Читать книгу String Theory For Dummies - Andrew Zimmerman Jones - Страница 58

Because string theory has made so few specific predictions, it’s hard to disprove it, but the theory has fallen short of some of the hype about how it will be a fundamental theory to explain all the physics in our universe, a “theory of everything.” This failure to meet that lofty goal seems to be the basis of many (if not most) of the attacks against it.

In Chapter 18, you find more detailed criticisms of string theory. Some of them cut to the very heart of whether string theory is even scientific or whether it’s being pursued in the correct way. For now, we leave those more abstract questions and focus on three issues that even most string theorists aren’t particularly happy about:

 Because of supersymmetry, string theory requires a large number of particles beyond what scientists have ever observed.

 This new theory of gravity was unable to predict the accelerated expansion of the universe that was detected by astronomers.

 A vastly large number of mathematically feasible string theory vacua (solutions) currently exist, so it seems virtually impossible to figure out which could describe our universe.

The following sections cover these dilemmas in more detail.