I’m in the middle of a biography on Penrose called “The Impossible Man”. It’s good. Penrose seems to me to be highly revered by other physicists regarding his intuitive grasp of relativity in particular. One may think that after 100 years all good physicists would have developed that, but you’d be wrong.
My new family physician asked me what I did for a hobby. I said one thing I enjoyed was reading books and articles on theoretical physics.
He said “Oh, you mean like string theory?” I replied “No, and don’t quit your day job, okay?”
Feel-good news of the day: Leftist propaganda outlet Media Matters may have to file for bankruptcy in part because of sky-high legal bills from the leftist Elias Law Group.
I think I post this every time this topic comes up. Ed Witten making what I think is a very profound point about theoretical physics and string theory.
I read that 4 or 5 States are trying to ban ICE from wearing Masks. Antifia, BLM and Student Anarchist – go ahead and mask up.
These states are challenging Fed Authority – isn’t something like 1860?
How does it even qualify as a theory barely a hypothesis
The a-holes wanting ICE unmasked are terrorists. They want to unleash their brown shirts against ICE and their families.
Grok weighs in on criticism of the Dirac equation: “Pauli, along with Werner Heisenberg, questioned the legitimacy of Dirac’s derivation. They believed Dirac had “gemogelt” (a German term meaning “cheated” or “fudged”) in formulating the equation, suspecting it was overly formalistic or manipulated to fit desired outcomes rather than emerging naturally from physical principles. This reflected a broader skepticism among some quantum pioneers who viewed Dirac’s approach as too abstract.”
String theory, apart from its success as a mathematical tool in solid state physics, has shown that it is possible to combine quantum mechanics and general relativity and helped clarify the nature of existing quantum field theory. It may not be the end point, but it has been useful.
@miguel:How does it even qualify as a theory barely a hypothesis
Hypotheses do not get “promoted” to theories any more than an uncarved stone block gets “promoted” to a cathedral. There’s a sort of kindergarten-level progression of hypothesis -> theory -> law that a lot of us heard about in school, but that’s not a real thing.
A hypothesis is really specific, a theory is very general. A law is a mathematical relationship, often an approximate one, like Ohm’s Law, which fails badly for common materials like diodes, but it doesn’t stop being called a “law” just because it is so often not true.
String theory is indeed a respectable theory in that a great number of phenomena could be explained by it. I too suspect that it is a dead end, for a lot of reasons, one of them being that no one can yet say exactly what it is. But there’s not yet a viable alternative for what it’s trying to describe. It’s been so far away from any of my research interests that I’ve bothered very little with it.
@Chuck (or rather Grok):Pauli, along with Werner Heisenberg, questioned the legitimacy of Dirac’s derivation.
Wouldn’t matter if the equation was told to Dirac by a leprechaun he met when he was high. It’s been incredibly successful in explaining the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum, it’s predicted antimatter–it didn’t get widely adopted because anyone was impressed with the steps in how it was derived, it got widely adopted because its results were so good.
@Mike Plaiss: For what it’s worth, I’m on team Witten.
To be clear I’m just a guy in the cheap seats, watching grandmasters slug it out. Still, I have read Witten’s boast, mentioned in the video you linked, that if we didn’t know about gravity, we would discover it was predicted by string theory.
That’s nice and all, I’m glad Witten is impressed, I don’t have a problem with string theory as a theory, unless one insists on testability as Penrose does, but my question for string theory is…
What have you done for me lately?
I was quite excited in the 90s, when all those popularizations about string theory came out, hailing it as a breakthrough as big as relativity, and that it would be changing the world similarly within 10-20 years. A strong candidate for the Theory of Everything.
String theory was way oversold. Maybe it pays off by 2050 or 2100, but in the meantime, it has sucked up a huge amount of attention and resources, and it has become a scientific orthodoxy crowding out other approaches. (For example, see Lee Smolin’s “The Trouble With Physics.”)
I don’t have a problem with string theory as a theory, unless one insists on testability as Penrose does
Fair enough, but precisely where does this non-testabilty notion come from? That is not a rhetorical question. This really lies at the heart of this discussion. Lots and lots of scientifically astute folks here. Can anyone link to anything saying that string theory is non-testable? Not in practice (I know it’s hard), but in principle? Einstein predicted gravity waves in 1915, literally writing at the time that they would never be observed. They were observed roughly 100 years later. There are currently efforts underway to observe phenomena that string theory could not explain.
… The FBI is a U.S. version of the Russian “State Police”; and the FBI is deployed -almost exclusively- to attack domestic enemies of those who control government, while they protect the interests of the U.S. Fourth Branch of Government …
Here is the problem. Somehow, someway, the notion that string theory can’t be tested has gone viral and become one of those things that “everybody knows”. It’s fake news. It has taken hold the same way other fake news takes hold.
