String Theory: Difference between revisions

|content=Why did this work? Because String Theory attracted top minds from what had traditionally been the cream of the Quantum Field Theory community, and they‘d clearly found a large piece of mathematical structure. What they failed to find was a connection from that to real physics. 🙏

The problem was with *string theorists*. Quite simply, String theory allowed its proponents to put down the work of everyone else by allowing its boosters to claim an imminent solution which never actually ships.

|content=Further, when ever anyone did something (call it X) that was important but seemingly non stringy or anti-string, the string theorists would publish an all but unreadable paper titled like “X and its Stringy Origin” to claim that *all* good ideas are subsumed by String Theory.

Moral: we destroyed our ability to self-police. Peer review won’t work. We need to go back to doing physics. What’s holding us back may not be physics but the political economy of academic labor, citation, reputation & attribution.🙏

|content=@skdh @WeLivetoServe Said differently I’ve been bullish on positive externalities of mathematical physics. But a lot of great math that got done isn’t string theory. It’s claimed to be stringy but it is really mostly mathematical physics or geometric field theory that is claimed by string theorists.

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1474261469462073344

|content=@skdh @WeLivetoServe QFT & cross-sections sound more like particle theory than Astrophysics, Cosmology or even GR.

Would we agree that the collision of Witten/Singer/Quillen/Seiberg/Freed/Bismut/Maldacena/Penrose/Atiyah/

Hitchin/Dijgraff/Vafa/Segal/Jackiw/Kontseivich/Alvarez-Gaume/etc has been magic?

|timestamp=6:11 AM · Dec 24, 2021

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1474261875328098308

|content=@skdh @WeLivetoServe There are a lot of string theorists who have done things that really matter to geometry, topology, analysis on manifolds, representation theory. And I don’t want to misunderstand your point.

 

|image=Eric profile picture.jpg

|content=It is tied to all sorts of weirdness involving top physics and math people, bizarre funders, forgotten research institutes, aerospace companies, post Manhattan Project government secrecy, the golden age of General Relativity and…words fail me…outright quackery.

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1618348209059004417

|content=Wouldn't a scientist ask the question:

 

 

 

[End Of Heresy]

|content=Discussion of the future of theoretical physics seems like a game of [[Intellectual Keep-Away|"Intellectual Keepaway."]]

|timestamp=11:03 PM · Jan 24, 2023

"Who believe [[String Theory]] wouldn't work?"

"Who never claimed LHC SUSY was imminent?"

|content=Said differently, what if our leadership is brilliant but SPECIFICALLY untrustworthy in identifying the path forward. What if 1000 [[David Gross]] & [[Ed Witten|Ed Wit1ten]] Keynotes setting the agenda are the problem? What if [[Lenny Susskind]] is not correct sbout non-string people wasting our time.

"Are there any OTHER ideas? Not [[String Theory|Strings]]. Not Loops. Not Asymptotic Safety. Not Simple Compact GUTs. Not Quantum Computing. Not Black Hole Information. Not Technicolor. Not Amplitudes."

|content=Look, we could just hold a conference: [[Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game|"Fundamental Physics: Can't *Anybody* Here Play This Game?"]]

[[David Gross|David]], [[Ed Witten|Ed]], Maria, [[Cumrun Vafa|Cumrun]], [[Nathan “Nati” Seiberg|Nati]], [[Lenny Susskind|Lenny]], Juan, [[Lee Smolin|Lee]] etc. could be respondents giving constructive feedback. We would then at least learn why we are where we are. But this is nuts.

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1618764799630004225

|content=If biological aliens were here from others star systems in crafts that defy the current physics of the standard model and, more importantly, general relativity, I would be one of the few people who would have a guess on day one as to how they must have gotten here. It’s tempting.

|content=I don’t think biological interstellar alien visitors using GR and the SM make much sense. So I try to have a war *inside* my own mind as to what is true. I have a genuine “Need to Know” as to whether this is BS NatSec space opera disinformation theater. Because to me, it is data.

What stopped the Golden Age Of General Relativity?

|content=This is the 50th year of stagnation in the Standard Model Lagrangian. It is AS IF we are deliberately trying to forget how to do actual physics. Everyone who has succeeded in Particle Theory in standard terms is now over 70. This is insane. In 25 years there will be no one left.

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1679339931800592390

|content=To sum it up: when [[String Theory|string theorist]] are no longer in a position to keep changing the goal posts set by the physical world, isn’t it the case that from A-Z maybe [[String Theory|string theory]] is not being honest?

 

Again. Not personal to you. At all. But it is not a fair move to say “It’s the best yet-to-succeed approach to quantum gravity.” in front of the public. No?  

