Physicist here. Would you like to enrich our world view by linking to counter-examples?
My understanding was that string theory being more "hypothetical physics" than "theoretical physics" at this point is still a pretty legit criticism.
Physicist here. Would you like to enrich our world view by linking to counter-examples?
My understanding was that string theory being more "hypothetical physics" than "theoretical physics" at this point is still a pretty legit criticism.
Physicist here. My PhD is in an area that was spawned into existence due to inspiration coming from string theory, not string theory proper.
I've made some comments here [1] to discuss how I see the situation. It's difficult to be thorought in the world of research, and even more so in an HN comment. I'll be writing more as the subject pops up in HN.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336655
The legit criticism with a legit recommended change is even better.
A time and technological gap always exists between theory and a plan for experimental confirmation. Some gaps are fairly short. String theory's gap is undoubtedly long, not for lack of resources.
This gap justifies tapering the allocation of attention and research resources (funding, students, etc), which got lopsided following the strong marketing campaign driven by Greene.
I tend to agree. Science funding is unfortunately a limited resource, and I would like to see different approaches explored in more detail, which unfortunately would imply less (but not zero) funding to string theory. Not zero, because we also don’t want the competence built up in string theory groups to die out completely, in case that remains our best lead.
To borrow a compsci analogy, we tried the depth-first search going in the string theory direction, maybe it’s time to switch to breadth-first for a while, to see if there are any viable and useful theories with less distance from the ones we have today. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a "theory of everything" either, we can initially settle for a "theory of more".
I'm legit interested in hearing more about this, like YouTube series, popsci books, magazines - I've been meaning to read Zwiebach's A first course, but I keep getting distracted with background reading and then never get back to it.