String Theory - From Physics to Metaphysics
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Date
2007-03-16T21:54:30Z
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Abstract
Currently, string theory represents the only advanced approach to a
unification of all interactions, including gravity. In spite of the more
than thirty years of its existence, the sequence of metamorphosis it ran
through, and the ever more increasing number of involved physicists, until
now, it did not make any empirically testable predictions. Because there are
no empirical data incompatible with the quantum field theoretical standard
model of elementary particle physics and with general relativity, the only
motivations for string theory rest in the mutual incompatibility of the
standard model and of general relativity as well as in the metaphysics of
the unification program of physics, aimed at a final unified theory of all
interactions including gravity. But actually, it is completely unknown
which physically interpretable principles could form the basis of string
theory. At the moment, ''string theory'' is no theory at all, but rather a
labyrinthic structure of mathematical procedures and intuitions which get
their justification from the fact that they, at least formally, reproduce
general relativity and the standard model of elementary particle physics as
low energy approximations. However, there are now strong indications that
string theory does not only reproduce the dynamics and symmetries of our
standard model, but a plethora of different scenarios with different low
energy nomologies and symmetries. String theory seems to describe not only
our world, but an immense landscape of possible worlds. So far, all
attempts to find a selection principle which could be motivated
intratheoretically remained without success. So, recently the idea that the
low energy nomology of our world, and therefore also the observable
phenomenology, could be the result of an anthropic selection from a vast
arena of nomologically different scenarios entered string theory. Although
multiverse scenarios and anthropic selection are not only motivated by
string theory, but lead also to a possible explanation for the fine tuning
of the universe, they are concepts which transcend the framework defined by
the epistemological and methodological rules which conventionally form the
basis of physics as an empirical science.
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Keywords
Anthropic Selection, Multiverse Scenario, Quantum Gravity, String theory, Superstrings, Unification