It is time to recognize that String Theory is buncombe. This has yet to dawn on the majority of physicists, who are enthralled with the thing, and may be many years away from general public recognition, but nevertheless it seems plainly evident to anyone who manages a sober reading of the issue. A general and brief overview of String Theory is enough for the purposes of this essay: the theory is not testable, is background dependent, has not been proven to be finite, is not responsible for a single practical technological advance despite the constant efforts of thousands of physicists over a quarter century, is at odds with actual observations and comes in a quantity of varieties that may exceed in number the population of atoms in the universe. Can one imagine a more formidable array of obstacles? More promising theories have died on the tip of just one of these spears.
The purpose of the present piece, however, is not to convince the good reader that String Theory has been a waste of time. Its own practitioners have supplied the curious investigator with ample proofs on that point. The intent today is to demonstrate that government is at fault and that Capitalism would have spared us almost the entire endeavor, whose opportunity costs are incalculable.
Is there a private citizen more sheltered from the Market’s vicissitudes than the college professor? He has tenure, which means that, short of being caught in bed with a nine year old Cambodian sold into white slavery, he cannot be fired. He is free to indulge those whims which most please him without affecting his salary, which is paid to him whether or not he produces something that someone wishes to purchase. The result is that he may consume without first contributing anything worth consuming. Contrast this with the common laborer, who no doubt would prefer to study the effect on batting averages of lowering the pitcher’s mound but who must instead, at the prompting of his landlord, stand at an assembly line for forty hours of the week.
We can see that the university environment permits capricious and non-productive behavior. Who among us would not alter his activities if his salary were guaranteed, would not seek to please himself not just at the point of purchasing, but at the moment of earning as well? If String Theory catches the fancy of a physicist, he may pursue it past the outermost limits of sensibility. That it has not led to any practical discoveries has not affected any salaries, and therefore it has not affected any physicists. The realities of the marketplace would permit very little of this behavior. It is certainly true that a rich patron, fascinated with science and dedicated to research, might be taken by the specious promises of String Theory and convinced to support a team of researchers while they scribbled endless equations only they understand. Insofar as that rich patron is spending his own money, this patronage is his consumption and he is welcome to it. But how many curious souls have been so delighted by String Theory that they would have spent, of their own volition, an amount of money equal to what has actually been given over to the pursuit of strings?
That is the truly appalling aspect of String Theory, not that a few physicists might have grown fond of it, but that it has taken hold of nearly the entire community of physicists and is researched to the exclusion of anything else. The nature of the sheltered community of particle physics has not just failed to put up barriers and discouragements to a non-productive activity like String Theory research, it has aggressively cultivated and expanded the phenomenon. Here too, we can see that exposure to Capitalism would resolve the problem.
Our statist universities pump out more Masters and PhD’s each year than is warranted even by the artificially inflated demand for them, a situation that is true in many areas, not just physics. These overly abundant young physicists are then forced to compete for a limited number of positions which are doled out by the old tenured professors in the field. The relative numbers of positions compared to applicants gives the advantage to these hoary professors, who find the aspiring physicists competing for their favor but who feel little pressure to compete for applicants. They choose youngsters who flatter their egos, who profess an interest in what they want to see studied.
It so happens that, due to a very respected member of the society declaring for Strings in the 1980’s and human beings’ well known propensity to get carried away by fads, String Theory came to dominate the upper echelons of physics society. That it has continued to dominate may, to some extent, be explained by the nature of String Theory itself: it is exceedingly complex, requiring many years of study before the relevant equations can be mastered. By the time a middle aged physicist has finally gotten a handle on the theory, he has devoted a very large portion of his career to just getting started and, like the war widow who supports the cause all the more strongly rather than face the truth and admit that her husband – or son – was killed for no good reason, finds himself unwilling to acknowledge how much of his time he has wasted.
Was String Theory always destined to seize the halls of physical academia? Was it a freak occurrence that made String Theory king and keeps it on the throne? The answer to that question is beyond the scope of the present piece, which is simply to note how Capitalism would cure the problem, a problem that besets any human endeavor when our natures clash with our environment.
Picture a company’s manager with no power to tax, and no possibility of indirectly receiving such coerced payment from the populace at large. Imagine him reviewing his books and noticing that his String Department has consumed a lot of capital and shows no promise of a breakthrough that he might use to increase the company’s profits. Imagine as he talks with his String Theorists and discovers that the theory, rather than honing in on an elegant explanation, keeps getting more and more complex as every emerging problem is addressed by further complications, distortions and conjectures. Whatever company saw profit potential in unifying physics, they could surely see scant reason to continue to underwrite String Theory research.
The universities, too, would get scrubbed clean in a fully capitalist world. Imagine an entirely private school system that had people ready to enter the work force after high school. Imagine businesses that did not fear law suits such that they could hire whom they pleased and did not need to allow universities to do their discriminating for them. Imagine universities being funded without taxes, which means with student fees, and therefore gearing themselves towards students. The whole prestige of research departments would fade, as would the impulse to manufacture higher order degrees which serve the university but rarely the student. Imagine a system where students, who need college less after being better prepared by their high schools, decline to pay the kind of tuitions needed, in the absence of taxes and Pell Grants, to fund major research. Companies would no longer be able to foist the costs of research onto the tax-paying public and allow the universities to do it for them. They would also be less able to let taxes pay to train their workforce.
In such a system, in such a world, it is difficult to imagine that a barren area of research like String Theory could long survive. It could still emerge and be pursued for a time, for there once were sound reasons to pursue it, but a capitalist system would have recognized long ago that nothing good was likely to come of String Theory. The discovery that Calabi-Yau Spaces might number 100,000 would have been a signal, to a profit-driven capitalist, to abandon the project. The discovery that there might be 10^1500 different vacuum states in String Theory would have been an even more powerful signal. The inability to prove the theory finite would never cease to provide its own signal, and certainly the acceleration of the universe’s expansion, which String Theory can accommodate only in the wishful daydreams of invested String Theorists, would have done it.
Instead, we are left with String Theory and its theorists. In a capitalist system the buyer pleases himself and the seller, if he wishes to remain in business, pleases the buyer. In String Theory, the “buyer”, compelled by taxation, pleases the seller. Certainly this delights physicists, who never find themselves in a position to curtail their impulses and do something of service for their fellow man, but it is a waste for, and a crime committed against, the rest of the populace. Add it to the list: Reason number 43,586 to abolish government and allow Capitalism to work its magic.
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