Been following this via proxy, i.e. Sabine Hossenfelder, for a few years. The charges are very solid afaict.

I can't speak to the merits (or lack thereof) of string theory. That's well beyond my physics knowledge.

It must however be daunting to be a theoretical physicist right now. It seems like the field has been in a standstill for years. The advances in the 20th century were just eye-watering. The Standard Model is a mixed bag of stunningly accurate prediction (eg electron monopole moment [1]) vs the wildly inaccurate (eg the so-called "vacuum catastrophe" [2]).

And there are so many unanswered questions, like nobody really seems to know what particle generations are or why they exist. Or that particle masses can't be derived from first principles (or that the math can't be solved, I'm honestly not sure).

It seems like we have no intuition for a lot of this stuff because there's no analog in the real world. So we give names to things (eg color, spin) that are just abstract properties. Electromagnetism is tantalizingly simple. The strong nuclear force interacts with its own carrier particles so is far from simple. The mediating particles of the weak nuclear force were, I believe, the first evidence of the Higgs field (because they have mass) but again, not my speciality.

But here's the interesting part (to me): the human systems surrounding it. When progress slows in a field, you'll find the tendency of people to coalesce around certain ideas that may border on dogma because careers are built on reputation and nobody wants to be "wrong". Likewise, string theory has a lot of investment in it. People have built careers on it. Nobody wants to throw that away.

The LHC gave experimental evidence to the Higgs boson, which was one of its goals. It's also managed to disprove a lot of theories, which is useful. But it hasn't given any hint of where to go. There's already talk of a successor but nobody really knows what to look for so it's hard to imagine that'll go anywhere.

So string theory seems to be like physics orthodoxy now.

j[1]: https://cfp.physics.northwestern.edu/documents/PhysicsToday-...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem

I'm beginning to like Sabine more and more. She is pro-nuclear, but she's not afraid to criticize the issues, like she did recently with small nuclear reactors.

The most optimistic view I've heard on string theory is that the Ads/CFT correspondence actually can move to de-sitter space one day. String theory proponents actually believe this. They do believe the Ads/CFT correspondence is one of the crowning achievements of string theory.

The most pessimistic view I've heard is that we're waiting for the people who have made string theory their life's work since the 1980's to retire and allow new funding efforts to go to different ideas.

Is part of it that we just can’t test any of this because we can’t either examine a black hole or run an accelerator the diameter of the Moon’s orbit?

Maybe planet nine if it exists will turn out to be a small primordial black hole within probe range, or we will locate a micro primordial black hole within the solar system.

Would building an even bigger deeper into time gazing JWST help?

I’ve gone down the black hole rabbit hole lately and personally I’d love to see an ultra sensitive fish eye X-ray and gamma ray telescope to hunt for the weak signatures that might be emitted by tiny accretion discs in or near our solar system. Find us a lovely marble to go examine and chuck stuff into.

> Peculiar individuals, no matter how famous they are, no matter how brilliant they are, if they’re off that consensus, and they’ve been off that consensus for a long time, they’re probably wrong.

So this guy works on string theory and has never heard of Einstein?

Why not use science to check what makes sense? - Because anyone would instantly notice that string theory is bs.

I think there should be a system, that when scientists act in bad faith (wasting money on questionable ideas because they personally profit) should retire.

The whole String Theory affair is amusing but also a sad spectacle.

These people convinced the world they were geniuses, but ended up fleecing funding agencies and universities for millions with zero accountability and scientific progress.

Do you have an example where funding was given out with zero accountability? I've worked at a number of universities and national laboratories for particle research and they all had multiple layers of accountability. At the top of any public funding structure is congress and the president and bigger initiatives will even be line items in public agency budgets. At the bottom are the required regular reports (I had biannually) to grant monitors and often independent review panels and committees (for one big project I had to do that annually on top of reports). In the middle are people who make it their jobs to find ways to save money, get money to the most promising projects, and communicating up to elected/presidentially appointed officials and down to researchers to keep this together. Both DOE and NSF funding are structured this way and represent virtually all federal channels to get money for particle physics, both experiment and theory.

What's the funding you're referring to with zero accountability?

Well, that people are really smart. Also I do bot think is bad faith. It just seems to not deliver all the answers we would like.

I think it just goes to show how desperate we are to find a unified theory after all this time and effort.

The worst of it reminds me of cryptocurrency schlock and how it has drained capital from our industry with little to show for it.

The pattern is similar: an infinitely fascinating puzzle to solve full of interesting math with potentially revolutionary implications if only… if only… but not enough people ask if it’s the right math solving the right problems in the right way or if it’s even applicable.

This phenomenon of smart people being nerd sniped to this degree reminds me of that episode of Star Trek TNG where they figured out a way to possibly destroy the Borg by giving them an infinitely fascinating unsolvable geometry problem to ponder until they lost their minds.

I also see some similarity to how people get triggered and sucked into and addicted to spirals of culture war and political rage or fear mongering or other media driven mind traps. This is less intellectual but seems similar in that you’ve got this meme that hooks us and creates a discourse around it that hooks us more and not enough people poke their heads out of the vortex and say “hey everyone is this really this big of a deal?”

We should become skeptical when we see a big idea accrete a lot of sound and fury around it but it’s not producing much and the main focus of the community circling it is self referential fascination with the idea itself.