I know a lot of the people she’s talking about. I hung out with future physicists is college. I’ve never understood aren’t theory, though.
And, um, i think she vastly overestimates how much the public thinks or cares about string theory.
It’s fusion that is always a few decades away. And fusion? People WANT infinite energy from cheap hydrogen. But what was string theory ever going to give us?
The “public” she’s talking about are the types who buy “popular science” nonfiction.
Fusion never got much play except for the extremely short-lived cold fusion crap. The issue with fusion was containment and I don’t think we ever got “promised” useful developments in that area.
String theory was supposed to give us a Theory of Everything (specifically, a unifying theory so that gravity could get along with the three other fundamental forces: EM, strong & weak nuclear). That’s what was so “amazing” about it. Not that we would get any nifty consumer electronics or energy sources out of it.
I think TOEs are overblown. Why should gravity play well with anything?
I see what you did there.
There is no gravity. The earth sucks.
I read a few Brian Greene books in the mid 2000’s. She’s talking to me.
Whereas i guess i never read any books about string theory, but have been promised clean fusion power in 30 years all my life.
It’s not popular science, I guess, but I’ve heard way more hoaxsters talking about fusion in the media than physicists. I remember one local TV news report where they covered a guy who claimed he had retrofitted his car to run on fusion. They showed under the hood and there a coffee can painted black, which is where he claimed the fusion was talking place. There was a rubber hose running from the coffee can to somewhere on the engine that he claimed was where the electricity ran. It was covered with a straight face by the “health and science” reporter.
I remember being promissed 30 years ago that we’d have clean fusion in 30 years, but I haven’t heard much about it since then.
I may just not follow the things you do though.
Pretty nice, real-life “black box” example.
Everything sucks 
I think you uncovered the unifying theory of everything.
I think I need a “Things that make me question my life” thread… because when I saw that image I immediately thought “Oh, someone made it look like Bebop from TMNT”.
The problem with that is that I have never consumed any TMNT media - never watched the cartoon or movie, never read a comic. What I have done is spend way to much time online cruising through random cultural ephemera, all of which now clutters up my brain.
I could have done something useful with that time, and instead all I seem to have gotten from it is the ability to recognize random pop culture references that I don’t give a damn about.
Did he go by Doc Brown? Almost 40 years since he went 30 years in the future and picked up the Mr. Fusion add-on to the Delorean.
Do you like bar trivia?
I’d watch the shit out of that. Make it happen!
I think the author underestimates the number of people who know SQL. It’s not like it’s niche, by any means.
It was originally from Sept 2003, but even then, many people knew SQL and liked mysteries
