| ▲ | xqcgrek2 2 days ago |
| A few hundred people working on String Theory for about four decades is about $500 million. Hope this proof was worth it. |
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| ▲ | cyber_kinetist 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Over a couple of decades VCs have invested in vanity startups that cost billions of dollars like it's nothing, countless times. I think half a billion isn't that expensive for a program that searches for a potential "theory of everything" that can profoundly change our understanding of the universe (even if it brings no results!) |
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| ▲ | lazide 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Then just call it maths, not physics? | | |
| ▲ | exe34 2 days ago | parent [-] | | you can still call it whatever you like! | | |
| ▲ | lazide 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Last time I called it ‘a haven for folks afraid to have testable theories’ I almost got banned! | | |
| ▲ | Qwertious 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Didn't string theory create the concept of supersymmetry, which had testable theories? They were proven wrong, but that's a good thing. | | |
| ▲ | glenstein 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | We're long past the point where people can claim string theory has contributed nothing. AdS/CFT correspondence helped us understand what happens to information in black holes, and brought us the holographic principle which now is looking like it might potentially be the next big conceptual revolution in physics. Holography is making meaningful predictions in nuclear and plasma physics right now Holography desperately needs it's own Brian Greene style ambassador to share the good news. In terms of momentum and taking center stage, it's now in the place where String Theory used to be like 10-15 years ago as the frontier idea with all the excitement ever momentum behind it, and it has been borne from the fruit of string theory. It's quite amazing times we're living in but I think there's been no energy in the post covid world to take a breath and appreciate it. | | |
| ▲ | lazide 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Last i’d heard, ‘they provided an interesting alternative way of thinking of the problem’ but provided no unique insights or additional testable behaviors. The folks using the alternative theories ended up being able to formulate them more directly using other (‘normal’) physics later. Do you have a cite for anything contrary to that? It doesn’t help that when something does finally seem experimentally provable (Craig Hogan noise for example), but then gets tested and seems disproven, then it gets ‘removed from Canon’ as it were and ‘is not string theory’. |
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| ▲ | lazide 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It got retconned to ‘not string theory’ after that, if i remember correctly. |
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| ▲ | exe34 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'd like to express my doubts about your ability to understand their theories more colourfully, but I'm afraid I'm also under close scrutiny around here. | | |
| ▲ | lazide 2 days ago | parent [-] | | This exact long running issue with string theory is surely my imagination, and I’m the only one who has commented on it. luckily it’s easy to prove me wrong. Right? | | |
| ▲ | exe34 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Is it though? The simplest fool can ask questions that stump the wisest of men. | | |
| ▲ | lazide 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Still waiting for an actual argument instead of passive aggressive ad hominem. | | |
| ▲ | exe34 2 days ago | parent [-] | | oh have you not seen the rest of the thread? | | |
| ▲ | lazide 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Where someone else gave an actual concrete info that I could respond to, and I did? Have you? | | |
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| ▲ | jjk166 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Or roughly the cost of producing Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker. Kinda wish that money had gone to string theory. |
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| ▲ | orochimaaru 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What would you have them work on? Predatory social media platforms that sell your data to advertisers and commoditize you. |
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| ▲ | analog31 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I suspect more people worked on solving quadratic equations in what I estimate to be the 1000 years since the problem was formulated, to when it was solved. The ancient Greeks knew that they could solve some quadratic equations but not others, and Al-Khwarizmi came up with the general solution. And then it was even further generalized with complex numbers. |
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| ▲ | glenstein 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Neil DeGrasse Tyson made an amazing point some years back that string theory costs practically nothing to develop. It takes some human capital to be sure, but in terms of infrastructure investments, it's pencils and paper and some computers. There's no high stakes mega project requiring massive infrastructure investments for questionable returns; no super colliders or gravitational wave detectors. For a field repeatedly challenged for not bringing testable predictions to bear, the fact that so much of its rich theoretical framework has been able to be worked out with minimal infrastructure investment is a welcome blessing which, I would hope, critics and supporters alike can celebrate. |
