String theory = Bayesian inference?

The following paper by Jonathan Heckman of Harvard is either wrong, or trivial, or revolutionary:

Statistical Inference and String Theory

I don't understand it so far but Jonathan claims that one may derive the equations of general relativity – and, in fact, the equations of string theory – from something as general as Bayesian inference by a collective of agents.




It sounds really bizarre because the Bayesian inference seems to be a totally generic framework that may be applied anywhere and that says nothing else about "what the theories should look like" while general relativity and string theory are completely rigid, specific, well-defined theories. How could they be equivalent?




Jonathan considers a collective of agents who are ordered along a \(d\)-dimensional grid. Each of them tries to reconstruct the probabilistic distribution for events that they observe experimentally. Collectively, these distributions define an embedding of a manifold in another manifold and Jonathan rather quickly states that various conditional probabilities we know from the Bayesian inference may be written as the Feynman path integrals with the actions that include \(\sqrt{\det G}\), \(\sqrt{\det h}\), and similar things!

Again, I don't understand it so far but needless to say, a proof that string theory is the same thing as rational thinking – and not just a subset of rational thinking – would be extraordinarily important. ;-) I will keep on reading it.