1. principles
  2. Strings and Philately

Strings and Philately

By drorzel on March 29, 2008.

Over at Evolving Thoughts, John Wilkins pokes string theorists:

Ernst Rutherford, the "father" of nuclear physics, once airily declared "In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting". By this he meant that the theory of physics is the only significant thing in science. Such mundane activities as taxonomy in biology were just sampling contingent examples of physics.

So it is with some amusement that I note that in order to make sense of string theory, a group of physicists have been trying to do taxonomy over string theories.

I'm never sure who reads what blogs, but I wouldn't want this to fail to come to the attention of the right people...

(There's much more to the post than that-- the shot at string theory is just the jumping-off point for a discussion of philosophy of science. I doubt he realizes what a can of worms he's (potentially) opening with that, though...)

Tags
Physics
Science
String Theory

More like this

Physicists undertake stamp-collecting
Ernst Rutherford, the "father" of nuclear physics, once airily declared "In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting". By this he meant that the theory of physics is the only significant thing in science. Such mundane activities as taxonomy in biology were just sampling…
Two Cultures Within Science
The great British physicist Ernest Rutherford once said "In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting." This is kind of the ultimate example of the arrogance of physicists, given a lovely ironic twist by the fact that when Rutherford won a Nobel Prize, it was in Chemistry. (…
Know Your Geeks
Alex Palazzo offers a taxonomy of biologists, and takes some heat in the comments for leaving people out or mischaracterizing subdisciplines. This reminded me that I did a similar post about physics quite some time ago-- almost four years! That's, like, a century in blog-time... I'll reproduce the…
String Theory, Part Three
Definitely the final essay in this series. And no more politics. In a Universe first, I received in my cool email "box" yesterday a piece of rebuttal about the political implications of the tokes on String Theory in my last essay. What my correspondent pointed out to me was that my comparison of…

If BRST invariance is falsified string theory is wrong. Bell the cat.

Galileo, Principia's opening page, metric gravitation, string theory... all demand isotropic vacuum and the Equivalence Principle. Both are exhaustively validated to at least 14 decimal places. Weitzenböck's teleparallel gravitation wholly contains GR without either founding postulate. Agreement is banal. Testable divergence is interesting.

Do chemically identical left and right shoes violate the Equivalence Principle given a chiral vacuum background for the massed sector? String theory could be overall wrong as Euclid cannot navigate Earth's surface. Somebody should look - parity Eötvös experiment opposing enantiomorphic space groups P3(1)21 and P3(2)21 single crystal quartz; parity calorimetry experiment opposing P3(1)21 and P3(2)21 single crystal benzil.

A century of composition and spin Eötvös experiments nulled within experimental error. A nulled parity Eötvös experiment fully meets the gold standards of publication and degree conferral. Otherwise, add a Swedish December vacation for killing string theory 10^1000 times dead.

@Uncle Al
Was that shit to make sense?