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| ▲ | SyzygyRhythm 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I wouldn't downplay the opportunity cost of that much human capital. It really is quite a lot, given the obvious talents of the physicists. I'm not saying I fully agree with the position, but one way of looking at it is that thousands of incredibly smart people got nerd-sniped into working on a problem that actually has no solution. I sometimes wonder if there will ever be a point where people give up on it, as opposed to pursuing a field that bears some mathematical fruit, always with some future promise, but contributes nothing to physics. | | |
| ▲ | niemandhier 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There is almost no opportunity cost: The academic pyramid swaps out the lower parts of the hierarchy at a high pace. You might lose a few smart people who become professors but the average sting theory phd goes to finance or whatever field requires absurd amounts of math at the moment. You do get people who are happy for a few years since they can live their childhood dream of being a physicist before the turn to actual jobs. | |
| ▲ | svara 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Having people work on things that are at the limit of human understanding is an essential part of a modern educational system. For every professional string theorist, you get hundreds of people who were brought up in an academic system that values rigor and depth of scientific thinking. That's literally what a modern technological economy is built on. Getting useful novel results out of this is almost a lucky side effect. |
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| ▲ | yunwal 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If all research bore fruit it wouldn't be research. |
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| ▲ | dimator 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| so like 12.5 million a year? what an incredible self-own. aside from that, this number is meaningless without context: how much do other fields of research get? |
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| ▲ | gmueckl 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Don't tell him how much money was invested into CERN over the same timespan to conduct experiments with highly uncertain outcomes. Or into gravitational wave detection. It wasn't certain that those waves even exist until the first measurement decades into the program. | |
| ▲ | daquisu 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 12.5 million a year for a hundred people seems reasonable? 125k per person per year. GP still said "a few hundred" - two hundred would drop that value to 62.5k per person |
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| ▲ | N_Lens 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Your entire life summed up probably costs $500k-4m (On average, depending). Some bean counter could probably argue that it isn't worth it. |
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| ▲ | runarberg 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I am not a fan of String Theory, but as far as fringe science theories go, String Theory is probably one of the more innocent ones. If you are going to pour money into a fringe science theory, I would much rather it goes to scientists trying to discover some properties of the universe which may or may not exist (and probably doesn’t exist; lets be honest here), than many of the awful stuff which exists on the fringes of social sciences (things like longtermism or futurism) or on the fringes of engineering (a future Mars colony, AI singularity, etc.). |
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| ▲ | setopt 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Genuinely curious: Why do you consider a future Mars colony to be «awful stuff»? | | |
| ▲ | runarberg 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, I do. It is engineeringly possible, but societally a horror prescription. I maintain that even the moon landing was an engineering dead end, it resulted in no major breakthrough which we wouldn’t have reached otherwise (for much cheaper) and the humanity benefited nothing but bragging rights. It was then used to further nationalism and exceptionalism by one particular society which went on to conduct many horrible acts of atrocities in the decades that followed. The prospect of a Mars colony would be that except a million times worse. Humanity will never migrate to Mars, we will never live on Mars, we have nothing to gain by living there, and it may even be impossible for us to live a normal human life over there (e.g. we don‘t know if we can even give birth over there). The only thing it will give us are bragging rights to the powerful individuals which achives it first, who will likely use that as political capital to enact horrible policies on Earth, for their own personal benefits, at the cost of everybody else. | |
| ▲ | Supermancho 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Saying "working toward a martian colony" is akin to saying "working toward a way to colonize the solar system". Mars is not very interesting once you have a methodology. The Moon is a much more practical place to start the process. Then aim at the asteroid belt. | | |
| ▲ | NetMageSCW 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Mars costs the same as the Moon to reach and return from (delta-V) and is a much easier environment to stay in, even over as short a period as a month. Mars makes much more sense than the Moon, which has little of interest and isn’t a stepping stone to anywhere. | | |
| ▲ | Supermancho 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Mars costs the same as the Moon to reach and return from 0/1 If you stay out of gravity wells, traveling anywhere in space is the same cost, minus the non-trivial life support issues, which only come into play on a trip to Mars and back. > (Mars) is a much easier environment to stay in, even over as short a period as a month 0/2 > (the moon) isn’t a stepping stone to anywhere. 0/3 Humanity has gotten there before Mars for the precise reason that it is a stepping stone. None of what you posted is factually true and, in good faith, I have to wonder why you might believe these things. |