Mike Plaiss:
I’m happy to grant that string theory is a theory and someday it may be testable. But as far as I know that day is a long way off.
That’s not fake news.
From what I read the bloom is off the string theory rose and even some physicists have become disillusioned.
Here’s a young physicist explaining her complaints with string theory in a fun, breezy YouTube:
We all do realize that “The Trouble With Physics” is 20 years old now, and a lot of research has happened since then? Even if that book was an objective description of where string theory was then, it wouldn’t be so by now.
I certainly haven’t kept up on string theory, I never learned much about it in the first place in order to have anything to keep up–I read Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe” (1999) in the early 2000s and that’s it–and neither that nor “The Trouble With Physics” would be of much use in understanding what the state of string theory is now.
All of us here are relying on second, third, or fourth-hand takes of what string theory is “about”, what it was “sold” as, and what’s “wrong” with it, including the notion that there is anything wrong with it. If there’s a “crisis of expertise”, how do we know that the experts with the crisis aren’t the ones saying they don’t like string theory? But it’s far more likely the media filters that are creating these impressions.
In general the scientists who get media attention are the ones who have something attention-grabbing to say, so we generally hear about either contrarian takes or we hear gosh-wow [bong rip] takes.
And have we forgotten about Gell-Mann amnesia? That’s the problem with Gell-Mann amnesia, you keep forgetting you have it….
@TR:Michael Flatley, the star of the musical show, Riverdance, is going to rub for the office of:
The President of Ireland.
What do you think the President of Ireland does? Not a whole lot, it is a ceremonial position. The Taoiseach is the head of government. Can’t see why a celebrity couldn’t fill the role adequately. We have a celebrity filling the role of the American President after all and that is a much more consequential position.
Niketas, “We have a celebrity filling the role of the American President ”
Trump had plenty of actual, capitalist business experience before celebrity. That very educational experience, along with his curiosity & learning of world economics, seems to be serving us well.
Especially compared to many previous Presidents.
And time will tell.
RE: Get them off the streets–
Here is an example of some guy just walking into a Walmart and stabbing 11 people at random–reportedly some of them children–and half of the 11 are currently in critical condition. Before the cops got there, he was finally stopped by customers, one of them armed. (How much do you want to bet the perp is mentally ill, and/or an alcohol or drug addict.)*
To judge by the news—there are lots of these violent, random attacks like this happening all over the country, people being shoved onto subway tracks, etc., etc.–they’re all too and increasingly common.
Many of these violent perps are roaming around this country, and anyone who is out and about, minding their own business, could be attacked at random–out of the blue–and seriously injured, or even killed by one of these people.
There are far too many of the violent, mentally ill and/or drug addicts, often homeless, squatting on our streets, and roaming around, untreated.
Individual freedom and autonomy is all well and good, but “being a danger to yourself and others,” to innocent members of society in general, is another.
President Trump just signed an Executive Order, pointing out the billions of dollars the government has poured into trying to eliminate homelessness, to no effect, and encouraging cities to take homeless people who are mentally ill and/or addicted off the streets, and put them in residential treatment centers, and, among other things, to make “civil commitment” more possible. **
I don’t expect anyone here to test string theory, but I’d be interested hearing anyone’s opinion on how in principle it MIGHT be tested!
So far, the knifeman has not been publicly identified. The good news is that a group of men surrounded the perp and yelled at him to drop the knife, which he finally did. The group included a couple of white guys and a black man with long dreadlocks and a pistol. The group kept the knifeman controlled until police arrived. First guess is that the attacker is mentally ill or on drugs or both.
We have a celebrity filling the role of the American President after all and that is a much more consequential position.
==
The celebrity in question ran a business with 22,000 employees for over three decades. Previous occupants of the position with a history in business would be George Bush the Younger, George Bush the Elder, Jimmy Carter, Warren Harding. You could add Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt just under the envelope. They all ran businesses with a much smaller workforce.
A scathing indictment of the FIB from Sundance:
==
I’m a Sundance skeptic. it looks like his usual smoke.
how in principle it MIGHT be tested!
If it predicted the three generations of fermions, their masses and coupling constants, that would be pretty convincing of its usefulness. There are a lot of constants in the standard model that are not computable with current theory, not to mention renormalization and the ground state energy of the fields. In short, there are major, and known, problems with physics. Dirac was very unhappy with renormalization, indeed, he also tried treating point particles as extended entities, disks IIRC. Current physics is amazingly accurate for some things, but sweeps a lot under the rug.
