This kind of fracturing into relatively isolated epistemological subcultures occurs within the theory community as well.  Lee Smolin, one of the principle actors in the development of another theory of quantum gravity, called loop quantum gravity, speaks of the solipsism that can occur as competing theories develop simultaneously:

For more than ten years, from about 1984 to 1996, these two theories of quantum gravity were developed by two different groups of people completely independently. […] Even now, one can go to a conference and find that string theory and loop quantum gravity are the subjects of separate parallel sessions.  The fact that the same problems are being addressed in the two sessions is noticed only by the small handful of us who do our best to be in both rooms.[7]

Although a given community’s tendency to overdetermine its functional and epistemological boundaries may result from its leaders wanting to assure that the new recruits master their discipline’s increasingly complex body of knowledge, Smolin goes on to suggest that such tacit protectionist policies may also carry with them political punishments: ‘There is now the problem of making sure that young people have the freedom to wander across boundaries established by their elders without fear of jeopardizing their careers.’[8]  The managers of the social networks that constitute their communities of practice must constantly fine tune the delicate balance between open and closed peripheries.  On the one hand, by fostering an excessive openness in the gates of information exchange, they run the risk of diluting the technical rigorousness of the discipline’s formalism such that it loses its uniqueness, and thus its chance to achieve inevitability.  This is analogous to the protection of trade secrets in business.  On the other hand, by keeping the network too closed, that same technical rigorousness may become excessively autotelic, and thus fatally out of touch with external referents, in particular, the demands of experimental evidence and also, the potential for reinvigoration through theoretical cross-fertilization.

            Roger Penrose makes precisely the latter complaint of string theory.  He argues that it ‘has been almost entirely mathematically driven’[9].  To illustrate the consequences of string theory’s autotelic solipsism with respect to the recruitment of apprentices to the field, Penrose compares it to the tour of a foreign city:

[L]et us suppose that you are the tourist, but you are part of a group, led by a tour guide of impressive intelligence, knowledge, and sensitivity—the only trouble being that, in this case, the guide has no prior knowledge of the city and has had no prior encounter with the local language. […]  If you follow the group, then at least you will have the companionship of others, and you can talk to them about the surrounding architecture and share the excitement of the quest for your common goal.  Even if you do not expect to find that goal, you enjoy the search.[10]

Here, clearly he is thinking of Ed Witten, with his impressive accumulation of surplus reputation, as the tour guide.  Among other things, I would argue that what is remarkable about the analogy is that it suggests that string theory, as it is practiced, has perhaps more to do with belonging than it does to what experimenters and more conventional theorists would consider doing good physics.  We will revisit this intriguing, almost psychoanalytic, observation in more detail shortly.  In the meantime, though, let us consider other complaints made by string theory’s critics.  Almost unanimously, they are quick to point out that the fact that string theory seems to concern itself only tangentially with observational data is a direct consequence of the move, back in the mid-1970s, to shrink the scale of the fundamental string from that of hadrons down to the Planck scale.  Current accelerator technologies are only capable of probing scales on the order of a thousand times smaller than the atomic nucleus.  The Planck scale is smaller than that by a factor of more than a million billion.

As string theory has further infiltrated popular culture’s awareness, other prominent critics, besides Roger Penrose, have also become more outspoken.  They include Sheldon Glashow, Lawrence Krauss, Philip Anderson, and Peter Woit.[11] The detractors all seem to rely on the Popperian argument that string theory, since it is so far removed from experimental observation, has the fatal quality of being unfalsifiable.  In its defense, physicists such as Steven Weinberg anticipate that string theory, with its radical reconceptualization of fundamental particles, as well as spacetime itself, may eventually suggest new ways to formulate experiments such that current technological limitations can be overcome.[12]  Critics such as Penrose and Krauss also contest the physical status of string theory’s proposed extra dimensions.  The ontological status of these extra dimensions, I believe, plays a pivotal role in understanding string theory’s cultural currency and as such, warrants a more detailed exploration, which the next three chapters, from slightly varying perspectives, will attempt to undertake.  But the sheer size and perhaps opaqueness of the string theory community would seem to insulate it from any sustained criticism.[13]

Comments (1)

or wow: ... Acheter wow gold à bon marché or wow Notre service de wow gold est un digne de confiance et fiable. 1 August 04, 2010

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