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| ▲ | runarberg 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Mining asteroids is a goal that makes sense. I can picture a future where spacecrafts are regularly sent to the asteroid belt and come back to earth with some minerals. Living on the moon does not make sense. There is nothing to be gained from humans living in a future moon base. Not any more than cities built in Antarctica, or in orbit with a constellation of ISS like satellites. We won’t build a city on the Moon, nor Mars, nor any of Jupiter’s moons, nor anywhere outside of Earth, and we won‘t do this even if engineeringly possible, for the exact same reason we won’t build a bubble city inside the Mariana Trench. | | |
| ▲ | TheOtherHobbes 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Mining asteroids makes no sense whatsoever with any currently imaginable practical tech, especially not economically. The numbers for even the most basic solutions just don't work, and anything cleverer - like adding thrusters to chunks of metal and firing them at the Earth - has one or two rather obvious issues. The Moon is interesting because it's there, it's fairly close, it's a test bed for off-world construction, manufacturing, and life support, and there are experiments you can do on the dark side that aren't possible elsewhere. Especially big telescopes. It has many of the same life support issues as Mars, and any Moon solutions are likely to work on Mars and the asteroids, more quickly and successfully than trying to do the same R&D far, far away. Will it pay for itself? Not for a long, long time. But frontier projects rarely do. The benefit comes from the investment, the R&D, the new science and engineering, and the jobs created. It's also handy if you need a remote off-site backup. | | |
| ▲ | NetMageSCW 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Mining asteroids wouldn’t be for Earth - it would be for satellites or LEO or possibly even Mars, which is a lot closer to the Asteroids than Earth and may need some extra raw materials we don’t want to spend the horrendous cost of lifting out of Earth’s gravity. The Moon has nothing to offer Mars explorers as everything will be different and solutions for the unique lunar conditions (two weeks of darkness, temperature extremes, moon dust, vacuum) do not apply to Mars at all. It’like saying living under the ocean is good practice for living in the Artic, but we should start under the ocean because it’s closer. | |
| ▲ | Supermancho 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Mining asteroids makes no sense whatsoever with any currently imaginable practical tech, especially not economically. With current tech, it's practical enough to extract rocks from a rock. We've already done this on a comet, which I think is much harder to do. With current economics, not practical to fund such an endeavor, even if it was to haul back an asteroid made of solid gold. Regardless, we're discussing the far future, rather than current state. If raw materials (again, an unknown) continue to become more scarce, it's hard to say what economics might support extra-planetary resource collection. What's for sure, is mining Mars will be harder than mining asteroids for water or metals, et al. | |
| ▲ | runarberg 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Mining asteroids makes no sense in the current economy with our current technology. But working towards engineering solutions which makes mining asteroids make sense makes sense (if that makes sense). However, it is much easier to see us send robots to mine these asteroids, or send robots to the moon to build a giant telescope on the dark side (if that makes sense), then it is to see us build cities on the moon to build said telescope, and to mine those asteroids. You see the difference here is that the end goal of mining asteroids are resources being sent to earth and exploited, while the goal of space settlements are the settlements them selves, that is some hypothetical space expansion is the goal, and that makes no sense, nobodies lives will improve from space expansion (except for the grifters’ during the grift). | | |
| ▲ | parineum 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > nobodies lives will improve from space expansion (except for the grifters’ during the grift). Aspiring to goals and accomplishing them makes life worth living to a lot of people. Furthermore, humanity seems to have an innate drive to explore and learn. Even to those left at home, it's inspirational to think that there are people who are taking steps to explore the universe. Maybe it won't help anyone live but it will give a lot of people something to live for. | | |
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| ▲ | koakuma-chan 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why colonize Mars? Why not Moon? | | |
| ▲ | whiplash451 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The moon has no atmosphere. It is regularly hit by meteorites. Not sure it’s a very safe place to set up a colony. Not like Mars is an amazing trip either, but the Moon is simply unsafe long term. | | |
| ▲ | dmix 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Plus Mars has a far more interesting history so the people living there can do more fun science than stare out at dusty grey rock. |
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| ▲ | glenstein 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As others have noted, the moon has significant limitations, in terms of resources and atmosphere. I do think it may have utility, not for anything we might consider settlements or habitats, but perhaps domed science outposts. | |
| ▲ | mwigdahl 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Mars has larger deposits of water and volatiles, which help with early space expansion. You can start with a single Moon base but generally it isn't worth the mission control investment once you start to build out Mars. |
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