludes it’s fully correct and in agreement with every last known experimental fact.
What are the odds that this “final theory” is really final? What chance would you give that physicists will never discover a need to modify it?
I’m going to go ahead and state for the record the chance of it never being modified again is exactly zero.
A bunch of people here opining on the pointlessness of further progress in fundamental theoretical physics are missing the point in the same way as the congressman asking Robert Wilson about how further funding of high energy physics would contribute to defense of the country, to which the reply was “not at all, except to make it worth defending.”
The reason for the public rock star status of string theorists is that (some) people are still curious about what all the turtles are standing on. And of course it would have been easy to question the value of general relativity back in 1920, but in 2020 it turns out to be very important for locating that blue dot on the map on the phone in your pocket.
I understand this viewpoint, but disagree completely. Yet another way to express my misgivings about “fundamental” physics is this:
The claim that current searches for the Theory of Everything are special, important, fundamental, or in any way exceptional is 100% based on philosophical prejudices and nothing else.
Shoveling dung may not be glamorous, but if you advertise it as “saving the free world” they’ll give people medals for doing it.
To take advances — even if they worked, which they don’t, and even if they were the “final theory”, which they wont be — that represent a minuscule increase in our ability to predict things, as “fundamental”, is just bunk.
By contrast being able to, for example, predict earthquakes with a 30 minute warning, would represent a vastly greater leap in our understanding of nature, not to mention our ability to predict, manipulate and master it.
That the former is considered “fundamental” and the later isn’t, is not a fact. It’s a philosophical prejudices at best, and pure flimflam at worst.
I went to a physics colloquium by one of the Event Horizon Telescope team members. He showed a slide of some of the front page stories of the first images of the black holes in M87 and our galaxy. He said there were – if I recall correctly – over 500 such front pages.
There is no contradiction between the *importance* of the unglamorous work at the mineface of whatever subfield, and the broad human desire to understand how the cosmos works.
I’ve seen lots of words and calculations about this, but never any actual GPS code (not that I’ve tried very hard). Do they actually calculate the relativity effect, or use an empirically-derived constant?
Maybe even as part of a larger error equation. Eg, it is assumed:
total = e1 + relativity
Then we *know* relativity error is 38 us (or whatever), and have measured the total error. If we didn’t know about that, e1 would just be estimated as 38 us larger (and maybe it is).
It would be especially interesting to see the earliest GPS code. Which came first: the correction or the observed error?
I don’t have my copy at hand, but Parkinson and Spilker have at least a full chapter on Relativistic Effects in their 2-volume book on GPS.
Here’s a discussion of the calculations:
https://www.gpsworld.com/inside-the-box-gps-and-relativity/.
This reference states that the offset in the early GPS satellites was empirical.
https://isidore.co/misc/Physics%20papers%20and%20books/GPS%20&%20Relativity/RELATIVITY%20AND%20THE%20GLOBAL%20POSITIONING%20SYSTEM%20(Ashby).pdf
Here is a description of that process from the above reference:
Nowadays the rate of every orbiting GPS clock is
adjusted by this “factory offset” before launch. But before
the first GPS satellite was launched in 1977, although it
was recognized that orbiting clocks would require such a
relativistic offset, there was uncertainty as to its magni-
tude, and even its sign. So correcting frequency synthe-
sizers were built into the clocks, spanning a large enough
range around the nominal 10.23 MHz clock frequency to
encompass all possibilities. After the satellite’s cesium
atomic clock was turned on, it was operated for three
weeks to measure its rate. The frequency shift measured
during this initial period was found to be 4.425 parts per
ten billion, agreeing with the relativistic calculation to better
than 1%.
Bob76
Thanks. So, its a post-diction rather than pre-diction.
I kind of suspected so. Typically people highlight their actual predictions in a way not seen for this GR + GPS claim.
It reminds me of LIGO, where they claimed to have detected some event, but actually it was a gamma ray telescope that told them where to look in the data. Last I followed it, the reverse had never happened, ie LIGO telling the other telescopes where to look.