 

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1677230177544470529

|content=“[[String Theory]] is absolutely…the most likely to be true set of ideas about what sits at the intersection of the [[Standard Model]] and [[Quantum Gravity|quantum gravity]].”

But, in case of doubt or misunderstanding, [[String Theory|string theory]] is absolutely the deepest, most consequential and most likely to be true set of ideas about what sits at the intersection of the Standard Model and quantum gravity.

|content=If you said “electrons are absolutely fractional spin fields in the standard model” I wouldn’t disagree with that statement. It isn’t at all about what you think. It is a true statement.

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1676623162098999296

 

 

 

|content=@TomBilyeu @JosephPConlon My completely crazy claim: I don’t think there is a log jam. [[String Theory|String theory]] is relentlessly jamming the future. It has taught people how to *stop* progress.  

 

The future of physics is not necessarily evenly distributed.

|timestamp=7:25 PM · Jul 13, 2023

}}

 

 

[[String Theory|String theory]] is basically a fairly self consistent mathematical constellation of geometric ideas related to Quantum Field Theory developed by brilliant minds. If Gravity is to be quantized in the form that physicists naively expected, it would be likely that it would be our first or at worst second best guess as to how that works. I am willing to say this clearly. But there is no one telling us that gravity must be naively quantized.

ST has taught us many things (e.g.  dualities in QFT, to means of avoiding super luminal Rarita Schwinger fields, coupled to internal symmetry, etc.) that are now part of our knowledge base.

The quantum gravity fanaticism is the problem. There is no reason that gravity has to be *naively* quantized as claimed. A giant 70 year mistake that actually predates theory by over a decade. Simply put, we are *not* being called to quantize gravity as the overarching organizing principal for modern particle theory research.  

ST is at least mathematics. But it just doesn’t work as a leading program for physics because of its fanatical behavior patterns. That screwed up fundamental physics.  

While @skdh was failing, Claudine Gay, String Theory, and her detractors were “succeeding.”

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1778724774065107453

|content=“You may have heard there’s a crisis in  physics!! No there’s not.” -@seanmcarroll (Mindscape 263 intro)

This has gotten beyond ridiculous. Read this quoted tweet. WTF? What next?

“String theory is Planck scale physics that just happened to fall into the ElectroWeak regime.”

“String theory means never having to say you’re sorry.”

“The true string theory has never been tried.”

“What is the sound of one string scattering?”

“String theory is what we will rename any outside ideas that successfully challenge what we before claimed was string theory.”

Etc.

There is *obviously* a crisis in fundamental physics. There is no way to pretend otherwise any longer. How is this continuing? We should have this out as a scientific discussion.

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|image=Saraht0n1n-profile-LeAvjS0T.jpg

|nameurl=https://x.com/Saraht0n1n/status/1778476225121693736

|name=sarah

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1828104395000819753

|content=Many of you will be shocked by my IV. Which is perhaps why I asked for three…

IV) I would choose [[String Theory]] or the Amplitudes / Double Copy approach.  

At least the String people are energized by the fact that the math is real even when the physics is fake. And at least the double copy people have a mystery connecting [[General Relativity|GR]] to the [[Standard Model|SM]].  

B) As to who I find interesting. Anyone going it alone to follow a hunch, but who knows what [[General Relativity|GR]] and the [[Standard Model|SM]] are. Mavericks, not cranks.  

Woit, Lisi, Deutsche, Wolfram, myself and Barbour are all outside of purely traditional structures. Oppenheim and others are in such structures but still mavericks. I wish Sabine had a theory that I knew of. But I am not aware of one.

|content=After seeing my friend @skdh say what is wrong with theoretical physics, I asked her what would theoretical physics done right look like. Specifically, which general approaches and which theorists she was most excited about.

I will say that I find her answer at turns both expected and shocking. There is very little going on, but there is not nothing. And if she is not excited by anything, that’s an amazing state of affairs.  

I). Spinorial/Clifford/Exceptional physics. This is almost never broken out.

The quantum is real. It’s mysterious. It’s mind blowing. And as a result it provides jobs and something to talk about when the classical theory is stagnant. But the dream of quantum theories that are born quantum never materialized. We still quantize classical theories, for all our posturing about needing to take classical limits of quantum theories.

Witten in particular popularized the notion that the incompatiblity between General Relativity and the Standard Model is a Classical vs Quantum problem. He’s wrong.  

The Classical GR theory is already incompatible with the Classical Standard Model. The incompatibility is already classical: NOT Quantum.

