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"string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard"
(www.youtube.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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I think she leaned a bit too heavily onto the notion that string theorists, as a whole, were lying. I think more likely they genuinely thought they were on to something. They may have been wrong but they didn't think they were wrong. A lie is deliberate misinformation, not simply being mistaken.
Like, ok, at first? Sure, I can go with "it's not a lie if you actually believe it," in 1985 or even 1995. But by 2010? Come on. And then in 2020, to be like "Well, I mean, I never specifically said I believed in it, just that, you know, it was a thing..." is so gross. It's like some shit my ex-wife would have said after a three-day-long running argument about some basic fact of the universe.
That's 1 string theorist, Brian Greene. It is absurd to call all string theorists liars. Are all psychologists liars because they had a reproducibility crisis?
This was a half-cocked and not through rant that others and blames a whole group of hard working physicists just because they were wrong. This kind of rant has no place in the scientific process or science communication.
That's like saying NDT is "one astrophysicist" or Freud is "one psychologist". We're talking about the guy who brought the entire concept to the public, and he's sure as shit not the only guy who wrote fantastically optimistic treatises about a concept that real physicists didn't bother with because it was inherently unfalsifiable due to being entirely untestable.
None of them wrote books that said "Yeah, this is a cool thought experiment that will never be able to do anything scientific hypotheses are supposed to be able to do". Fuck, just make another thread asking "What do y'all think about the Many Worlds hypothesis?" and you'll get a hundred comments talking about how cool it is as they walk straight out of the real of science and into the realm of crackpot woo-woo speculation. BECAUSE OF THESE PEOPLE.
Yeah, I agree with the video. After a certain point (I'll be generous and say that point was 2000-2005), it was a lie. A scam. A con. No different from the guys who say the pyramids were alien landing markers and Stonehenge was built by fairies. It was a load of people saying nonsense stuff to sell books and speaking engagements.
Yeah, again, if she has a problem with Brian Greene or specific people, call them out, don't slander an entire branch of physicists. Most of them were working very hard on the math and theory to try and figure out if there was anything that could be testable, for those who even understood their field well enough to realize how important that was.
No, you and her are just lashing out and looking for someone to blame for a distrustful public. How about you both take a step back and notice that not every western country is as science-phobic as the US, and maybe there are other issues at play (like having a shitty public education system for one).
Again, if you want to huff and puff and get all red in the face at someone that's fine, but name specific people who you think lied and say why, don't just cattily say "it was all of them"