User talk:Mad physicist

Christopher (talk) 14:22, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world
Something to sharpen your skepticism on. All the best, Reverend Black Percy (talk) 18:12, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks a lot for the welcome! Concerning your question: I'm an experimental physicist and I have rarely looked into string theory. But what I can say is: Yes I have heard of criticism of string theory, mainly because it's so big and complicated and so far one couldn't make any predictions which could actually be tested. But yeah, I started looking around just now. The "Criticism" section of the wikipedia article on string theory gives an overview but you might have already looked there. This and this might also give an overview. (The first is a fairly old article and mentions the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which allegedly could deliver some experimental results that could be checked against string theory. Well, the LHC is running for a while now and one can say that its findings are very useful to check against the standard model of particle physics but not so much against string theory.) What I make of all these articles: proponents of string theory say "yes, we couldn't make any useful predictions yet but, well, finding the unified theory of everything is no child's play." --Mad physicist (talk) 19:52, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your input! I'd also like to be clear that I'm not out to call all of theoretical physics 'pointless' or anything. Rather, I'm just after the stuff that cannot ever be tested experimentally. Such concepts typically stem from any of the various overflexible theories (i.e., theories which can be adjusted to 'fit the findings' no matter what experiments do or do not show, like string theory). This post gives a decent rundown of the problem. All the best, Reverend Black Percy (talk) 23:13, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

It begins
Reverend Black Percy (talk) 23:14, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
 * -> Thanks! It's a pity, though, that both the rbutr and the google scholar plugin are not available for the latest firefox (which I use in 99% of the time). But I tried them out on chrome anyway and both appear to work. But it was a bit of a bummer that rbutr did NOT explode when I visited Whale.to! --Mad physicist (talk) 22:46, 12 August 2017 (UTC)