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” — Isaac Newton
Marlene and Art Deco make my point for me. Millions of people knew Trump only through The Apprentice or through tabloid journalism. What a celebrity is famous for may not be what they bring to the table.
Think of Reagan and Schwarzenegger before they were Governors of California, a lot of people only knew they had been actors. Oprah Winfrey employs over 12,000 people, and has been running a media business for 40 years.
I don’t know everything Michael Flatley has done besides dancing and boxing, but it may very well be adequate for the Presidency of Ireland, which is a ceremonial position anyway. He too runs more than one business, though.
Marlene and Art Deco make my point for me.
==
In your imagination only.
@Chuck:If it predicted the three generations of fermions, their masses and coupling constants, that would be pretty convincing of its usefulness.
From what I’ve read it can predict those things, but it can predict lots of other things that aren’t known to exist and I don’t think anyone knows what else needs to be known to confine string theory predictions to the universe we live in.
Sometimes those things work out and sometimes they don’t. Dirac’s work predicted positrons and they exist. Pauli needed neutrinos to make the math come out right and they exist. Yukawa predicted pions and they exist. (At first people thought muons were them, no one was looking for muons but now we’re stuck with them.)
But no one has (unambiguously) found a magnetic monopole. All the equations are written, ready and waiting for them to be found, if they are out there, they’d be theoretically convenient. Mendeleev used his version of the periodic table to predict absurd and impossible elements as well as some that actually exist, and he even once denied the existence of a real element (argon) that didn’t fit his version of the periodic table.
@Art Deco:In your imagination only.
You misunderstood the point I was trying to make, is all. It happens, especially since I was terse. And the reflex to contradict any criticism of Trump is sometimes hard to suppress, I find.
It’s not self-evidently stupid that the guy from Riverdance might be a decent President of Ireland, and I was using Trump as an example of why, not to belittle Trump but to say that Flatley might have much more about him than we’ve heard of, as is the case with Trump.
I don’t think anyone knows what else needs to be known to confine string theory predictions to the universe we live in.
I think that is the major missing ingredient. Einstein could explain and extend the oddities of Maxwell’s equations by the postulate that the speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames. That, in combination with the equivalence principle leads to General Relativity. Dirac could argue that the equation of the electron needed to be first order in time and space, so on and so forth. What is missing in string theory is a general principle that selects among all the possibilities.
YAWN. My interest in string theory is less than zero.
Cicero discovers negative numbers 🙂
But is it lower than you can imagine? Thus introducing imaginary numbers.
Tom Lehrer passes, 97. RIP and no more poisoning pigeons in the park.
I just must vent. I have mentioned recently that I was trying to build a modest workshop on my 1.5-acre parcel. Routine stuff. I started in March. I am not waiting for the building permit; I am waiting for the permission to apply for the building permit.
We are pulling the plug and writing off $21k already spent. We have discovered changes in the most recent state and county codes that are an egregious violation of our property rights. The collectivist shits obviously believe that ALL property is owned by the state, and we are just renters who must get the landlord’s permission to trim a bush. We would be fools to spend $250k on building and landscaping anything in this county and state. Bunch of effing commies.
We have property rights that precede statehood, and the state supreme court has ruled they supersede some state shoreline law. These changes make a complete mockery of that. My family’s suit against the City of Mercer Island took 13 years. We do not want to spend what might be last decade of our lives in litigation. Furthermore, we have no reason to believe the commie pretzel makers on the Seattle Supreme Court would not say the previous ruling was wrong and the state IS supreme. Then more litigation in Federal Court with the possibility the feds would say state court decision is final.
Another weapon we have been sitting on for more than 10 years, a weapon either the county doesn’t know about or assumes we don’t know about, is our “Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.” We have standing to sue the county in Federal Court for ongoing violations of the Clean Water Act. I have already participated in such a suit and provided the data and pictures that won the case. My reward was a threating phone call that implied I was being viewed through a rifle scope.
Background on the issue that triggered this. A few years ago, I interacted with a couple .gov dorks sitting in a car on my private road. They were trying to find a way for the public to access the water. I told them this and the shoreline was all private and there was no way. The county has apparently solved this problem by code which allows the public to cross private property and that I must provide safe access across my yard to my steps for public to use to cross my private tidelands to access public tidelands if someone asks. Also, the state says they can seize my private tidelands for any reason or no reason.
This is Vaderism as government, “I am altering your property rights, pray I don’t alter them any further.” We are prepping an Waxit.
Traveling all day yesterday and busy visiting with our friend whose husband died last year, so ignoring all the string stuff for the past 48hrs.
