And String Theory stems from an attempt to understand the implications of relativity and quantum mechanics. The physical world led to the math, which led to insights that must be tested in the future. So the processes are comparable to Einstein's work.
COMMENT: Well, O.K. But you can just as well say that any kind of speculative theory originates from an attempt to understand the physical world. What matters is precisely what you say here, whether such theories can "be tested in the future." String theory is untestable, for reasons I stated. Note, that "God theories" might be postulated to explain physical reality too; for example the origin of the universe. But like String Theory they cannot be tested. So in that sense they are on the same footing with the single exception that String Theory is a mathematical theory, while God is a religious "theory." Both are metaphysical in the same sense; they are beyond confirmation by experiment!
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You realize, I'm sure, that Einstein did not get the Nobel Prize for relativity. Why? Because years after the formulation of the theories no one had been able to test the hypothesis and its math still seemed speculative. Instead, they gave him the prize for earlier work which other scientists could understand and test.
COMMENT: Correct. Except there have been Nobel prizes for theories that have turned out wrong.
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/10/nobel_prizes_awarded_for_disproved_discoveries.html_________________________________________
So you are effectively claiming that relativity was testable when it was devised, which is false. The math was decades ahead of the science.
COMMENT: I made no such claim, effectively or otherwise. However, relativity was confirmed soon after it was presented, not decades. Eddington began the confirmation process in two experiments in 2019 showing the bending of light in a gravitational force, only four years after General Relativity was first published.
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It was your logic that denied relativity the Nobel Prize. You therefore can't say that Einstein's work was sufficiently contretized but later iterations of the same process--observation leads to math and hypotheses that will not be capable of test for decades to come--are metaphysical because they cannot now be tested.
COMMENT: Nonsense. We are talking about the confirmation of String Theory, not relativity. As noted above, relativity was confirmed four years after it was presented. String Theory has existed at least since the 1980s in various forms, and science still has no idea how to verify it. Here is a quote from Peter Woit's book, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law:
"Near the end of his life, when asked his opinion of an article by a young physicist, he [Wolfgang Pauli] sadly said, "it is not even wrong." The phrase "not even wrong" is a popular one among physicists, and carries two different connotations, both of which Pauli likely had in mind. A theory can be "not even wrong" because it is so incomplete and ill-defined that it can't be used to make firm predictions whose failure would show it to be wrong. This has been the situation of superstring theory from its beginning to the present day.
This sort of "not even wrong" is not necessarily a bad thing. Most new theoretical ideas begin in this state, and it can take quite a bit of work before their implications are well enough understood for researchers to be able to tell whether the idea is right or wrong. But there is a second connotation of "not even wrong" : something worse than a wrong idea, and in this form the phrase often gets used as a generic term of abuse. In the case of superstring theory, the way some physicists are abandoning fundamental scientific principles rather than admit that a theory is wrong is something of this kind: worse than being wrong is to refuse to admit it when one is wrong."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit_______________________________________________
The distinction is in the standards you apply, not the scientific process.
COMMENT: The scientific process can be abused when the standards are not met until you get to the extreme "not even wrong" description, which I equate here with metaphysics.
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That is not how it works. In reality, scientists confront problems, use math to make sense of things, and then devise experiments to test the new theories. Sometimes there is a gap of decades between the math and the experimental evaluation.
COMMENT: I don't disagree. But the "proof" is always in the pudding (i.e. experimental confirmation) And you are exaggerating the time it takes. In most cases, when viable well-defined theories are put forth, the experimentalists are all over it, sometimes inventing new technology. But, that said, more recently as science has outlived the technology available to confirm its theories, theory often now stands alone, untested. In such cases, theories in isolation, as supported only by the mathematics of the theory itself, often incomplete, are metaphysical; i.e. beyond physical confirmation.
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> In short, the connection between mathematics and
> the physical world is real, but tenuous because
> there is no *logical* connection between
> mathematics per se, arguably a mental construct,
> and physical reality.
This is basically an attack on the scientific process in general. For all scientific theories work the same way: observation, hypothesis, evaluation. You only get the validation after the evaluation. With regard to String Theory you are standing in the gap between articulation of the theory and its eventual experimental evaluation. If you did that to relativity in 1918 you must conclude that relativity was "metaphysical" and bore "no logical connection" to "physical reality."
COMMENT: I am not attacking the scientific process. I am only pointing out that theory absent confirmation (validation) is just interesting mathematics. Maybe some day, somehow, String Theory will be validated. But, then, maybe some day a Being will descent from heaven and announce she is God. Both are wishes and prayers until the event happens.
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> That is why John Wheeler
> talked about the "unreasonable* connection between
> mathematics and the physical world.
Again, the name dropping. If Wheeler persuaded you that Einstein's best work, or Bohr's, or Hawking's, was "metaphysical" because they produced theories that were not for decades capable of falsification, I'm not sure he deserves much attention.
COMMENT: You better Google Wheeler before you disparage him. He is one of *the* geniuses of 20th Century physics--by all accounts!
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> COMMENT: The use of mathematics to generate
> theories that claim to coincide with physical
> reality, but which have no known connection to
> physical reality is, by definition, metaphysics.
Then all science is "metaphysics" because each new hypothesis is by definition a step beyond presently understood science.
COMMENT: Science as a process is not metaphysical; as long as it is designed to generate, test, and confirm theories for the purpose of understanding the physical world. Scientific theories like String Theory, that are not supportable even in principle by experimental confirmation, and which distort existing scientific knowledge, or extend ontology to dimensions completely unknown in order to validate their mathematics, is just metaphysics. And there is a hell-of-a-lot of such metaphysics in science today. (IMHO)