>>9982179i like string theory threads
here's my take on whether or not string theory is the ultimate meme
string theory initially started out pretty well -- some guys were working on modeling hadrons with strings, but they realized that they could pop out a spin 2 particle in their equations. so they said "hey fuck maybe a quantum theory of gravity". that's cool.
then it turned out that string theory requires supersymmetry. and okay, fine, they thought string theory was a really natural way to get the gauge couplings to unify and simplify the model in a beautiful way, provided that they found susy particles with a mass at or near 1 TeV. so far so good. so far, so good, but still, they couldn't turn string theory into a real theory -- they still couldn't calculate anything. fine, they thought, in a few years
then it turned out that string theory needed to have 10 or 11 (currently 11) dimensions, that's annoying. but okay, the other 7 can be compactified so that they're too small to be observable, fine. but they need to compactify in a particular way so as to give us something that looks like the standard model
this is where it got hairy. it turns out there were 10^500 different ways to compactify string theory, and each gives completely different theories. uh oh.
but no worries, cosmologists have wacky ideas like chaotic inflation! so therefore we might just get lucky and happen to live in a universe where we got lucky to one part in 10^500! yay for cosmology wacko theories!
then it got worse. the tevatron didn't see SUSY. and neither did the LHC, even at higher energies.... but hang on, SUSY can still survive! it just doesn't show up where it naturally would, instead, you can fine tune it in super arbitrary ways so that it stays hidden and unobservable! oh but wait, didn't we design susy to solve the problem of the SM looking like it had super arbitrary stuff? hmmm
(cont'd)
