ThoughtGoblin

If your view of string theory is through the lens of media, you aren't going to be up-to-date. String theory was and is the leading theory for quantum gravity, is actively worked on, and has only been supported in recent findings through quantum field theory.

But you're talking about a field with little funding, that requires some of the most brilliant mathematical minds who have specializations, and in which experimentation requires super technology to build particle accelerators the size of the moon. It's not a glamorous field and once the buzz of "theory of everything" wording died off, it was forgotten in media. Just like so many other topics before it.

The standard model for quantum stuff

The standard model doesn't handle quantum gravity, which is kind of important. Nor does it address a slew of other very real phenomenon (dark matter, for instance). It's not a theory of everything, just a good model. It's also something that can be derived from string theory. The two are not competing ideas.

America not being a dictatorship doesn’t a matter to anyone else besides it’s citizens.

Most American allies depend on the US for defense, the US is the largest economy in the world, and the US is the largest ideological counterpart to countries like Russia - who want to use force to annihilate both dissent and opposition.

It absolutely matters to most well-informed citizens of any country the world over how we conduct ourselves because it does directly impact them. That's part of the reason we should be better than we are.

The... world want [sic]... for America to not...

I mean, you're preaching to the choir. Most folk here didn't want to send their kids to die in 'Nam or Afghanistan. Vets didn't sign up to risk their lives for opium fields. American citizens were duped too.

We're on the same side here.

Do you really think the gouvernement doesn’t inject propaganda on social media ?

I didn't say that, but they take out ad campaigns and use PR firms like a normal company. Twitter does not work for the US government and the US government does not rig the algorithm it uses for feeds. The Washington Post is not controlled by the US government. Amazon is not controlled by the US government.

The distinction between that and what China or Russia does is important. They own the media. They own the companies. They own every method of communication and every interaction between their people. And they leverage that direct power to control narratives to say things like "Taiwan belongs to China" and "Ukraine belongs to Russia" and "Tianemen Square never happened".

Meanwhile, you can see all the atrocities the US government did on Wikipedia. Sometimes even on the websites of the state itself. Reparations are discussed, sometimes won. Protesters fight with, yes, the risk of state violence, but not of tanks turning them into pudding that's washed down the gutters. And with that knowledge, we can shape our own future democratically. Putin and Xi cannot be voted out.

All this is a long-winded way to say:

• The US government engages in propaganda.
• The US government's propaganda, compared to authoritarian states, is heavily restricted and far more reliant on consensual participation. It's also widely criticized and (almost) universally hated.
• The propaganda used by authoritarian states like China is actively leveraged to commit outright genocide and deny atrocities. It cannot be publicly criticized or opposed.
• Therefore, the scale and impact of propaganda is different and that difference must be considered.

The scientific consensus seems to be that there isn’t really a good alternative to dark matter. Was it string theory that tried?

The alternative to dark matter is modified gravity/modified Newtonian dynamics. Neither of which have held up to scrutiny and have major flaws that would need to be worked out before being a legitimate competitor to dark matter. In every single permutation thought of today, these theories directly conflict with the reality we observe, while dark matter has been in happy agreement with new data.

that’s basically dismissed and disproven regardless of whether it had anything to do with dark matter.

String theory is not disproven and still remains the leading train of thought. It's just a very niche field and progress is hard/underfunded! But so far we've seen things like AdS/CFT correspondence and it's a more "elegant" solution than its competitors.

is there any reason to expect that the giant deep Antarctic ice-telescope will be able to observe dark matter?

Are you talking about the IceCube? If so, no, that's a neutrino telescope. Although, in general, the answer would also be no; dark matter does not interact with itself or with regular mass in any way other than through gravity. It's simply impossible to measure it directly - it must be done by measuring it's gravitational effect on other things.

And because of that very property dark matter's smallest observable structures are galactic in scale, so it's also rather hopeless to try to observe them locally with current technology.

Sorry for not responding earlier, I don't seem to be getting notifications! My other reply further down in the thread hopefully answers all of your (wonderful) questions, though. Have a great day!

I'm happy to talk about this more, but I'm afraid I don't understand your analogy. I'm sorry! If you'd like to rephrase it, I'll make myself available to respond. 🙂

my understanding is that string theory is basically dead, and only getting deader.

Huh... where is this impression from? String theory isn't dead, it's just a very narrow field in which most of the participants specialize in a subset of it that's less concerned with completing it as a whole. It's incredibly difficult work, progress is slow, and it's currently too broad to be applicable to reality (which is important for funding). The tests we can think of to validate the correspondence of math to the physical world are... significantly out of reach due to the energy requirements.

But it's still the leading theory of quantum gravity and there's active work in, say, AdS/CFT correspondence - which shows that string theory can line up to reality and be predictive. It's the best idea we have right now, it's satisfyingly elegant, and it's working as a useful tool at the very least.

There are competing alternatives that get their own research, of course. We should persue them all until a clear victor emerges!

But I thought modified gravity as explanations for the dark matter observations is seeing a bit of a resurgence lately.

Modified gravity, so far, is non-predictive and does not account for things like the bullet merger while also accounting for ultra diffuse galaxies and our observations of the CMBR. All proposed modified gravities have failed to pass experimentation compared to general relativity. Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) fails in the face of light and gravity having the same speed. And even if MOND were to be true, it still requires the presence of (albeit possible baryonic) dark matter to be even considered due to existing mass measurements of galaxies.

So, again, dark matter is simply the best model we have.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of physics if you think that analogy is even remotely similar to dark matter.

Poverty, lack of education, the US overthrew multiple democratically elected leaders during the red scare by funding extremist groups to commit coups, harsh environment.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Dark matter has been proven numerous times, is a predictive model, and is the only explanation that has held up to scrutiny and observations. It's very clearly the right explanation and we know how dark matter generally behaves, we just don't know specifically what it is.

See, for example, the behavior of the bullet cluster merger.

Who in the world said western state propaganda was a good thing? Military recruitment and political ads are pretty universally hated.

I might also add that western tech giants and media aren't directly owned by the state, nor is the state a dictatorship, so it's a little different? You think Elon's Twitter is on the same side as Bidens Executive is on the same side as the conservative Congress?

I mean, if we're talking Hamilton it's even further, being pretty clearly a commentary on the whole "founding fathers freeing everyone while most of them owning human beings they refused freedom to" thing.

How is Xorg a "direct competitor" to Microsoft? Especially Microsoft's trademark to X in the gaming market where they own the Xbox and Xorg doesn't participate at all?

Trademarks protect consumers by preventing fraud and misleading naming. It makes perfect sense that Microsoft owns X in the given market space due to the enormous prevalence of Xbox. Their first console was literally X-shaped and it would be bad for consumers for anyone to be able to make the "X-station" or "X-cube" or some such.