String theory lied to us and now science communication is hard…
Taking the opportunity of the Bank Holiday weekend to catch up on some other blogs, I found this video on Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong. It’s by Angela Collier. It’s a bit long for what it says, and I find the silly game going on while the speaker talks very irritating, but the speaker makes some very good points and it’s well worth watching all the way through. The most important message it conveys, I think, is how the hype surrounding string theory contributed to increasing public distrust of science and the media.
If I were a string theorist I probably wouldn’t appreciate this video, but I’m not and I do!
In the Dark 
April 30, 2023 at 3:13 pm
I made it 2:22 s into the video before my cat started hissing at the screen. Schrödinger’s cat does not like computer games in guessing.
April 30, 2023 at 10:59 pm
Long ago there was a glorious Amazon review of Brian Greene’s “Elegant Universe” string book which I saved, and which begins and ends as follows:
“This book is written at such a level and with such clarity that almost anyone can get an appreciation for string theory. The book contains one of the best explanations for laymen of special and general relativity and quantum mechanics that I have encountered. Even though the author is a proponent of string theory, he has presented it in such an evenhanded manner that anyone with a modicum of scientific wisdom can see that it is one of the biggest scientific boondoggles in history.
“Contrary to the claim of elegance in the title of the book, string theory is an arbitrary mathematical construct with parameters, topologies and dimensions tacked on at every turn. When things start to fragment, Edward Witten, the string Wizard of Oz,, tacks on yet another dimension, rechristens the whole thing M-theory and claims that strings are really more like ribbons. This is much like the military who deal with their biggest screwups by hauling out the ribbons…
“…Let us hope that this excellent book is the beginning of the end of string theory”.
The author of this review was “A reader from Princeton, NJ”. How I would enjoy knowing his or her identity!
Another anonymous review was by “a reader from a major US research institution” and opened like this:
“This is a reasonably readable popular exposition of string theory. The problem is that string theory is almost certainly wrong. Or worse yet, it is “not even wrong”, it is such an ill-defined idea that there is no way to prove it wrong.
“There is not one iota of experimental evidence for string theory. To the extent that string theory is a well-defined theory and calculations can be done, the results of the calculations do not agree at all with experiment. String theorists will claim that the problem is that they just haven’t found the final formulation of string theory, that when they do it will agree with experiment. They’ve been saying this for fifteen years now, and the end result of thousands of papers and tens of thousands of person-years of work is that string theory looks even less likely to explain what it is supposed to than when people started working on it…”
In view of the “not even wrong” quote, was this reviewer Peter Woit, who went on to write a book critical of string theory having that name?
PS Watch the clip embedded above rather than on YouTube and you can scroll it so that you see only the lower part of the screen with the important written comments but not the silly game.
May 1, 2023 at 12:06 am
I don’t know the answer to your last question, but it seems a reasonable inference!
May 4, 2023 at 7:54 pm
This is quite an amusing generalisation of the trouble with string theory:
I hadn’t known that she quit her academic job last year after getting disillusioned.