Gayoung Lee at Gizmodo today has responses to the question Whatever Happened to String Theory?.
Carlo Rovelli and I give the obvious and accurate answer that it’s a failed idea, explaining why. The other answers exhibit the sad state of continuing denial in many quarters of the reality of the situation:
- Science communicator Daniel Whiteson, an experimentalist who doesn’t appear to know anything about string theory, assures the public that the problem is just that we can’t yet test it.
- John Schwarz is completely delusional: “A large portion of the theoretical particle physics community is now convinced that we are on the right track to discovering the correct unified theory of our universe (and many naysayers have repented).”
- Thomas Van Riet, whose main claim to fame is vigorously hyping string theory on Twitter, also does the job here.
- Hiroshi Ooguri gives an absurd argument that one should ignore 40 years of utter failure, since “it would take 1,250 years to construct a realistic model of the universe from string theory and another 1,000 years to verify it experimentally.”
- Cumrun Vafa turns up the hype machine to 11, claiming that “the large-scale cosmological observation and the small-scale tabletop experiments are both on their way to confirming string theory predictions.” (the bogus “predictions” are from his latest “string-motivated model”).
The past few days have also seen another “string theory is doing fine” PR effort, Marika Taylor’s String theory: scientists are trying new ways to verify the idea that could unite all of physics. Here the hype is about string theory vindication from dark energy measurements, black hole gravitational wave measurements, and something about quantum computing.
It became clear long ago that writing careful explanations of exactly what was wrong with this kind of hype is a waste of time. There’s no point in arguing with the people making up the industry generating this nonsense since they simply don’t care whether what they are writing is true or not. For many years it seemed to me that the effort to try and fight this was still worthwhile, because if unchecked it was going to lead to the intellectual death of the subject of fundamental physical theory, together with massive discrediting of scientific research in general among the public who traditionally held science in high esteem. Unfortunately that fight has now been lost, with the depressing consequences that surround us all.
As for what to do about it, articles like Taylor’s claiming “right now, things are looking up for string theory” are just digging the hole that needs to be climbed out of deeper. I’m personally optimistic about some new ideas in fundamental physical theory, trying to concentrate on pushing them forward and getting them written up. I’m not optimistic though about seeing this part of the scientific enterprise return to a healthy subject in the forseeable future.
