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Nigel Bryan Cook
local time: 2024-03-29 00:12 (+00:00 )
Nigel Bryan Cook (Abstracts)
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  • Asking the Right Questions to Obtain Scientific Answers (2006) [Updated 7 years ago]
    by Nigel Bryan Cook   read the paper:

    Because of Drs Susskind and Witten, the media has let string theory go on without asking for definite testable predictions. I don't think the layman public takes much notice of ?theory' it can't understand. There are three types of not-yet-falsified theory:

    1. Experimentally confirmed but mathematically abstract and possibly incomplete (Standard Model, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc.)
    2. Not experimentally confirmed but popularised with best selling books, but possibly testable (Hawking radiation, gravity waves, etc.)
    3. Untestable/not falsifiable (over-hyped string theory's vague landscape ?predicting' 10500 vacua, 10/11 dimensions, vague suggestions of superpartners without predicting their energy to show if they can be potentially checked or not, ?prediction' of unobservable gravitons without any testable predictions of gravity)

    Back in 1996, ?popular physics' authors were flooding the media with hype about backward time travel, 10 dimensional strings, parallel universes and Kaku flying saucer speculation, and were obviously lying that such unpopular non-testable guesses were science.