Murray Gell-Mann - Testing superstring theory (156/200)

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New York-born physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) was a theoretical physicist. His considerable contributions to physics include the theory of quantum chromodynamics. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. [Listener: Geoffrey West; date recorded: 1997]
TRANSCRIPT: [GW] Are you concerned in any way, given your... the way you practiced physics which was very closely tied in with experimental results, are you in any way disturbed by the fact that it seems unlikely that there can be a... an acid test of superstring theory, in the usual sense of that...?
Well I don't know what you mean by 'the usual sense.' It has already got some successes in predicting the Einsteinian theory; it predicts supersymmetry, which could play a very important role in preserving the big ratios that we observe among masses in the presence of radiative corrections; and curing the singular properties of the scalar particles. The… so supersymmetry is desirable in itself and it's predicted by superstring theory. Super… supersymmetry can also be verified by observation, and I hope that the LHC is sufficiently energetic to permit that. We don't know exactly what the supergap is, how high you have to go to encounter the superpartners of the known elementary particles, but if it's too high it sort of defeats the purpose-the one we just discussed-of maintaining the big ratios in the face of radiative corrections and so on, so I don't the supergap can be so very high. Moreover some people speculate that the superpartner of the top quark, the top squark, so to speak, might be lighter than the top quark. Could be discovered perhaps even without the LHC. All of those things are encouraging. Now I suppose there could be some naysayers who, even if supersymmetry is confirmed, will say, well, that doesn't prove superstring theory. But one can make a great many post-dictions as well as predictions: one can explain, perhaps, a large number of the facts about the standard model that are now known or will be known in the future. And I'm sure there are also corrections to the standard model and those could be verified; there may even be astrophysical or cosmological consequences that can be… that can be checked. I don't see any… anything wrong with the idea of comparing superstring theory with observation.
[GW] Some of the practitioners of M-theory have been making provocative statements that there is really no need any longer for big accelerators and it's… no… along these lines of 'testing' in the traditional sense, hat those are not the sorts of tests, other than...
Well, I don't find that very congenial. I think that's absurd. Of course we should, to the extent possible , carry our experiments to higher energies, try to understand what's going on there and see how it compares with theory. But I do agree that besides accelerator building and accelerator experiments, it's essential to do a lot of theory. We have to extract the predictions from superstring theory.

[@sclogse1]

The real question is, does all this help me spot a narcissist in my life quicker?

[@moc5541]

What I understand from this is that there has been no prediction by superstring theory of anything new that has been confirmed by experiment. He did cite someone deriving Einstein's equations of general relativity (gravity) from superstring theory, but of course we already knew those. One can reasonably ask whether or not superstring theory is nothing more or less than a grandly complex mathematical construct that has been willfully crafted so as to wrap itself around already known and verified theories... albeit in as neat a fashion as possible.

[@EGarrett01]

2:40 That facial expression is called "I'm waiting to see how dumb your statement gets."

[@johnny4aces410]

EGarrett01: I don't know if you are right about that look on his face, but it's funny that it could be. LOL

[@Studentofgosset]

The interviewer was referring to statements some theoreticians had made about testing super-string theory, he wasn't making the statement himself.

[@EGarrett01]

@@Studentofgosset He was interpreting their statement.

[@FunctionalIntegral]

You don't need to test string theory by going to higher and higher energies, just tell us how to calculate the mass of an electron and structure constant alpha THEORETICALLY from an AB-INITIO approach with no parameter involved.

[@monglold]

FunctionalIntegral those seem like pretty arbitrary demands

[@likithstochastic]

@@monglold Then don't propose string theory as the TOE.

[@qswaefrdthzg]

Sadly enough these statements have aged very poorly

[@chriskindler10]

yes, it seems that supersymmetry is in the mud

[@ArnoldSommerfeld]

What a clown. String theory incorrectly predicts dimensions that don't exist. He does not even mention that.