A scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory replied to my email with a curt, please don’t waste my time again. The head of the Physics Department at the University of Miami dropped Bob’s research paper like it was radioactive. He receives one of these papers each week, he said. It turns out, there is a whole community of people out there who also claim to have disproved Einstein’s theory. So persistent are these outsiders that John Baez, a Professor of Mathematics in California, felt compelled to publish the crackpot index. It’s an online quiz you can take to see if you are, by his definition, a crackpot.

From https://www.thisamericanlife.org/293/transcript

    • Krudler@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      8 months ago

      String ‘theory’ is mental masturbation for mathematicians.

      Hmm… nothing in our model or math makes sense… I know… let’s just jam all the artifacts into a dimension that cannot be measured. Ahhh… look how elegant it is!

      • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        8 months ago

        Predictions? No, this doesn’t predict anything. It behaves identically to all existing models but it’s cooler!

        • Krudler@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          8 months ago

          Oh no, it seems to predict everything perfectly.

          You just have to accept that the known universe is actually a 5D holographic projection on a the inner curve of a 7D frisbee that is floats through an unbounded, dimensionless 11D space that can somehow also expand.

          Edit: also that there are infinity solutions to every problem. So tidy and elegant 😌