Trump just announced a big deal with the EU. Looks good to me. I dropped by CNN and their reporting was pretty fair. The comments were loaded with how Trump lies, this will cost us even more and add to inflation, etc. The kicker was several saying “what’s wrong with CNN for not bashing the agreement. ” LOL.
You misunderstood the point I was trying to make,
==
No, I did not. You were just wrong.
Related:
They may just have to stop stringing us along….
“END OF THE CLIMATE CON: Hard to believe but it’s true – two Ivy League physics professors do the numbers and describe the result…” https://instapundit.com/734646/
+ Bonus…without a doubt, strung out…and, essentially—morally, ethically, professionally—struck out…
‘NY Times Pulitzer winner Jeff Gerth: “The media isn’t looking for Russiagate scoops nor will they fairly present…[other scoops]…if they reflect poorly on their prior reporting. Theyre in a defensive posture & arent inclined to report deeply on anything that helps Trump”’— https://instapundit.com/734622/
Re: Tom Lehrer
I didn’t know he had been still alive. He made it to 97, an inspiration for everyone.
According to wiki, he put all his lyrics, music and even recordings in the public domain. Indeed, here they are.
BTW, Lehrer remained an old school liberal Democrat. One of the last political comments he made was in 2008. “Just tell the people that I am voting for Obama.”
You misunderstood the point I was trying to make,
==
No, I did not. You were just wrong.
I love a substantive debate!
Chases Eagles, I’m sorry about that news. Are you sure it’s Vaderism and not Calvinball?
(I have no views at all on string theory, btw.)
Chases Eagles:
Likewise. Sorry for your travails. Give ’em heck if you can.
My café friend, who was a mayor of Malibu, said that after the Palisades Fire there was no way the California Coastal Commission would allow those beachfront homes to be rebuilt.
Technically, homeowners can rebuild if they rebuild exactly what they had before, presumably up to current code. However, practically speaking, the CCC doesn’t have to say no, it just has to make rebuilding impossible.
So, the fires were an emergency and Democrats don’t let emergencies go to waste. I won’t be surprised if this turns into a massive land grab carved up between the ultra-rich and the state government.
There were ordinary middle-class folks who managed to buy into the Palisades at the right time. My bet is their homes and their investments will be lost for pennies on the dollar.
@Barry Meislin
William Happer and Richard Lindzen are old news, their paper can’t be considered change unless it gets published in Science or Nature, which is unlikely. The con won’t be in trouble until the young folks figure it out.
Haven’t both journals covered themselves in slime due to their politicized positions on Covid?
[What do you think the president of Ireland does?…]
In my view, your response sounds kind of dismissive. If you rephrase the question in a more neutral manner, then I’d gladly like to discuss my idea.
Later on.
Chases Eagles,
Sorry for your troubles and sorry more of the U.S. voting public doesn’t prioritize electing representatives who will fight to ensure individual property rights.
Haven’t both journals covered themselves in slime
They are still the most influential general journals. That is why Stanford worked to make Marcia McNutt editor-in-chief of Science and the covid bull sh!tters published in Nature. Note that McNutt is now President of the NAS.
Re: Palisades Fire / Paradise Fire
neo may correct me, but looking into the Paradise Fire which burned Gerard Vanderleun’s home, the average homeowners got the same land grab treatment as the Palisades homeowners are now experiencing. Chat summarizes:
_______________________________
Paradise, CA (Camp Fire, 2018) –85% of the town destroyed
* Rebuild blocked by CEQA, PG&E grid failures, and FEMA restrictions
* Property values cratered
* Investors began assembling parcels
* Few locals could afford to rebuild or even stay nearby
_______________________________
That’s just the way it is.
Chases Eagles, your description of the state taking your property by stealth is sad reading.
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I’m in the middle of a biography on Penrose called “The Impossible Man”. It’s good. Penrose seems to me to be highly revered by other physicists regarding his intuitive grasp of relativity in particular. One may think that after 100 years all good physicists would have developed that, but you’d be wrong.
My new family physician asked me what I did for a hobby. I said one thing I enjoyed was reading books and articles on theoretical physics.
He said “Oh, you mean like string theory?” I replied “No, and don’t quit your day job, okay?”
Feel-good news of the day: Leftist propaganda outlet Media Matters may have to file for bankruptcy in part because of sky-high legal bills from the leftist Elias Law Group.
https://freebeacon.com/democrats/you-must-be-kidding-media-matters-fumed-at-massive-legal-bills-from-marc-elias-firm/
I think I post this every time this topic comes up. Ed Witten making what I think is a very profound point about theoretical physics and string theory.
https://youtu.be/UCaLNkNjllM?si=4HsNBCDoC64_msZK
For what it’s worth, I’m on team Witten.
