Next Week’s Hype

Next week there will be a workshop in Munich with the title Why Trust a Theory? Reconsidering Scientific Methodology in Light of Modern Physics. It’s organized by Richard Dawid, to discuss his ideas about “non-empirical theory confirmation”, developed to defend string theory research against accusations that its failure to make any testable predictions about anything make it a failure as a research program.

I guess the idea of such a workshop is to bring together string theory proponents and critics to sort things out, but looking at the program and talk abstracts, this doesn’t look promising, with the central issues to be evaded, and speakers likely to just talk past each other.

While the workshop title refers to “Modern Physics” in general, the talks are mostly focused on one very narrow part of the subject: quantum gravity. String theory is supposed to be something much more than a quantum gravity theory, explaining the Standard Model and low energy physics. This has been a complete failure, and the plan at the workshop seems to be to deal with this elephant in the room by ignoring it, or worse, claiming it isn’t there.

From the talk abstracts, about the only person discussing particle physics will be Gordon Kane (Quevedo may mention it, although his main interest is cosmology). Kane will be claiming that string theory makes testable predictions about particle physics, ones about to be tested. The problem is that he has been making the same claims for thirty years, arguing back in the 90s in the pages of Physics Today and a book that string theory would be tested at LEP and the Tevatron (by finding superpartners). As his predictions have been conclusively falsified, he just refuses to acknowledge this and starts advertising new ones. Perhaps the most outrageous case of this is his latest book (discussed here), which is a reissue of the old one, with falsified predictions simply deleted and replaced, without any acknowledgement of what happened. I don’t think this behavior raises any philosophical issues about theory confirmation, just the sociological issue of why the physics community tolerates this, or why he’s the one person invited to this workshop to address the largest problem of the subject.

Another central problem here is the hype problem. If you give up on testability, and allow theory confirmation based on claims that “my theory is just better” by some ill-defined metric, you open up the obvious problem of how to deal with people’s natural human inclination to praise the wonderful characteristics of their intellectual children. At the workshop, Joe Polchinski’s talk is entitled “String Theory to the Rescue”. I see nothing in the program about any planned examination of the significant string theory hype problem, or even any acknowledgement that it exists.

I’m actually in a way more sympathetic than most people to the idea that “non-empirical” evaluation of a theory is an important and worthwhile topic. Fundamental physics theory is facing a huge problem due to the overwhelming success of the Standard Model and the increasing difficulty of exploring higher energy scales. If it is to continue to make progress there is a real need to do a better job of evaluating theoretical ideas without help from experiment. There is a group of scientists who have a lot of experience with this problem, and have a well-developed culture designed to deal with it. They’re called “mathematicians”. Despite the fact that this workshop is hosted by the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, the organizers don’t seem to have thought it worthwhile to invite any mathematicians or mathematical physicists to participate, missing out on a perspective that would be quite valuable.

Update: It’s now “this week”, not “next week”. Some tweeting from the conference going on, you can try the hashtag #WhyTrustATheory. Massimo Pigliucci comments from the Q and A session about a problem with this kind of thing: some people “very very much like the sound of their own damn voice”. I hear that David Gross claimed to have 20 possible observations that would invalidate string theory, but didn’t say what they were.

Update: Massimo Pigliucci is blogging a detailed account of the conference, see here (he’s also a speaker, slides here).

Update: I don’t think I’d noticed before that Lee Smolin has a very much to the point review of the Dawid book here.