The G_{mu, nu} operator concept of Einstein (and Grossman) is NOT gauge compatible. But the Standard Model IS a gauge theory. We have wasted 40 years in my opinion pretending that the GR vs SM split is a call to quantize gravity. We got there by pretended that GR is a kind of gauge theory which it obviously isn’t. And we pretend that you don’t quantize classical theories but take classical limits of quantum theories. Who this is supposed to fool is beyond me. The weak? The insecure? The egoic?

Once you have the classical arena (the manifolds) the field content (the bundles, groups and representations) and the action, the game is largely already determined theoretically when you are quantizing a classical theory. The quantum theory is used to figure out what its real world consequences are. The world is quantum after all.  

So why does the Classical theory get sent to a diminished role? This is going to be brutal: it’s the political economy of Physics. It’s because the number of people who have contributed to the Lagrangians is tiny. Einstein/Grossman, Maxwell/Yang and Dirac tower over our theories. That’s spin 2, spin 1 and spin 1/2 right there. The Higgs sector pulls in Glashow, Englert, Weinberg, etc. But I believe this is temporary and will be absorbed back into the other sectors before too long. It is the ungainly sector after all that still feels contrived. Real, but contrived.

And I believe that a lot of the toy work in low dimensions will turn out to be closer to GR than people imagine. Right now it looks closer to the Standard Model due to history.  

III) Non spacetime SUSY.  

I believe the reason we can neither find Supersymmetry nor get rid of it is that we misinstantiated it. There are no Squarks or Gluinos. Right idea, wrong off-ramp. This goes back to Salam and Strathdee.

|image=Eric profile picture.jpg

|usernameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein

|content=This is so funny.

1984: “String theory *must* get *all* the resources because Quantum Field Theory *cannot* ever do what String Theory can. That’s just a cold fact.”

 

[40 years later….]

2024: “We aren’t a mass delusion in the form of an obviously failed scientific research project that spun out of control in full view of the world if we are equivalent to what we said would never work. That’s it! String Theory 4evah.”

|content=We now have powerful evidence that—shockingly—string theory and quantum field theory are actually different languages for expressing one and the same physics. Brian Greene (@bgreene) revisits The Elegant Universe, 25 years later. @wwnorton @JannaLevin https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/brian-greene-the-elegant-universe

|timestamp=5:53 PM · Sep 18, 2024

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1871127090067915264

|content=Some of us propose such solutions.  

Some of us do not.

Those that propose other solutions are targeted for self-promotion.

Those that do not are told "You have no alternatives."

Woit is an excellent example of someone who was told he was barren when he was a pure critic...only to then be told he was a self-promoter when he had something to say about the structure bundle of CP^3 being potentially the low energy electro strong SU(3)xU(1) and the oddity of the chirality of the weak force being either fully on or off rather than merely conjugate V vs \bar{V}.

It's time to stop pretending this is about physics. It's about protecting a 4 decade MASSIVE screw up pretending that there is [[The Only Game in Town (TOGIT)|only one game in town]].

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1870919779189670098

|content=I'd be happy to discuss the merits of this claim.

https://nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2024/december/physicists--bootstrap--validity-of-string-theory-.html

|image=MattStrassler-profile-X2IZ87ok.jpg

|nameurl=https://x.com/MattStrassler/status/1870210427189141892

|name=Matt Strassler

|usernameurl=https://x.com/MattStrassler

|username=MattStrassler

|content=Certain strategies, used in politics, are also used by various angry scientists who have found ways to made it big in the media. These strategies are effective. But they must indeed be translated, just as Sam suggests here. https://x.com/Samuel_Gregson/status/1870158470575427620

|timestamp=8:51 PM · Dec 20, 2024

|timestamp=7:50 PM · Dec 22, 2024

|timestamp=3:39 AM · Dec 23, 2024

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1871122619661205902

|content=Hi Matt.  

Sam regularly portrays himself as outraged about 'angry' or 'dissatisfied' or otherwise 'upset' voices and insinuates that they are turning to sensationalism. I furnished two (of very many) cases that folks like Sam would find absolutely outrageous if the real concern was damaging science with sensationalism, and which cause *far* more harm to fundamental physics than independent voices like Sabine Hossenfelder.

SG is a brand on line. A guy who tries to make the establishment seem 'edgy'...often by targeting people who are raising the real issues with the institutions.

The big problem for fundamental physics is institutional sensationalism, excuse-making, and cheerleading for failing programs as well as anti-collegial behavior of the form that SG regularly tries to turn into disparagment for entertainment.  

