String theory

Like what if the apparent effects of strings are just results of some infinitesimal self intersections of spacetime.

Isn't the smallest known unit of something an energy membrane. Idk physics moves too fast to keep up. Someone school me on this.

WAIT. That's funking wrong.

QFT makes valid predictions and is in itself consistent.

ST fails miserably at making even the same predictions.
No it's even worse, ST is not an effective theory.

>What if strings aren't real and the apparent effects are just a result of some complicated spacetime geometry?
What if we witness some complicated space geometry and the apparent effects can only be explained by strings?

It has huge implications since string theory has been verified by all experiments ever conducted (they agree with string theory) and pretty much all candidates for quantum gravity that aren't obviously wrong reduce to string theory. If string theory was wrong, whole modern physics would be fucked because we would lose hope for unifying all forces.

String theory is a quantum theory.

ST can makes all the same predictions as QFT

It’s bunk

All physical objects must break down to binary. If they are physical objects described in any space other than a self-referential one then they are emergent from something else.

You nailed it: strings are really tiny julia sets

itt people who have absolutely no clue not only about string theory, but about (theoretical) physics in general, shooting their clueless reinterpretations of popsci bollocks
even Greene's popsci goes well beyond abilities of your average pseud, and that isn't even remotely good enough of an outline of string theory to assess its validity or usefulness
hint as to why string theory is universally accepted in hep-th: whenever you try to come up with something new in hep-th, string theory suddenly pops out even if you tried to avoid it (it also is incredibly powerful, but that isn't the main reason it's accepted)

they are not... string theorists are nigger tier... muh symmetry... :)

>QFT makes valid predictions and is in itself consistent.

Wrong.

>ST fails miserably at making even the same predictions.

Wrong.

>QFT ... Wrong
Proof left as an excercise to the reader
>ST ... Wrong
Proof left as an excercise to the reader

You should ask for proofs first.

QFT is not at all consistent. It does make valid predictions though.

ST can make the same predictions in most cases.

say that to my face fucker not online and see what happens

I have never read a popsci book in my life. My idea comes from math.

what discrepancy do you see in mathematics of string theory?

Quantum effects and particles are so tiny that what we know to be conventional physics has little bearing over them. to describe these things as strings, particles or fields is to assign these descriptions that apply to our reality, but not the quantum reality so that we can understand something that is unconscionable to a monkey. Our brains recognize what food sized objects are, as well as our peers and basic ideas we need for survival. Imagine a man who has never seen any machine, we plucked him straight out of the jungle, he has never seen anything not made from nature. now he goes back to his tribe instructed to describe to them cars and air plains, he'll compare them to what he knows, perhaps turtles or birds. The act of attempting to describe the quantum reality to your average person will do them no service, because they will never understand the true nature of the reality

NO ONE knows if String Theory is correct. Even String Theorists like Ed Witten will readily concede that.
The math is very elegant but there's not a scintilla of experimental evidence. Not even indirect evidence. And, SFAIK, it's never made a prediction of a result which was later confirmed by experiment.
There are alternatives such as en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity
Loop Quantum Gravity might be the "complicated spacetime geometry" you're looking for.
I once attended a colloquium. Brian Greene spoke on "Why String Theory is the Answer to Everything." Lee Smolin spoke on "Why String Theory is Total BS"

>because they will never understand the true nature of the reality
Nobody ever will btw, but they could very easily understand the quantum nature of our world if they were introduced probability in a better way. Surprisingly, intuition in probability is very uncommon and aquiring it isn't as easy for them as for instance intuition in linear algebra. From talking with my peers who at least heard about QM, they have a trouble both accepting and working with a probability distributions as a model of reality.
Polchinski or Strominger do a better job at explaining the *why* of string theory to laymen than Witten. Arkani-Hamed has also written (and talked) on the very high confidence of hep-theorists in string theory. There are currently no alternatives to string theory and since string theory naturally emerges from pretty much anything you touch in theoretical physics, it is *very* likely to describe our universe.
Yes it is true we're not certain that it is correct, and this might remain so for a very long time, but that isn't reason to abandon it. String theory is already useful- conformal field theory is part of condensed matter physics.
LQG has serious issues, on top of not being as elegant and powerful as ST. The two biggest issues i had was that LQG doesn't (and can't) have GR as semi-classical limit, the other (big one, and i didn't really pursue after this) is that it breaks local Lorentz invariance.

>tfw won't live long enough to see physicists unify all forces and explain the basic makeup of the universe

how close are we to understanding EVERYTHING, Veeky Forums?

Theory that unites all forces and describes them up to (even beyond, but that's not important) Planck scale is a theory of everything. Anything beyond that is inherently unverifiable, so it's just a conjecture, not a theory. We currently know of one such theory- string theory.
So for a meaningful definition of everything, we are as close to understanding everything as we are to finding our universe among all the universes string theory describes. Nobody knows how fart that is.