I read that 4 or 5 States are trying to ban ICE from wearing Masks. Antifia, BLM and Student Anarchist – go ahead and mask up.
These states are challenging Fed Authority – isn’t something like 1860?
How does it even qualify as a theory barely a hypothesis
A theory has to be proveable
“Feds allowed 1,000s of juvenile gang members, criminals to become citizens … Congress never included a prohibition for juveniles with criminal records or a moral character standard requirement.”
https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_ad567bd7-c72a-44d6-9c35-f138dbedd1ae.html
String Theory is a model.
The a-holes wanting ICE unmasked are terrorists. They want to unleash their brown shirts against ICE and their families.
Grok weighs in on criticism of the Dirac equation: “Pauli, along with Werner Heisenberg, questioned the legitimacy of Dirac’s derivation. They believed Dirac had “gemogelt” (a German term meaning “cheated” or “fudged”) in formulating the equation, suspecting it was overly formalistic or manipulated to fit desired outcomes rather than emerging naturally from physical principles. This reflected a broader skepticism among some quantum pioneers who viewed Dirac’s approach as too abstract.”
String theory, apart from its success as a mathematical tool in solid state physics, has shown that it is possible to combine quantum mechanics and general relativity and helped clarify the nature of existing quantum field theory. It may not be the end point, but it has been useful.
#LOSING – Democrats Get Lowest Rating From Voters in 35 Years, WSJ Poll Finds – RePost
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/07/losing-democrats-get-lowest-rating-from.html
@miguel:How does it even qualify as a theory barely a hypothesis
Hypotheses do not get “promoted” to theories any more than an uncarved stone block gets “promoted” to a cathedral. There’s a sort of kindergarten-level progression of hypothesis -> theory -> law that a lot of us heard about in school, but that’s not a real thing.
A hypothesis is really specific, a theory is very general. A law is a mathematical relationship, often an approximate one, like Ohm’s Law, which fails badly for common materials like diodes, but it doesn’t stop being called a “law” just because it is so often not true.
String theory is indeed a respectable theory in that a great number of phenomena could be explained by it. I too suspect that it is a dead end, for a lot of reasons, one of them being that no one can yet say exactly what it is. But there’s not yet a viable alternative for what it’s trying to describe. It’s been so far away from any of my research interests that I’ve bothered very little with it.
@Chuck (or rather Grok):Pauli, along with Werner Heisenberg, questioned the legitimacy of Dirac’s derivation.
Wouldn’t matter if the equation was told to Dirac by a leprechaun he met when he was high. It’s been incredibly successful in explaining the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum, it’s predicted antimatter–it didn’t get widely adopted because anyone was impressed with the steps in how it was derived, it got widely adopted because its results were so good.
@Mike Plaiss: For what it’s worth, I’m on team Witten.
To be clear I’m just a guy in the cheap seats, watching grandmasters slug it out. Still, I have read Witten’s boast, mentioned in the video you linked, that if we didn’t know about gravity, we would discover it was predicted by string theory.
That’s nice and all, I’m glad Witten is impressed, I don’t have a problem with string theory as a theory, unless one insists on testability as Penrose does, but my question for string theory is…
What have you done for me lately?
I was quite excited in the 90s, when all those popularizations about string theory came out, hailing it as a breakthrough as big as relativity, and that it would be changing the world similarly within 10-20 years. A strong candidate for the Theory of Everything.
String theory was way oversold. Maybe it pays off by 2050 or 2100, but in the meantime, it has sucked up a huge amount of attention and resources, and it has become a scientific orthodoxy crowding out other approaches. (For example, see Lee Smolin’s “The Trouble With Physics.”)
I don’t have a problem with string theory as a theory, unless one insists on testability as Penrose does
Fair enough, but precisely where does this non-testabilty notion come from? That is not a rhetorical question. This really lies at the heart of this discussion. Lots and lots of scientifically astute folks here. Can anyone link to anything saying that string theory is non-testable? Not in practice (I know it’s hard), but in principle? Einstein predicted gravity waves in 1915, literally writing at the time that they would never be observed. They were observed roughly 100 years later. There are currently efforts underway to observe phenomena that string theory could not explain.
https://scitechdaily.com/this-forbidden-particle-could-break-string-theory/
A scathing indictment of the FIB from Sundance:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2025/07/26/fbi-deputy-director-dan-bongino-shocked-to-his-core-over-fbis-recent-corruption-discoveries-ill-never-be-the-same/#more-274371
Here is the problem. Somehow, someway, the notion that string theory can’t be tested has gone viral and become one of those things that “everybody knows”. It’s fake news. It has taken hold the same way other fake news takes hold.
