Editing Ed Witten (section)

=== 2025 ===

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|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1912162744863961364
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=I took your point. For some reason my point doesn’t seem to get through. 

I agree with you. He *could* make a strong statement to admit defeat. There are clear reasons not to do this from the ST perspective. It is thus unlikely. 

My point was that he could do something *vastly* less expensive. And the fact that Susskind, Witten, Greene, etc won’t do even that tells us that this isn’t about string theory. It’s about no other theories or theorist being worth considering. It’s abuse of the referee role.

Somehow, the String Theorists set themselves up as a football team that is also the *sole* source of game referees.

So even when their team loses on the field,  they still win by referees decision that they are the only real team competing. Everyone else focuses on whether they have background independence, particle predictions or a renormalizable spin 2 quantization. That is a total red herring. 

Sabine: Theoretical physics isn’t this dumb or anti-scientific. It’s impossible. [[The Only Game in Town (TOGIT)|“The only game in town”]] campaign is not a string theoretic idea. It is totally foreign to science.

Something separate doesn’t want rival theories side by side. In a science we would all be expected to listen to each other. This is what my first memories of physics looked like 1983-1988. There were different ideas. Nothing like this.

The defining feature of [[String Theory]] is that it would rather fundamental physics die than that [[String Theory]] face healthy adult rivals that were not maimed, crippled, stolen, or murdered in their cribs.
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{{Tweet
|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1911991840204898751
|name=Eric Weinstein
|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein
|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=People ask me how you can tell whether scientific experts are leveling with them if the lay public doesn’t understand deep science. 

Here an interviewer asks a leading String Theorist how things are going after 25 years since popularizing String theory in a well received book:
|timestamp=3:55 AM · Apr 15, 2025
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|image=skdh-profile.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/skdh/status/1912022194395467852
|name=Sabine Hossenfelder
|usernameurl=https://x.com/skdh
|username=skdh
|content=If Brian Greene publicly said he doesn't believe in string theory anymore it'd be the end of the field. He'd ruin the lives of thousands of people. Even if it was what he thinks, I strongly doubt he'd ever admit it.
|timestamp=5:46 AM · Apr 15, 2025
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|image=Eric profile picture.jpg
|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1912032953896673603
|name=Eric Weinstein
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|username=EricRWeinstein
|content=The issue isn’t [[String Theory]] which has obviously failed in the terms it set for itself. 

The issue is the [[The Only Game in Town (TOGIT)|“String Theory is the only game in town”]] which appears designed to destroy fundamental physics itself. If you have spent 40 years bragging and failing, wouldn’t you at least ask “Doesn’t anyone have any other ideas?” before finally going over the edge of the cliff? 

<nowiki>*</nowiki>Absolutely* not. And that tells you that string theory isn’t a theory. It’s some kind of a suicide pact. Better that the field die than we ask “What if the string theorists were always wrong including pronouncements about [[Quantum Gravity|quantum gravity]] and against other theorists? What if [[The Only Game in Town (TOGIT)|‘the only game in town’]] was always an obviously totally unethical anti-scientific move to destroy and poison the market place of ideas?”

cc: @bgreene.
|timestamp=6:39 AM · Apr 15, 2025
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|nameurl=https://x.com/skdh/status/1912102850513023326
|name=Sabine Hossenfelder
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|username=skdh
|content=Yes, but that wasn't my point. My point is that Brian is a highly visible string spokesperson, I'd say second after Witten, but Witten doesn't talk much. If Brian were to renounce string theory, he'd be responsible for killing the careers of thousands of people, and he must know that. I am just saying I think it's unlikely he would do it, even if he had stopped believing it makes sense, and you need to factor this in when evaluating what he says.
|timestamp=11:16 AM · Apr 15, 2025
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|timestamp=3:14 PM · Apr 15, 2025
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