The Unraveling of String Theory
Sven Gelbhaar
sven.gelbhaar@gmail.com
25 January 2008
So far in this series we’ve covered the origin of Cosmic Microwave Background
Radiation, how both theories of Relativity fail to meet our experimental data
and our logical expectations, how this in turn affects our understanding of
Relativistic Thermodynamics, that Cantor’s postulate of uncountable sets in
number theory is wrong, a prototype of a superluminal engine, and the
misconceptions regarding the purported proof of Quantum Mechanics. Now let us
turn to the latest, and potentially most hyped of all of our theoretical
physics: String Theory.
As wikipedia will tell you(ยน), String Theory is not one hypothesis, but rather a
collection of rivaling, mutually exclusive theories that are vying with one
another to fill the last foreseeable vacancy in the Theory of Everything. It
sprung from the need to explain the weakness of gravitational force, and was
hoped to explain the increasing rate of cosmic acceleration from the Genesis
Point where the Big Bang is thought to have taken place. However, there are a
number of problems inherent to all of the rivaling String Theories.
One common trait shared by all incarnations of String Theory is that they make
no verifiable claims by which to test them, thereby removing them from the scope
of science. While not being falsifiable via the scientific method does not
necessitate that they are wrong, it does much to discredit them at present time
for this is our only reliable meter of veracity.
All String Theories share the conjecture that there exist more than 4 dimensions
(3 spatial, 1 temporal), and as none of the String Theories or any other model
of physics gives us any way to test for them, we are left with no choice but to
assume that they don’t exist. Surely there must be a simpler way to explain what
String Theory sets out to.
If we are to follow the logic presented in String Theory that gravitons, the
hypothesized particles responsible for gravity as per Quantum Gravitation,
escape into other dimensions thereby accounting for the weak gravitational
forces perceived in reality, we are soon forced to infer that the inverse must
also be true: namely that if gravitons can escape from our 3 spatial dimensions
that they can also be introduced seemingly at random from outside of them, from
other neighboring bodies of mass outside of our D-Brane. This could be one
method of falsifying or proving String Theory, for if we were to find otherwise
unaccountable gravimetric forces on observable bodies of mass, this might well
be because of other bodies of mass in a parallel D-Brane, as described in String
Theory. This, however, has not yet been observed, and while lack of evidence is
not evidence to the contrary, we are left with no choice but to assume that this
doesn’t apply to us or our world as per the namesake of this series: Occam’s
Razor.
Upon weighing the above objections to String Theory, we have no option but to
discount them as pseudo-science, which is not testable and contradicts our
observations. There are other perfectly plausible explanations to the apparent
increasing acceleration of observable cosmic bodies of mass. There could be vast
sums of dark matter that could be exerting gravitational influence on them, for
instance. This hypothesis makes far less presumptions, as it doesn’t rely on
extra dimensions nor gravitons, and what does Occam’s Razor tell us? That the
simplest explanation that fits our observations is the most likely to be true.
References 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory