CAPITOL IDEAS: Science on a String
Bethell, Tom
TOM BETHELL been living through "a dark age of theoretical physics." The underlying problem is that scientists, professors, editors, journalists—the intellectual classes, in short—are...
...ing ideas that enjoy the cachet of revolution...
...Marx really would be the true hero of our age, except for the inconvenient fact that, when put into practice, his theories caused poverty and famine...
...Newton saw science as a cumulative enterprise that built on the discoveries of the past, not as something that overturned them...
...But I doubt whether true scientific discovery ever really appealed to our sense of the bizarre...
...is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...Most physicists don't...
...The appeal that Dada had to the patrons of art 90 years ago This is supposed to be physics at its most advanced the "theory of everything...
...Einstein may win that one yet...
...So Feynman knew that he too could end up looking silly in calling string theory nonsense...
...Bizarre, the man said...
...he went on...
...What's your thinking on that now...
...I am going to be very foolish because I do feel strongly that this is nonsense...
...The Scientific American is going with the flow, floating downstream...
...Once, it made a real effort to explain these things...
...When the American Journal of Physics sent Brian Greene's book out for that when younger he was aware of "old men in the field [who] couldn't understand new ideas very well, and resisted them...
...In The Elegant Universe you suggested the holographic principle could be that principle for string theory...
...The underlying problem is that scientists, professors, editors, journalists—the intellectual classes, in short—are still in love with revolution and revolutionary ideas...
...Upheavals" just plain excite them...
...If they can't survive that, they aren't worth anything anyway...
...The question was not meant to clarify, but to promote the editor into a player...
...In the November issue, an interview with Greene included the following lives on today in theoretical physics...
...Shortly before he died Richard Feynman was asked what he thought about string theory...
...In the Standard Model, it's gauge invariance...
...More next month...
...In their public discourse, scientists are expected to be good revolutionists if they want to stay on the A list and qualify for a MacArthur...
...Hang on, though...
...Feynman does indeed provide us with an object lesson...
...That brings us to biology...
...It is the strength of the taboo against oppos review in 1999, it would have been unthinkable to have sought the opinions of a debunker...
...He had the self-confidence to overcome it...
...But in the last century, both in art and science, revolutionary upheaval has been applauded for its own sake and the result has been one nonsense after another...
...42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004...
...They ended up looking foolish...
...Notice the contrast between these much admired revolutions and Isaac Newton's comment: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants...
...No lowly reporter's role for him, thank you...
...It certainly requires conceptual advances every bit as bizarre and unexpected as was the case in the prior two revolutions...
...The magazine has declined sadly, along with the science it purports to describe...
...You can't get any more exciting than that...
...An executive producer of the Nova program said: "This isn't your father's physics...
...All this talk of upheaval is just childishness, the romance of Marx enduring in a realm of physics that has become unmoored from experiment...
...It went to a reliable revolutionist, John Schwartz of Caltech, who wrote: "In fact, many string theorists (myself included) believe that string theory constitutes the third big physics revolution of the century, following relativity and quantum mechanics...
...Tom Bethel...
...Meanwhile the revolutionary ardor of the intelligentsia lingers on...
...He cited Einstein, "not being able to take quantum mechanics...
...That is the highest praise...
...None of these notions had been brought up or explained earlier...
...TOM BETHELL been living through "a dark age of theoretical physics...
...String theory appeals to the imagination, with incredible consequences such as extra dimensions and parallel universes that seem to come off the pages of scientific fiction...
...Awesome, I guess...
...But it is not his own short-sightedness that is on view...
...Actually, all new ideas should be required to run a gauntlet of censorious reaction...
...It has to answer to no one except fashion-conscious grant-makers...
...The same issue also includes an excellent article by Wayt Gibbs suggesting that the vaunted Genome Project has all along been based on a serious misconception...
...Perhaps I could entertain future historians by saying I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction...
...He said "question" from an editor: "In the case of relativity, you had the equivalence principle and general covariance in that beacon role...
Vol. 36 • December 2003 • No. 7
