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Today superstrings and branes are outdated
It’s the age of M theories
They’re the unification of all those kinds of theories
which try to unify, as you said before, the concept of the macroscopic
the Universe as a whole, that is, that which is governed by the force of gravity
On one hand we have Einstein’s theory of gravitation
It’s perfectly well described
On the other hand we have Quantum Mechanics, which describes perfectly
up to an astonoshing detail, the microcosmical world
that is , atoms, nuclei and the particles that come out of it
At that level we have three forces
the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force
Those are unified reasonably well
And the other force -and that’s all with forces- is gravitation
Theoretical Physics tries to unify all of them, because that’s what we’ve always done
The history of Physics is a history of unifications
of trying to generate as much as we can from a unified point of view
And, furthermore, to express it mathematically
Well, we’re having a lot of problems with this last unification
We have conjectures
First we started with strings, then with superstring
Now we need 11-dimensional spaces, instead of the four we used to have
And, in order to show these extra dimensions, we need energies at a range we’re unable to achieve
And now the Physics community is trying, with every means available
o find some experimental confirmation of these theories, the M ones in particular
And that cannot be done with current technology
Therefore: are M theories Physics?
Because, if there’s no experiment, if there’s no checking to be done in the same conditions, that’s not science
What Galileo taught us, where science’s greatness lies, is that we need experiments
That, if I publish some results and I say how I got them
anyone else -with the same means- can obtain the same results
That’s science
And if that cannot be done with M theories
we can discuss if what they’re doing is science or some new kind of philosophy, expressed mathematically