Near the end of his life, Feynman said, we do have plenty of data, it’s all the unexplained parameters in the standard model.
Another hint: Witten once said, there has never been a theory which contained as many of the ingredients of reality as string theory (fermions, gauge fields, gravity), that turned out to be unrelated to reality.
Loop quantum gravity, on the other hand, is extremely overrated. The nonperturbative form of the theory has been incapable of recovering space-time.
Penrose’s twistors are great, they have revealed deep new structures in field theory and string theory, and even have some relationship to the Ashtekar variables that are employed in loop quantum gravity (it’s just LQG’s method of quantization which is probably wrong).
The old paradigms of supersymmetry appear to be wrong. The old paradigms of dark matter are probably wrong too, given the number of correct predictions that come from “MOND”. However, there are many known variations on these ideas, and we are also simply very far from knowing all possible forms of field theory and string theory.
The odds are that we are living in some kind of string theory possible world, that is slightly or markedly different from the ones that have received most of the attention in particle physics. However, non-string-theory hypotheses deserve to have people investigating them too, they may turn up overlooked pieces of the puzzle.
To the extent that these opinions of mine provide appropriate guidance, I can’t say it’s due to the use of any rationalist heuristics. It just comes from lots of study and thinking about the subject, and having Internet guides, for the best orthodox wisdom (Lubos Motl) and for promising ideas on the fringes (Marni Sheppeard, RIP).
Near the end of his life, Feynman said, we do have plenty of data, it’s all the unexplained parameters in the standard model.
Another hint: Witten once said, there has never been a theory which contained as many of the ingredients of reality as string theory (fermions, gauge fields, gravity), that turned out to be unrelated to reality.
Loop quantum gravity, on the other hand, is extremely overrated. The nonperturbative form of the theory has been incapable of recovering space-time.
Penrose’s twistors are great, they have revealed deep new structures in field theory and string theory, and even have some relationship to the Ashtekar variables that are employed in loop quantum gravity (it’s just LQG’s method of quantization which is probably wrong).
The old paradigms of supersymmetry appear to be wrong. The old paradigms of dark matter are probably wrong too, given the number of correct predictions that come from “MOND”. However, there are many known variations on these ideas, and we are also simply very far from knowing all possible forms of field theory and string theory.
The odds are that we are living in some kind of string theory possible world, that is slightly or markedly different from the ones that have received most of the attention in particle physics. However, non-string-theory hypotheses deserve to have people investigating them too, they may turn up overlooked pieces of the puzzle.
To the extent that these opinions of mine provide appropriate guidance, I can’t say it’s due to the use of any rationalist heuristics. It just comes from lots of study and thinking about the subject, and having Internet guides, for the best orthodox wisdom (Lubos Motl) and for promising ideas on the fringes (Marni Sheppeard, RIP).