String Theory: Difference between revisions

|content=@martinmbauer Seiberg/Witten/Dijkgraaf/Maldacena

Maybe get a string theorist to admit this to you. Brian Greene likely wouldn’t disagree with me.

“String Theory” has done a *tremendous* amount of good while “String Maximalism” has done even more harm.

If the String Theorists who led the movement were to undo some of the damage by admitting what happened, it’d be a major positive.

|content=Here is where I respectfully disagree with my colleague @skdh. You can’t ‘get rid of string theory’. String-like objects are natural and have an unbelievably rich and beautiful interlocking mathematics. The beguiling beauty isn’t the problem in my opinion. Beauty is the excuse.

|content=During that time String Theory diverted the entire field into a magical never-land of “toy physics”. Models that aren’t in any way real. You now have “particle physicists” at the end of their careers who have never worked with anything like a particle and can’t remember them.

|content=So, here’s my analysis. In a world where David Gross, Ed Witten, Lenny Susskind, Cumrun Vafa, Michio Kaku had a public Come To Jesus moment where they admitted the disaster in front of the community faithful, I’d be up for having ST as a major theory. But without that I’m unsure.

|content=The damage to the culture of High Energy Physics is more severe than the damage done by Geoffery Chew in a different era. And here I support @skdh, Peter Woit, Lee Smolin etc. These are brave people who paid with abuse to communicate that physics was diverting into pure fantasy.

String Theory deserves to be a major branch. But it has already mostly given up on the ‘80s promises/lies it told us to gobble up all the resources of the community (brains, mind share, $$$). That was a crime which may prove fatal to our being able to do physics.

|content=@martinmbauer String theory was a giant percentage of a tiny priesthood. That was the same tiny priesthood that brought us Thermo Nuclear devices. And if you want to pay for me to research the numbers I’m willing to hire somebody to put together the data after 1984. It’s not usually contested.

Beyond the standard model theory? Is a small field. Tiny. But hugely consequential. And the percentage and effect wasn’t small. Do you really dispute this??? Look at the IAS professors.