Mike Plaiss:
I’m happy to grant that string theory is a theory and someday it may be testable. But as far as I know that day is a long way off.
That’s not fake news.
From what I read the bloom is off the string theory rose and even some physicists have become disillusioned.
Here’s a young physicist explaining her complaints with string theory in a fun, breezy YouTube:
–Angela Collier, “string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E
I consider the overselling of string theory as another instance of the crisis of expertise.
Michael Flatley, the star of the musical show, Riverdance, is going to rub for the office of:
The President of Ireland.
…OK.
…I’m going to look for a therapist, now.
I can only take a limited amount of nonsense.
Cheers.
https://news.stv.tv/world/riverdance-star-michael-flatley-to-run-for-irish-presidency
We all do realize that “The Trouble With Physics” is 20 years old now, and a lot of research has happened since then? Even if that book was an objective description of where string theory was then, it wouldn’t be so by now.
I certainly haven’t kept up on string theory, I never learned much about it in the first place in order to have anything to keep up–I read Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe” (1999) in the early 2000s and that’s it–and neither that nor “The Trouble With Physics” would be of much use in understanding what the state of string theory is now.
All of us here are relying on second, third, or fourth-hand takes of what string theory is “about”, what it was “sold” as, and what’s “wrong” with it, including the notion that there is anything wrong with it. If there’s a “crisis of expertise”, how do we know that the experts with the crisis aren’t the ones saying they don’t like string theory? But it’s far more likely the media filters that are creating these impressions.
In general the scientists who get media attention are the ones who have something attention-grabbing to say, so we generally hear about either contrarian takes or we hear gosh-wow [bong rip] takes.
And have we forgotten about Gell-Mann amnesia? That’s the problem with Gell-Mann amnesia, you keep forgetting you have it….
@TR:Michael Flatley, the star of the musical show, Riverdance, is going to rub for the office of:
The President of Ireland.
What do you think the President of Ireland does? Not a whole lot, it is a ceremonial position. The Taoiseach is the head of government. Can’t see why a celebrity couldn’t fill the role adequately. We have a celebrity filling the role of the American President after all and that is a much more consequential position.
Niketas, “We have a celebrity filling the role of the American President ”
Trump had plenty of actual, capitalist business experience before celebrity. That very educational experience, along with his curiosity & learning of world economics, seems to be serving us well.
Especially compared to many previous Presidents.
And time will tell.
RE: Get them off the streets–
Here is an example of some guy just walking into a Walmart and stabbing 11 people at random–reportedly some of them children–and half of the 11 are currently in critical condition. Before the cops got there, he was finally stopped by customers, one of them armed. (How much do you want to bet the perp is mentally ill, and/or an alcohol or drug addict.)*
To judge by the news—there are lots of these violent, random attacks like this happening all over the country, people being shoved onto subway tracks, etc., etc.–they’re all too and increasingly common.
Many of these violent perps are roaming around this country, and anyone who is out and about, minding their own business, could be attacked at random–out of the blue–and seriously injured, or even killed by one of these people.
There are far too many of the violent, mentally ill and/or drug addicts, often homeless, squatting on our streets, and roaming around, untreated.
Individual freedom and autonomy is all well and good, but “being a danger to yourself and others,” to innocent members of society in general, is another.
President Trump just signed an Executive Order, pointing out the billions of dollars the government has poured into trying to eliminate homelessness, to no effect, and encouraging cities to take homeless people who are mentally ill and/or addicted off the streets, and put them in residential treatment centers, and, among other things, to make “civil commitment” more possible. **
*See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uytphPm6BYI
** See https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/ending-crime-and-disorder-on-americas-streets/
I don’t expect anyone here to test string theory, but I’d be interested hearing anyone’s opinion on how in principle it MIGHT be tested!
So far, the knifeman has not been publicly identified. The good news is that a group of men surrounded the perp and yelled at him to drop the knife, which he finally did. The group included a couple of white guys and a black man with long dreadlocks and a pistol. The group kept the knifeman controlled until police arrived. First guess is that the attacker is mentally ill or on drugs or both.
We have a celebrity filling the role of the American President after all and that is a much more consequential position.
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The celebrity in question ran a business with 22,000 employees for over three decades. Previous occupants of the position with a history in business would be George Bush the Younger, George Bush the Elder, Jimmy Carter, Warren Harding. You could add Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt just under the envelope. They all ran businesses with a much smaller workforce.
A scathing indictment of the FIB from Sundance:
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I’m a Sundance skeptic. it looks like his usual smoke.
how in principle it MIGHT be tested!
