“On Functional Freedom and Penrose’s Critiques of String Theory”

James Read (University of Oxford)

Abstract: In his The Road to Reality as well as in his Fashion, Faith and Fantasy, Roger Penrose criticises string theory and its practitioners from a variety of angles ranging from conceptual, technical, and methodological objections to sociological observations about the string theoretic scientific community. In this talk, I assess Penrose’s conceptual/technical objections to string theory, focussing in particular upon those which invoke the notion of ‘functional freedom’.

(Based upon joint work with Matěj Krátký (Oxford); preprint available here: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/22732/.)