This type of weasely behavior is very irritating, but also gives confidence there is a lot of exciting stuff about the universe still waiting to be discovered.
I have some experience in both fields. I think there are similarities in the problems & causes. Essentially, in both fields
– researchers make over the top claims that aren’t supported by strong evidence
In the replication crisis, the evidence required is statistical – do you have enough of it to warrant a particular conclusion? Whereas in ST, the evidence would be deductive math. Demonstrating the existence, properties, equivalences etc of various mathematical structures. Does that math justify your bold conclusions & interpretations?
The causes are likely similar:
– researchers want funding & status
– media want stories
– journals want ‘breakthrough’ articles that generate publicity
“In the replication crisis, the evidence required is statistical …”
It seems to me that the replication crisis in the social sciences and psychology is due to bad theories. Since the theories are bad, any honest/carefully-done experiment is going to turn up zilch, so the need for published papers results in fraud.
Human intelligence is a humongously wonderful thing, and we get people studying nudges. We (1970s/1980s AI types) tried really hard to figure out how people dealt with logical reasoning about the world, and failed miserably. No one else is even trying. (Really. The whole LLM game is based on the idea that intelligence will magically appear from statistical next token guessing if we just have enough data. This is patently ridiculous. Really, it is.)
Still, it seems to me that social sciences and psychology have it easier in the sense that if you open your eyes and think, you’ll notice how amazing human intelligence is, and find all sorts of examples of it. The mud-wrestling in physics may look silly, but these guys can sling around amazingly deep math. They may think each other idiots, but they’re all amazingly smart blokes. Math in general gets kewler and kewler, with ever more amazing things being figured out, e.g. Landlands stuff. We’re figuring out more and more how cells (and biology in general) works, and it’s, again, hairier and hairier and harier.
I don’t think the differences are really all that great between what’s happening now in physics and what’s been happening in the social sciences, with the latter also suffering from a theory crisis that I would argue set the stage for the reproducibility crisis. If I understand correctly, Andrew seems to suggest implicitly that junk science (from nudgelords to himmicanes) is not necessarily representative of the state of mainstream theory development. I think the theoretical dysfunction has actually permeated pretty much the entire field of social sciences. The mechanistic approach, ironically conceived as a corrective to naive verficationism, has become the de facto standard for theory-building. I think this has inadvertently legitimatized the relinquishing of the development of the theoretical (or even merely meta-theoretical) and methodological coherence that could prevent falling right back into the verficationist trap. The rejection of falsification in favor of selective story-telling aided by a performative veneer of empirical pseudo-rigor has long become very much the standard. To paraphrase one of my sociology professors, we let 100 flowers bloom* but no one is getting rid of the weeds anymore.
*Yes, a pun on Mao’s campaign.
Once you strip away the hype, the entire field of high energy physics is an extraordinarily kludgy set of phenomenological theories about a fringe aspect nature (fringe to human concerns anyway).
Non physicists are shocked to hear that because they hear it’s the “most accurate theory ever”, or “fundamental”, and leading to a “theory of everything”, and so on. But it shouldn’t be shocking. Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation of QM was explicitly phenomenological. There is no physical picture, the goal is to just calculate observables correctly. It’s not much different in principle than Ptylomy’s epicycles “saving the phenomenon”.
Consequently, every advancement in QM or field theory was a struggle, usually lasting 5-20 years, to find which way among endless possibilities gets a calculation that sorta reproduces the experimental numbers. The “correct” choice is then presented in text books as the obvious way to do it, with the other two dozen attempts quietly forgotten. Even then the “correct” way is usually extremely kludgy.
The claim to be “the most accurate theory ever” is based on the QED calculation of the electron g-factor. Oliver Consa detailed the actual history of these calculations in a paper in 2021.
Basically experimentalists would determine a value of g, the theorists would calculate a close value of g within error. Then the experimentalist would determine a more accurate value of g outside of the previous errors, then the theorists would miraculously publish a new value of g that agreed with the latest experiments.