If it predicted the three generations of fermions, their masses and coupling constants, that would be pretty convincing of its usefulness. There are a lot of constants in the standard model that are not computable with current theory, not to mention renormalization and the ground state energy of the fields. In short, there are major, and known, problems with physics. Dirac was very unhappy with renormalization, indeed, he also tried treating point particles as extended entities, disks IIRC. Current physics is amazingly accurate for some things, but sweeps a lot under the rug.
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” — Isaac Newton
Marlene and Art Deco make my point for me. Millions of people knew Trump only through The Apprentice or through tabloid journalism. What a celebrity is famous for may not be what they bring to the table.
Think of Reagan and Schwarzenegger before they were Governors of California, a lot of people only knew they had been actors. Oprah Winfrey employs over 12,000 people, and has been running a media business for 40 years.
I don’t know everything Michael Flatley has done besides dancing and boxing, but it may very well be adequate for the Presidency of Ireland, which is a ceremonial position anyway. He too runs more than one business, though.
Marlene and Art Deco make my point for me.
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In your imagination only.
@Chuck:If it predicted the three generations of fermions, their masses and coupling constants, that would be pretty convincing of its usefulness.
From what I’ve read it can predict those things, but it can predict lots of other things that aren’t known to exist and I don’t think anyone knows what else needs to be known to confine string theory predictions to the universe we live in.
Sometimes those things work out and sometimes they don’t. Dirac’s work predicted positrons and they exist. Pauli needed neutrinos to make the math come out right and they exist. Yukawa predicted pions and they exist. (At first people thought muons were them, no one was looking for muons but now we’re stuck with them.)
But no one has (unambiguously) found a magnetic monopole. All the equations are written, ready and waiting for them to be found, if they are out there, they’d be theoretically convenient. Mendeleev used his version of the periodic table to predict absurd and impossible elements as well as some that actually exist, and he even once denied the existence of a real element (argon) that didn’t fit his version of the periodic table.
@Art Deco:In your imagination only.
You misunderstood the point I was trying to make, is all. It happens, especially since I was terse. And the reflex to contradict any criticism of Trump is sometimes hard to suppress, I find.
It’s not self-evidently stupid that the guy from Riverdance might be a decent President of Ireland, and I was using Trump as an example of why, not to belittle Trump but to say that Flatley might have much more about him than we’ve heard of, as is the case with Trump.
I don’t think anyone knows what else needs to be known to confine string theory predictions to the universe we live in.
I think that is the major missing ingredient. Einstein could explain and extend the oddities of Maxwell’s equations by the postulate that the speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames. That, in combination with the equivalence principle leads to General Relativity. Dirac could argue that the equation of the electron needed to be first order in time and space, so on and so forth. What is missing in string theory is a general principle that selects among all the possibilities.
YAWN. My interest in string theory is less than zero.
Cicero discovers negative numbers 🙂
But is it lower than you can imagine? Thus introducing imaginary numbers.
On another front – wow.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/07/27/trump-european-union-eu-trade-tariffs.html
Tom Lehrer passes, 97. RIP and no more poisoning pigeons in the park.
I just must vent. I have mentioned recently that I was trying to build a modest workshop on my 1.5-acre parcel. Routine stuff. I started in March. I am not waiting for the building permit; I am waiting for the permission to apply for the building permit.
We are pulling the plug and writing off $21k already spent. We have discovered changes in the most recent state and county codes that are an egregious violation of our property rights. The collectivist shits obviously believe that ALL property is owned by the state, and we are just renters who must get the landlord’s permission to trim a bush. We would be fools to spend $250k on building and landscaping anything in this county and state. Bunch of effing commies.
We have property rights that precede statehood, and the state supreme court has ruled they supersede some state shoreline law. These changes make a complete mockery of that. My family’s suit against the City of Mercer Island took 13 years. We do not want to spend what might be last decade of our lives in litigation. Furthermore, we have no reason to believe the commie pretzel makers on the Seattle Supreme Court would not say the previous ruling was wrong and the state IS supreme. Then more litigation in Federal Court with the possibility the feds would say state court decision is final.
Another weapon we have been sitting on for more than 10 years, a weapon either the county doesn’t know about or assumes we don’t know about, is our “Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.” We have standing to sue the county in Federal Court for ongoing violations of the Clean Water Act. I have already participated in such a suit and provided the data and pictures that won the case. My reward was a threating phone call that implied I was being viewed through a rifle scope.
Background on the issue that triggered this. A few years ago, I interacted with a couple .gov dorks sitting in a car on my private road. They were trying to find a way for the public to access the water. I told them this and the shoreline was all private and there was no way. The county has apparently solved this problem by code which allows the public to cross private property and that I must provide safe access across my yard to my steps for public to use to cross my private tidelands to access public tidelands if someone asks. Also, the state says they can seize my private tidelands for any reason or no reason.
