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.
My understanding was that string theory being more "hypothetical physics" than "theoretical physics" at this point is still a pretty legit criticism.
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.
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.
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".