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Comment by fusiongyro | Hacker News Reader

I enjoy Peter Woit's writing and especially loved his book "Not Even Wrong." I also enjoy shitting on string theory from the comfort of my armchair. Maybe this is "productive," in the sense that getting people to stop investing in string theory will get them to work on investing in something else, but again from my armchair, I just don't see what positive work is happening. It feels like there are not enough holes in the standard model that need plugging and no big theory trying to supplant it or handle gravity gaining ground.

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His book contains several factual inaccuracies that he either has failed to correct or refuses too (as of last year). It makes me think a lot less of him and his position on string theory. It makes me wonder what else has he misrepresented in his criticisms.

Keep in mind science is not free of "agendas"; people in competing areas love to bash the competition because they're competing for funding, aka their livelyhood.

Can you point me to something about these inaccuracies?

care to share some of the inaccuracies?

I think there's an unexamined assumption that a "theory of everything" must exist.

As it stands now we don't have a working theory of the turbulent motion of fluids. We don't know why hurricanes and eddies happen, but we're investing brainpower in understanding particle physics in a neighborhood of the big bang? Get out of here.

It must exist because we still haven't reconciled quantum mechanics with relativity. That matters if we ever want to understand what happens inside black holes, or the moment of the big bang itself. As of right now, our physics literally breaks, it stops working. If a black hole was a computer program, we'd get a critical systems fault the moment it began running.

“Theory of everything” is a bit of a misnomer. Rather, the goal is to understand the fundamental laws of nature. That doesn’t mean all problems about complex, composite systems like turbulence will be solved. Think about it like finding the underlying simple rule of a cellular automaton, as opposed to all the phenomena such a rule gives rise to. Sometimes the fundamental is more simple than what emerges from it.

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