This is Vaderism as government, “I am altering your property rights, pray I don’t alter them any further.” We are prepping an Waxit.
Traveling all day yesterday and busy visiting with our friend whose husband died last year, so ignoring all the string stuff for the past 48hrs.
Trump just announced a big deal with the EU. Looks good to me. I dropped by CNN and their reporting was pretty fair. The comments were loaded with how Trump lies, this will cost us even more and add to inflation, etc. The kicker was several saying “what’s wrong with CNN for not bashing the agreement. ” LOL.
You misunderstood the point I was trying to make,
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No, I did not. You were just wrong.
Related:
They may just have to stop stringing us along….
“END OF THE CLIMATE CON: Hard to believe but it’s true – two Ivy League physics professors do the numbers and describe the result…”
https://instapundit.com/734646/
+ Bonus…without a doubt, strung out…and, essentially—morally, ethically, professionally—struck out…
‘NY Times Pulitzer winner Jeff Gerth: “The media isn’t looking for Russiagate scoops nor will they fairly present…[other scoops]…if they reflect poorly on their prior reporting. Theyre in a defensive posture & arent inclined to report deeply on anything that helps Trump”’—
https://instapundit.com/734622/
Re: Tom Lehrer
I didn’t know he had been still alive. He made it to 97, an inspiration for everyone.
According to wiki, he put all his lyrics, music and even recordings in the public domain. Indeed, here they are.
https://tomlehrersongs.com/
Get ’em while you can!
BTW, Lehrer remained an old school liberal Democrat. One of the last political comments he made was in 2008. “Just tell the people that I am voting for Obama.”
You misunderstood the point I was trying to make,
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No, I did not. You were just wrong.
I love a substantive debate!
Chases Eagles, I’m sorry about that news. Are you sure it’s Vaderism and not Calvinball?
(I have no views at all on string theory, btw.)
Chases Eagles:
Likewise. Sorry for your travails. Give ’em heck if you can.
My café friend, who was a mayor of Malibu, said that after the Palisades Fire there was no way the California Coastal Commission would allow those beachfront homes to be rebuilt.
Technically, homeowners can rebuild if they rebuild exactly what they had before, presumably up to current code. However, practically speaking, the CCC doesn’t have to say no, it just has to make rebuilding impossible.
So, the fires were an emergency and Democrats don’t let emergencies go to waste. I won’t be surprised if this turns into a massive land grab carved up between the ultra-rich and the state government.
There were ordinary middle-class folks who managed to buy into the Palisades at the right time. My bet is their homes and their investments will be lost for pennies on the dollar.
@Barry Meislin
William Happer and Richard Lindzen are old news, their paper can’t be considered change unless it gets published in Science or Nature, which is unlikely. The con won’t be in trouble until the young folks figure it out.
Haven’t both journals covered themselves in slime due to their politicized positions on Covid?
(Or are they “Teflon” publications?)
…Speaking of Teflon…
“How the Hunter Biden cover-up continues to this day”—
https://nypost.com/2025/07/27/opinion/how-the-hunter-biden-cover-up-continues-to-this-day/
– – – – –
And…of course…GO BLUE!
(“Sweet Home…Minnesota” edition…)
“FRAUD ALL THE WAY DOWN”—
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/07/fraud-all-the-way-down.php
@Niketas Choniates,
[What do you think the president of Ireland does?…]
In my view, your response sounds kind of dismissive. If you rephrase the question in a more neutral manner, then I’d gladly like to discuss my idea.
Later on.
Chases Eagles,
Sorry for your troubles and sorry more of the U.S. voting public doesn’t prioritize electing representatives who will fight to ensure individual property rights.
Haven’t both journals covered themselves in slime
They are still the most influential general journals. That is why Stanford worked to make Marcia McNutt editor-in-chief of Science and the covid bull sh!tters published in Nature. Note that McNutt is now President of the NAS.
Re: Palisades Fire / Paradise Fire
neo may correct me, but looking into the Paradise Fire which burned Gerard Vanderleun’s home, the average homeowners got the same land grab treatment as the Palisades homeowners are now experiencing. Chat summarizes:
_______________________________
Paradise, CA (Camp Fire, 2018) –85% of the town destroyed
* Rebuild blocked by CEQA, PG&E grid failures, and FEMA restrictions
* Property values cratered
* Investors began assembling parcels
* Few locals could afford to rebuild or even stay nearby
_______________________________
That’s just the way it is.
Chases Eagles, your description of the state taking your property by stealth is sad reading.