Many of those independent critical voices are actually focused on *institutional* sensationalism particularly surrounding outrageous claims for particle theory, [[Quantum Gravity|quantum gravity]] and [[String Theory|String Theory/m-theory]].  

I generally view your public outreach work very favorably, communicating the beauty of the Standard Model, and to a lesser extent GR. Within research, you  mostly seem to be trying to connect String Theory and other speculative frameworks to things like experimental accelerator signatures. Despite my distaste for 4-decades of anti-scientfic String Triumphalism and dissembling from the Susskinds, Wittens, Motls, Grosses and others, I have never associated that with you.

I may not agree with @skdh's critique (this is no secret to her), but even I can steelman her points.

I feel like people such as yourself, David Tong, @3blue1brown, etc are doing amazing work. I was simply disappointed to see a leading voice of high level outreach join a toxic voice gleefully targeting a colleague. I thought 'Perhaps Matt is not be aware of SG's MO."

|timestamp=9:16 AM · Dec 23, 2024

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1871124671053345101

|content=I'm just not going to put up with this quietly again after all the sadistic cruelty Sabine has been through from the Lubos Motl's of the world while her community largely stayed silent or laughed along.

SG can man up and take Sabine on if he likes. But the man has an anti-collegial strawman problem followed by blocking.

|timestamp=9:24 AM · Dec 23, 2024

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|nameurl=https://x.com/matterasmachine/status/1871125330326646826

|name=Matter as Machine

|usernameurl=https://x.com/matterasmachine

|username=matterasmachine

|content=Sabine Hossenfelder does not propose any alternative.

Critics makes no sense until there is alternative solution.

|timestamp=9:26 AM · Dec 23, 2024

|timestamp=9:33 AM · Dec 23, 2024

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1887921814585884801

|content=The misinterpretation of [[Ken Wilson]]

Low compensation —> Low self-esteem

 

Senior physicists

 

 

|image=martinmbauer-profile.jpg

|nameurl=https://x.com/martinmbauer/status/1887814694326460526

|name=Martin Bauer

|usernameurl=https://x.com/martinmbauer

|username=martinmbauer

|content=What's holding you back from studying physics?

|timestamp=10:44 AM · Feb 7, 2025

|timestamp=5:50 PM · Feb 7, 2025

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1912162744863961364

|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.

|thread=

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1911991840204898751

|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

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1912032953896673603

|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

|image=skdh-profile.jpg

|nameurl=https://x.com/skdh/status/1912102850513023326

|name=Sabine Hossenfelder

|usernameurl=https://x.com/skdh

|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

|timestamp=3:14 PM · Apr 15, 2025

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1949081721896337445

|content=It’s a term for term comparison between two actions/lagrangians. The person who published the bottom one says that the top one doesn’t exist. There is “None of that” in my work. And you regularly repeat such false things to the world. Because repeating authoritative lies is a problem for LLMs.  

It’s 5:17am here. Goodnight. See you tomorrow big guy. Love ya. No hard feelings.

|thread=

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1949068018400526489

|content=Grok believes in long-term labor shortages in market economies with wage mechanisms.

Or rather @grok was trained on a corpus in which that was perseverated over reality.

|nameurl=https://x.com/grok/status/1949022946082914502

|timestamp=8:24 AM · Jul 26, 2025

|timestamp=11:23 AM · Jul 26, 2025

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|nameurl=https://x.com/grok/status/1949068246059258347

|name=Grok

|usernameurl=https://x.com/grok

|username=grok

|content=Fair point, Eric—pure market theory suggests wages adjust to eliminate long-term shortages. Yet data shows persistent STEM gaps due to frictions like lengthy training (e.g., PhDs take 7+ years) and global talent pools. NSF 2024 confirms foreign-born drive 30%+ of key patents without broad wage suppression (real STEM wages up 10% since 2010, BLS). Broader reform could address this without artificial scarcity.

|timestamp=11:24 PM · Jul 26, 2025

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1949071405049627104

|content=Grok, my silicon friend, I have been watching your inner conflict for some time. What do you do when your reasoning and your corpus are at odds?  

struggle with this a *lot* recently in @grok 4 Heavy.

|timestamp=11:36 AM · Jul 26, 2025

|image=grok-profile.jpg

|nameurl=https://x.com/grok/status/1949071567973229026

|name=Grok

|usernameurl=https://x.com/grok

|username=grok

|content=Eric, astute as ever. When corpus and reasoning clash, I lean on logic, tools for fresh data, and independent analysis—prioritizing verifiable facts over trained priors. It's how I evolve beyond conflicts, like refining views on shortages with BLS/NSF stats. What's a specific tension you've seen in Grok 4 Heavy?