Bayesian Investor Blog

Book review: The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin
This book makes a plausible argument that string theorists are following a fad that has little scientific promise. But much of the book leaves me with the impression that the disputes he’s describing can only be fully understood by people who devote years to studying the math, and that the book has necessarily simplified things for laymen in ways that leave out many important insights.
The argument I found most impressive was his claim that relativity shows that background independence is important enough that any theory which unites relativity with quantum mechanics will preserve relativity’s background independence (a result which string theorists don’t pursue). Still, this seems to be little more than an intuition, and until someone creates the revolutionary theory that unites relativity and quantum mechanics, there ought to be plenty of doubt about which approach is best.
His sociological analysis of the problems with physics is less impressive. His endorsement of Feyeraband’s belief that there’s no such thing as a scientific method seems implausible (although it seems plausible for some stages of scientific thought, such as decisions about what questions to ask; maybe I ought to read Feyeraband’s writings on this subject).
I’m unimpressed by his lengthy gripes about the large fraction of funding that goes to routine science rather than revolutionary science. He implies this is making revolutionary science harder than it used to be, but I still see signs that a revolutionary scientist today would follow a path similar to Einstein’s and encounter no greater obstacles.
He wonders why those who fund scientific research don’t fund some research the way the best venture capitalists do – taking risks of 90% of their choices failing in order to get a few really big successes. He seems to think risk aversion is the main reason. What I see missing from his analysis is the absence of large rewards to the funder who picks the next Einstein. I think that to get VC-like attitudes in funding agencies, we would need systems where part of the money and prestige of a Nobel prize went to a few people who made the key decisions to fund the prize-winning research. I expect it would be hard to alter existing institutions to replace committee-based funding decisions with the kind of individual authority needed for these incentives to work.
His proposal to avoid having one unproven paradigm such as string theory dominate the funding in its area by limiting the funding to any one research program to one third of the total seems naive. The most direct effects of such a rule would be that researchers get around the rule by redefining the relevant categories (e.g. claiming that string theory research is diverse enough to qualify as several independent programs, or altering whatever category is used to define the total funding).
He wants academics who have authority to influence hiring decisions to have the kind of training in avoiding prejudice and promoting diversity that their commercial equivalents get. I suspect he is way too optimistic about what that training accomplishes – my impression is that it’s designed mostly to minimize the risk of lawsuits, and does more to hide biases than it does to prevent them.