Our universe’s fine tuning may be why the Standard Model is so mathematically ugly
String theory is the only real contender for a theory of everything these days. In a recent interview, string theory guru Michio Kaku suggested that the Standard Model, the theory that has been confirmed over and over as our best understanding of how matter and forces behave, just “pops out” of string theory. Kaku went on to say that the Standard Model is “one of the ugliest theories proposed so far”.
Statements like this, which might have only caused some grumbling in past decades, are downright incendiary among many physicists. String theory critic Sabine Hossenfelder said in a tweet that Kaku’s statement was “just wrong” and that
if string theory was actually really simpler than the Standard Model, then physicists would actually USE IT to make predictions for the LHC [Large Hadron Collider]. They don’t. Why? Because it’s useless.
While there is no real consensus on the merits of string theory, for now it remains a mathematically beautiful theory that is indeed “useless” for making predictions. It also makes so many unobserved predictions that you could call it an ugly theory, but ugly in the way that the Standard Model is beautiful. (It’s what’s on the inside that counts after all.)
