How stuff works is fascinating. I think anyone entering science shares this inexplicable curiosity. Most who do are dissatisfied with any answer lacking empirical evidence. We can claim many answers are true, but good science demands that we demonstrate our answers are both reasonable and reliable.

Science, in its broadest scope, has two camps: theoretical and experimental. Although the theoretical camp claims they are concerned with reality, it is often their job to imagine beyond what we might, collectively, currently consider real. The experimental camp houses the hands-on workers, the salt-of-the-earth people with the good sense to recognize fantasy from fact.

It is a familiar paradigm. Theoreticians might argue that they, too, have the good sense to recognize fantasy from fact. And I know many experimentalists have no problem with their imaginations. But science, which stands above both these camps – which unites them, has little concern with these immaterial nuances. Science requires truth, and it is not to be trifled with.

It is the theoreticians who increasingly fancy themselves philosophers. In fact, I have heard several suggest that scientists will eventually become civilization’s philosophers. It is an interesting characteristic of science when engaging broader philosophy, that science demands acquiescence from philosophy whenever science can scientifically prove itself right. Personally, I’m fine with that. We all have more to learn, and there is always tomorrow.

We’ll narrow the focus now to physics to enable the demonstrative. Apparently, psychology believes this will better hold your attention. It should also irritate physicists. But I am also hoping to irritate other scientists, in other disciplines, too. In fact any scientist willing enough to walk far afield from their experimental counterparts.

First, we’ll help the theoretical physicists tie knots in their skirts. Unfortunately, they will probably stop reading long before that. That’s okay. This isn’t for them. This is for people interested in science – that larger science that is a superset of the theoretical and experimental. The majority of theoretical physicists have long ago turned inward upon themselves in an neurotic, elaborate and expensive mash of metaphysics. To them, science has become incidental. Perhaps this truly makes them more akin to philosophers. I’m fine with that, too. However, in doing so, they forfeit the science trump card.

Since Einstein, physics has increasingly relied upon mathematics. In much the same way we simulate airplane designs before ever building an actual airplane to see how it actually flies, theoretical physicists imagine the component structures of existence before we know anything for certain. This is good – it can save a great deal of time and leaves some people free to let their imaginations wander, which is always good for innovation and revelation. However, to carry on the analogy, the difficulty we now face as a society is that we have built acres and acres of supercomputers, staffed with dreamers, housed in megalithic structures across the country, running simulation after simulation, and building even more powerful simulated airplanes based upon their simulated findings – but we have only a tiny handful of actual airplane facilities that can actually build one of these airplanes, just to see if any might fly. It may very well happen that a facility might build a plane that just doesn’t fly, and all the planes the theoreticians subsequently built upon that failed design have no hope of ever flying.

This is a problem with simulation. And this is a problem with believing in and building upon simulated results. Mathematics is excruciatingly accurate within the terms of mathematics. However, mathematics is metaphysical – it can only simulate or represent the physical. When you tie physical models to mathematics, you abstract even further into the metaphysical than mathematics alone. And when you make even more physical models based upon the trueness assumed in other physical models based upon mathematics, before long you find yourself holding a complicated monstrosity that may or may not have any actual foundation in anything but mathematics, yet claims to represent reality.

Perhaps this is why people who love the metaphysical often cling to ideas like string theory: because string theory can be so easily molded and re-molded to assume a shape that will satisfy what people desire to see. Of course, that is stretching it. If you’re a string theorist, you have to re-mold it within the constrains of mathematics, and all prior mathematical contrivances related to string theory. Or, you could make up some new mathematics. Or throw in a new subatomic particle or two. Maybe add a few extra dimensions to the universe…

As a quasi-agnostic, and as someone who places importance in reason, and who claims to have some of it, I find it very difficult talking with some zealously religious people. They are very quick to retreat into the tautologies of their belief system. And when someone who is reasonable runs into a giant tautological belief, there really is very little you can do except take a sledge hammer to it, or ignore it. Not necessarily because you are too impatient to reasonably examine the tautology, but rather because your subject is unwilling to reexamine themselves.

Now, I cannot say that all theoretical physicists are like this. Most retain at least a semblance of dispassion toward the sanctity of their cause. They will listen, and may even say, “oh, that’s neat”, and then roll their eyes, carrying along their track, even working to cut off funding and undermine any research that might threaten the final acceptance of their ideas, experimental data or not.

In case you’re wondering, I am not a fringe theoretical physicist. Nor do I have anything against string theorists. Well, that’s not exactly true. I do. It is this: they have no conception of the power they currently wield to stifle any science they see fit. Or, if they do have a conception of that power, yet still choose to wield it against “competing” ideas, they are behaving unethically. Perhaps they forget that exploratory science is more than just one perspective, or small variations on a theme. It is about taking in all the perspectives and figuring out what is right. And you cannot make a determination about what is right without experiential evidence that flows from someplace other than the metaphysical. And even more fundamentally, discourse must never be stifled.

“The marketplace of ideas,” is a phrase often heard amongst string theorists. It is to the detriment of science that they have embraced the marketing techniques of “spin”, the repetition of unfounded ideas until they become truisms, and oftentimes ruthless acts of market suppression in an attempt to achieve a monopoly. But they have been successful. Perhaps the market does know best – even better than science. Perhaps they forget their roots in being the lunatic outsiders from the institutional power structures, enduring ridicule and suppression. Perhaps they have forgotten, saying to themselves, “look how much time was wasted in progress, having to fight those pig-headed assholes who were so caught up parroting the same things back and forth to each other, for so long.”

So, I have this to say to theoretical physicists, particularly those working in string theory: watch your duplicity. Don’t tell another scientist, and squash them, because what they propose might mean changing a small part of General Relativity, when you yourselves are more than willing to do so for your theories. Don’t bash other scientist’s ideas when they happen to call into question one of your own cherished tenants. Let them try to prove you wrong. Hell, help them prove you wrong – you’ll only come out stronger, at least from a scientific perspective. Unless that’s not really what you’re concerned about…

String theory truly has done a wonderful job of marketing to the masses. That’s how I first heard of it. That’s what drew my interest. Ironically, and perhaps unexpectedly, expectation as well as money, accompanies the eyes of the public when they are focused more and more in your direction. We see how far out afield you are from experimental physics – the physics that, at the end of the day, really matters to us. Because we can hold it. We can understand it. And we can benefit from it. You have your money, for now. But we will not allow you to stifle science. Science still matters to us, and you do not determine what is, and is not science. You forfeited the trump card. And you are strangers.