In my last post I talked about Pesky Postulates and the problem in revising them.
Today I’ll talk about the challenge on a more practical level: what do you do if you find evidence that a postulate is wrong?
To surely sound like a crank, I’ll refer to Galileo Galilei. He is the ultimate crank, who also happened to be right. Galileo’s main claim to fame is that he was convinced based on his astronomical observations that the earth rotated around the sun and not vice versa. Galilei wasn’t the first person to claim this idea. Nicolaus Copernicus had the idea in 1543, but it was Galilei who had to face the Roman inquisition in 1615.
So, you’d imagine that Galileo had the perfect proof for his model and he only needed to convince others to look at his data. Apparently, he wasn’t a very good experimentalist and fudged his data to make it look more convincing. But he had ideas. And enough of them were correct enough for him to be forever remembered for them.
Before Copernicus, the postulate among learned men was that the Earth was the center of the universe and all celestial objects were in orbit around it. To explain the movement of the planets, the moon and the sun in this manner required convoluted mathematics that from current perspective make very little sense.
However, it is crucial to note that while Copernicus had the initial idea of heliocentrism and Galileo faced the wrath of the scientific establishment for it, it was only Isaac Newton who in 1679 figured out the celestial mechanics of gravity. Thus, it took over a century from the general concept to find proper mathematical representation for it. To some extent there was a huge gap, where the new postulate existed without the mathematics to back it up.
Could this happen today? Could you present a revised postulate without the mathematics to back it up? With some experimental evidence, but without full mathematical representation.
As far as I see it, the answer is: not easily. For three months I have attempted to get my manuscripts accepted even as non-peer-reviewed preprints, both in chemistry and physics. In neither field can the idea of revisiting basic postulates be accepted even as an idea (or preprint), as it appears not to be scientific. Even though I specify my aim clearly and compare data reflecting two postulates, this approach cannot pass even the first stage.
Conversely, as conventional String theory starts by assuming the basic postulates of physics to be correct and logically follows from these postulate, it is possible to publish articles in respectable journals claiming there to be extra invisible dimensions. The thing is, if the mathematics are correct, the manuscripts have to be accepted.
I see the current situation with String theory being analogous to the Ptolemaic model of geocentrism. If the postulate of Earth being the center of the world is correct, each planet is moved by a system of two spheres: one called its deferent; the other, its epicycle. From current perspective, this idea seems crazy and overly complicated.
Analogously, if one assumes the postulate of the free movement of gas molecules from the kinetic theory of gases, the mathematics leads to strings being present in a ten-dimensional universe. The analogy to epicycles is almost comical.
Thus, it seems to be quite clear that the problem isn’t in the basic idea of string theory, but more fundamentally in the basic postulates the theory is based upon.
So, do we need a Newton to figure out the mathematics behind these ‘classical’ strings before the new postulate is accepted? Possibly so. I think of myself more of a Galileo or Copernicus. Possibly wrong in many accounts, but the first proponent of a postulate that requires a much better mathematical framework to be accepted.
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