The Accursed Fertility of Differential Geometry

[Martin]

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/blog/archives/000165.html

 

a fine conversation in progress at Not Even Wrong

 

choice tidbit:

 

Chris W remarked

"In a way, all this reminds me of the contrast between Lorentz's and Einstein's explanations of the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment."

 

 

Thomas Larsson replied

"We live in a region of the Landscape where the aether wind is very small, because a large aether wind is not compatible with human life."

 

 

Here is Chris post, for context:

 

"In a way, all this reminds me of the contrast between Lorentz's and Einstein's explanations of the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment. The fact to be explained had a stark simplicity about it, whose full significance Einstein grasped and Lorentz couldn't quite perceive, in spite of his gifts as a theoretician and mastery of the subject.

 

Of course, it has become clear that for Einstein the Michelson-Morley result was expected and almost trivial; he was led to the underlying principles by thinking about Maxwell's electrodynamics and certain observations which by themselves had not heretofore appeared to be problematic.

 

In contrast, string theory's birth was oddly accidental. The hope has been maintained for 25 years that its underlying physical principles would eventually become clear. Instead, it has begun to seem like a mockery of the very idea of physical explanation -- a massive virtuoso exercise in mathematical modeling, supported by the "accursed fertility" of differential geometry (to use Kant's phrase*). As Kachru says without apparent irony:

 

'In studying any of these issues in depth, [the] most striking feature is the diverse array of possibilities the theory encompasses.'

 

Again, why is this diversity supposed to be a virtue, when there is so little empirical basis for believing that most of these possibilities are actually realized, and so little real insight offered to account for their absence?"

 

Kant was talking about the accursed fertility of Metaphysics in his day, by which, if one wished to, one could "explain" anything, and probably its opposite as well.

[Martin]

the conversation at Not Even Wrong contained some sober words from Lubos Motl. (I rarely go along with what he says but in this case partly agree)

 

"Shamit is a nice and extremely smart and technically powerful guy - which of course makes it slightly more difficult for me to say that I essentially agree with Peter.

 

The level of anthropicity of his thinking has been increasing in the past few years. A couple of years ago, Shamit would tell me things like 'you don't need to believe the anthropic principle; this is a question we should understand anyway'. This kind of disclaimer has been disappearing.

 

It seems that now it is expected that one believes the anthropic thinking as the ultimate answer we can have about nature. It is the motivation for this kind of research as well as the broad framework in which the research is done. I just can't imagine how could I ever be convinced that a theory of this kind is a correct one because it lacks quantitative predictability..."

[Martin]

more stuff from Not Even Wrong, from an earlier conversation about the stringy Landscape and Leonard Susskind's view of it.

 

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showpost.php?p=135586&postcount=1

 

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showpost.php?p=135596&postcount=2

 

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showpost.php?p=135874&postcount=3