This happened 11 times.
My issue is not with the field, or the work they do, or the success they’ve had and will have in the future. But the hype and hyperbole surrounding this field is off the charts and hype-rot set in well before string theory.
> Basically experimentalists would determine a value of g, the theorists would calculate a close value of g within error. Then the experimentalist would determine a more accurate value of g outside of the previous errors, then the theorists would miraculously publish a new value of g that agreed with the latest experiments.
You seem to be angry that people are fixing their mistakes. The community of scientists is not saying that they predicted the correct value before seeing the experiments, and then fudging to remove inconvenient evidence to the contrary. They are saying that *the theory* predicts a certain value, and are arguing over the value, changing their views as the evidence changes, mistakes come to light, and as they add smaller and smaller corrections. It is easier to find mistakes when you have an experiment to check you. This is not to say that confirmation bias and other such things do not exist.
I looked through Consa’s paper and he says things are “miraculous” and “strange” when they are not if you understand that error bars decrease on average over time. He also doesn’t understand the concept that you can predict more than one measurable quantity with a theory (the success of QED does not solely depend on the g-2 factor). Finally, he doesn’t understand renormalization, Wilson fixed the problems with it in 1971-1974.
Imagine a simpler situation: the shape of the earth. Consa is basically saying that as smaller and smaller corrections to the shape were discovered, the theorists fixed mistakes that they found and “miraculously” published better calculations of the shape that agreed with the latest experiments, so…something is wrong with the theory.
There is currently a large (nearly 5 sigma but not quite) discrepancy between the theoretical and experimental value of the muon’s g-2 factor. People are talking about it excitedly, because it might be the first evidence of a hole in the standard model. If true, we can learn something from it, i.e. create a new theory that agrees with the experiments and makes new predictions. This is the progress of science.
> But the hype and hyperbole surrounding this field is off the charts and hype-rot set in well before string theory.
Yes, it is overhyped. But none of the over-the top claims in Consa’s paper work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/750_GeV_diphoton_excess
That’s what I’ve gathered from the 750 GeV excess. It appears the theory is flexible enough to very precisely calculate any number you want, in dozens /hundreds of different ways, even when its actually some experimental artifact.
This is fixed by making a clear distinction between pre- and post-diction.
I’m confused what part of the diphoton “hangover” makes you say that. Physicists thought it was a signature of new physics, i.e. something that the theory did not predict. It wasn’t. End of story.
They are postdicting the supposed particle with new theories. Those theories were falsified when the particle vanished into noise. Pretty simple.
We may be using different definitions of “theory”. To me it is a core set of premises along with whatever can be deduced from them.
How is it so easy to “explain” any supposed new particle without affecting any of the other predictions? This looks very suspect.
If you are changing the theory, some other predictions should change too. It seems more like you have a bunch of independent equations.
Not really. The hypothesized particle would very explicitly be an invalidation of “the theory” (the standard model).
Now, for introducing a new elementary particle, there is a family of mathematical methods for constructing an associated new field theory and working out particle’s properties. So in that sense, the framework of quantum field theory (which is not in fact a theory) is in fact flexible enough to fit any particular observation you want.
This is really a problem of terrible semantics. “Quantum field theory” itself is really not a theory, it’s a mathematical method for constructing theories. There are particular quantum field theories which are concrete theories, like QED, QCD, EW, etc. The collection of quantum field theories that are considered to be experimentally validated and fundamental and fit together nicely is the standard model. You can construct a quantum field theory to explain an anomaly, but as you note
it probably won’t play fit that nicely with the standard model, and even if it does it also probably won’t replicate in a future experiment. I don’t know much about the digamma theory, but my guess is they never really got as far as trying to fit it into the standard model, working out how it breaks/respects existing symmetries, etc.
Thanks, somebody.
It’d be great if you chose one of the 500 examples to show thats the case. But it does make sense.
Essentially, in HEP “theory” can refer tof the actual theory (standard model), a meta-theory that filters out obviously inconsistent ideas, and wild speculations.