Whatever Happened to String Theory?

Peter Woit's opinion: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15348

This is a great article — just short texts by experts in their field who really know what they're talking about. It's very refreshing compared to all the rewritten and simplified articles one so often sees.

It got lost in one of its 26 dimensions.

Over 25 years ago I was doing ny final thesis on string theory for my Masters degree. The more I read, the more I went ”this could not possibly be right”. I ended up taking a break to work to get perspective on things and decide whether I wanted to continue pursuing a career in theoretical physics. I never went back. And given that in this field, things have been stagnant for those 25 years, it seems my impressions were quite on the mark.

Having so many things required to make it work, that we could not verify always rubbed me the wrong way, as was the ability to always be able to add just one more patch to make it outlive each experimental or theoretical setback.

It's always seemed to me that string theory was more about "hey this maths is cool" rather than any correspondence to the physical world. I guess that kind of thing goes in and out of fashion.

>The major objection is that its predictions are for things at a microscopic scale that we cannot yet test

Yet? That's generous. String theory (whichever one you choose) works on the Planck scale regime, around 15 orders of magnitude beyond what the LHC can reach. Just scaling the LHC size you'd need...

27km(10^16TeV/14TeV) ≈ 2.710^13 km ≈ 2.4 ly

Sure technology doesn't scale linearly but come on, string theory testing scale is impossible.

They strung us all along?

One of many relevant xkcd's.

https://xkcd.com/397

I initially saw all these maths in books about string theory and was scammed that these people are so clever and found something that it is hard for me to grasp.

I did my MSc and diploma work in pure mathematics inspired by this. then I saw the light and did my PhD in electrical engineering because I felt I was getting a rabbit hole that did not worth it and could ruin my life financially.

Still was convinced that with money and time there was something there. Thanks to all these people that eventually uncovered the scam and gave evidence to see that string theory is indeed a conspiracy theory.