Although the theory is promising, the duo point out that they have not yet completed its proof. The theory uses a technical procedure known as renormalization, a mathematical way of dealing with infinities that show up in the calculations.
So far Partanen and Tulkki have shown that this works up to a certain point—for so-called ‘first order’ terms—but they need to make sure the infinities can be eliminated throughout the entire calculation.
“If renormalization doesn’t work for higher order terms, you’ll get infinite results. So it’s vital to show that this renormalization continues to work,” explains Tulkki. “We still have to make a complete proof, but we believe it’s very likely we’ll succeed.”
Physics is not math, you can’t “prove” a physical theory. You make predictions and through experiment or observation Nature has the last word.
Quick, get in contact with the physicists, they need the insight that you got from thinking about a sentence in a pop sci article for 30 seconds.
I am a physicist. String theory already unified QFT and GR and that doesn’t mean it’s a verified physical theory, you need to validate it through experiment. It’s physics 101. Just watch some Sabine H. videos to see how she speaks about string theory being a failure besides being mathematically consistent.
Nothing has unified gr and qft and you’re a liar
“The bonus of string theory is that it has the tenets of a unified theory of all interactions, electro-magnetism, weak and strong interactions, and gravitation” https://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.1036
No string theory has unified them, it hasn’t been verified. I’m not familiar with the intricacies of string theory, but presumably it is logically consistent. Or “proven”.
It hasn’t been experimentally verified
If you get ahold of them, I need to tell them why they’re wrong because of this one time I watched star trek while I was baked.
They are talking about mathematical proofs here. Once the mathematical proof is complete, we can look at the application, i.e. using it to make predictions and seeing how well they do.
Yes but you can prove that something is true given your set of assumptions about the universe.
A very loose example would be light being constant which could be an assumption, and then you can show that from that relativity is a natural conclusion. Or proof it formally, resulting in the Einstein’s equations.
You have no idea what you are talking about. You can’t prove mathematically Einstein’s equations. No fundamental equations in physics were proved mathematically.
I said they could be proved from assumptions. In the same fashion as mathematical proofs, they aren’t actually 100% true, they merely say that given these assumptions, the following is true. In maths the assumptions are so acutely obvious, or essentially definitions that we rarely rewrite our proof as the tautologies that they actually are
I agree with you that the you can’t prove a physical theory, but you can TRY to axiomize it. Which is what Hilbert’s 6th problem was.
In this way you can show that the equations you have are logically consistent - not that they are 100% true.
The crux of this argument is defintional, not factual, you take proof in an experimental way, as such no theory can be proven. I take proof to mean proven logically consistent. As such any good theory should be 100% proven, otherwise 1 might as be 0.