Brian Wecht
speaker
852 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 5 Sep
Brian Wecht’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Is it useful?
Not, is it real?
Right.
Not even useful.
It's like, what, what is this framework and what are the boundaries of it?
What can we use it for?
that's a separate question.
Also, this is not astrophysics, and I want to be clear.
This is theoretical particle physics.
It has cosmological implications, but it's not astrophysics.
So yeah, testability is also a big problem here, because the particles that we're talking about, things that would provide direct evidence of string theory, would be so massive that you'd only get them at very high energies, and there's no way to actually give direct tests
it.
So at the moment, also, there are no known direct tests of string theory, or even plausible indirect tests.
If you've ruled out supersymmetry completely, that is a knock against string theory.
And since the LHC didn't find anything, yes, that makes string theory maybe look a little bit less real.
But the thrust of where I wanted to go with this, with the what happened to string theory thing, is most working string theorists today, and there are fewer than there used to be, it's not this hot new field anymore, are using string theory...
as a tool in theoretical physics and part of a larger toolbox and not as maybe this is the theory of the real universe.
And I don't think, I think they're both interesting questions and I don't think one is less valid than the other.
So I'll give you just one example here.
There are lots of examples.
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