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203 points jandrewrogers | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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slanderaan01 ◴[] No.41082121[source]
I'm curious what applications there might be if any in number theory. If I recall, langlands had motivations from string theory concepts which ultimately wasn't as successful as hoped in physics.
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bdjsiqoocwk ◴[] No.41086092[source]
String theory is still the only self consistent theory of quantum physics.... I'd say that's extremely successful.
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defrost ◴[] No.41086137[source]
Not particularly, it's so open ended it describes an enormous landscape of possible universes and lacks any specific testable predictions for our universe.

Unless it's been firmed up a great deal in recent times.

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bdjsiqoocwk ◴[] No.41086167[source]
> lacks any specific testable predictions for our universe.

Predicts that special relativity holds up at all scales (check, according to all evidence so far), predicts general relativity at low energy scales (check).

So it's false that it has no testable predictions. None of this happened "in recent times" though, it's been understood for a long time.

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jerf ◴[] No.41088988[source]
"No testable predictions" is shorthand for "makes no testable prediction that don't match our other theories, making it impossible to distinguish between string theory and relativity+QM". We know the latter doesn't really work, but without the ability to distinguish, it isn't clear that string theory "works" either. It really needs a solid new testable prediction.
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bdjsiqoocwk ◴[] No.41089538[source]
If you grant arbitrarily advanced technology then "testable predictions" absolutely do exist, most immediately on the cross sections of basically every particle. We can't perform such experiments now, but that's a problem with the technology, not with the theory.

Imagine if someone had said 30 years ago that the "higgs boson theory" is a failure because we couldn't then perform the experiments to detect it.

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1. jerf ◴[] No.41100416{4}[source]
"If you grant arbitrarily advanced technology"

I don't, thus neatly resolving your issue.

Neither does anybody else. Testable means something like testable today or in the designable future and it always has.

As for the fact this may mean a true theory is not testable today even though some hypothetical technology in the hypothetical future wielded by hypothetical beings could hypothetically resolve the problem, well, welcome to the universe we live in. This is not special pleading applied only to string theory. It's evenly applied to everything. It's just that string theory gets hit by this particularly hard, although not uniquely so (to the best of my knowledge, loop quantum gravity is also rather short on testable predictions). The only utility of quadruply hypothetical advances is to science fiction authors. And I've greatly enjoyed many such stories. But it's important to distinguish between science fiction and what we can do in reality.