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> a super unpopular position at the time (1996); pretty much the only prominent person in agreement with him was Nobel Prize Winner Phil Warren Anderson, who disagrees with him in many other respects. Ultimately many other writers came out in agreement on this issue at least; Woit and Smolin most notably, though others agreed.

Ugh, almost everything about this narrative is wrong; see my other comment. Science writers didn't invent skepticism of string theory, that was in good supply among physicists even 50 years ago. You only think they did because, well, you rely on them to tell you what happened, and they puff up their own roles. They turn it into "me vs. the establishment" while cribbing off conversations that are already happening within the field.

For example, Glashow, one of the architects of the Standard Model, tried to bar string theorists from ever being hired at Harvard, but you never hear about that.

Thousands of grad student careers, faculty appointments, glowing documentaries and ruined lives later and "oh, we knew that all along." They sure didn't act like they knew it at the time. Horgan deserves credit for making the right call. Even more credit because he wasn't even a physicist.

Credit to Glashow, and apologies for forgetting him, but Horgan deserves his victory lap.

I mean, do you think literally everybody was doing string theory? There have always been plenty of theorists focused on more concrete things -- string theorists are not and have not been the majority.

Grad students entering even in the 90s knew they had to make a choice between concrete, more easily testable physics and a long-shot approach to quantum gravity. String theorists have stories of faculty going out of their way, back in grad school, to discourage them from going into it. (It wasn't just Glashow, either, it was most of the Harvard physics department.)

To say that string theory comprises all of theoretical physics is to uncritically accept the "me vs. the establishment" narrative some pop scientists put out. I think it does real damage inside the field, too, because it distorts the perspectives people have coming in.

They weren't discouraged to do string theory in particular, they were discouraged from getting into the whole "trying to find something better than the standard model." If they anyway went into th hep, they would have slim chances of having any career if they didn't do string theory.

They were encouraged to do things like condensed matter physics, not trying to find some alternative to string theory.

So as long as there is one physicist on the right side of the fence the “field” is somehow in the know...? Would you be willing to extend that kind of reasoning to the “pop scientists”?

I often wish Feynman (or anyone of his kind really) was still here. Science nowadays seems more and more like one big appeal to authority...

Something that most people don't understand is that most physicists won't talk to the public. What you hear as a layman is usually the few people who have a public axe to grind and bears no resemblance to the majority of the field.

When I was in physics in the early 2000's, the general feeling was that it's a probably nonsense, but having someone out at the far end of the mathematical spectrum like that in your theory group was a good investment. And even if they were doing string theory, there's a good chance they were using it as a vehicle, a kind of generalized, more flexible version of field theory, to poke at some mathematical rabbit hole.

The majority of physicists are not in HEP. The majority of HEP physicists are experimentalists. The majority of HEP theorists are phenomenologists. But phenomenologists aren't generally good fodder for science journalists because statements like, "I'm calculating scattering cross sections in the kaon sector for CP violation measurements" isn't going to get clicks. And the experimentalists are even worse: "I've been working eight hour night shifts for the past two years. I'll probably go back to my home university and spend another couple years processing data to get an estimate for this parameter in this scattering calculation. It might be a fraction of a percent off what we expected!" Faced with that, "I'm playing with a high dimensional extension of quantum field theory to see if I can generate a spin 2 field in an expanding spacetime" sounds really sexy.

Honestly, I think physicists can't win here. Tommaso Dorigo (an HEP experimentalist) likes to talk to the public, so he has a blog. If you look right now his Plot of the Week is about how ATLAS "produced an improved bound on the rate at which Higgs bosons may decay to electron-positron pairs". This is the kind of thing that inspires people to write about how academic writing is inaccessible. Alternatively, physicists can write something more exciting, which is almost certainly highly speculative, and then they get dinged when the speculation turns out to be wrong.

I don’t pay much attention to the popular science depictions. Many of my friends are academic physicists (while I got out after my masters).

I think what I’m objecting to is that as the discoveries within physics become less and less impactful, the “field” seems to turn more and more inwards. Also, egos seem to expand approximately proportionally to the inverse of the utility of their work...

It’s difficult to know what kind of politicking led to this though.

It preposterous to think that all the physicists were on board with string theory. Do you really think the experts in the field didn’t have doubts and it took an non physicist to work it out?

Why does he get more credit for not being a physicist?? So he made an uninformed conjecture that turned out to be true? (whether it is true also seems up in the air right now?)

I don't understand why that deserves kudos. I would very much prefer top scientists to listen to people who know what they're talking about, instead of paying heed to the less informed on the off chance their wild speculation bears fruit.

That's biased.

I will only accept the correct answer from people I choose. Experts in the field should provide the most insight overtime but don't ignore non-experts. That's foolish and limiting.

I like Horgan a lot, but it's notable he also made a very wrong prediction that traditional proofs in math would start losing out to less rigorous means of collecting evidence for correctness.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/okay-maybe-...

Although being a string theory skeptic was certainly a minority position in both academia and journalism in 1996, I think it's somewhat of an exaggeration to characterize it as a "super unpopular position" and Horgan and Anderson as the only prominent holders.

There are still a lot of prominent, respectable theoretical physicists who work on string theory. Leonard Susskind, for example. While no evidence of it has been found so far, is calling it "Noodle Theory" and a bunch of baloney really fair? There are plenty of big theories for which there's no evidence, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're certain yet that they're pseudoscience or unfalsifiable. Supersymmetry, Many Worlds, etc.

I don't think Susskind works on string theory proper at all anymore. He works on the AdS/CFT stuff, which is compatible with and motivated by stringy approaches, but is logically quite independent. Related: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6252

IMO calling it "noodle theory" is just a juvenile means to make fun of people who study it. If you want to tell people something is wrong, tell them why; don't invent childish names to put other people down by association.

There seems to be lots of forward progress in physics, e.g. in condensed matter physics, quantum computing, etc. Grand unified theories are sort of irrelevant so long as there are not measurable phenomena that cannot be explained without them.

> There seems to be lots of forward progress in physics, e.g. in condensed matter physics, quantum computing

The theory of quantum computing is based on real physics, unlike string theory. But we have no idea if or when we will be able to build a quantum computer that actually calculates something useful. So far the progress has been only in theory.

Edit: To downvoters, let's make a bet: In the next 18 years, no one will have used a quantum computer to break any encryption that hasn't also been broken by traditional computers?

Progress does not mean "Commercial success". Your bet is like hearing "my kid seems to be making lots of progress on their bike", and responding with "I bet he'll never cycle around the world in 18 years".

The bet in the posted news was also about winning the Nobel prize, not about making just lots of progress.

Breaking a cryptosystem is not a good metric for whether quantum computers have become useful. Calculating energy levels of molecules, for example, is a much easier problem in the near term, and is of benefit to humanity. Breaking a cryptosystem takes vastly more and higher-quality qubits, and the end result is just that everyone upgrades to different math.

As a computational chemist, I assign 50% probability to the idea that quantum computers will be able to do useful molecular calculations cheaper than classical computers (for large batches) within 18 years. For small batches, classical computers will remain cheapest much longer because of overhead.

If anyone by the name of Crown Sterling takes your bet, don't trust 'em. They've got unified merrygorithms and kwuantum top hats.

String theory is 100% based on real physics, and it’s very difficult to make a theory like it which agrees with all known physics — that it doesn’t create any new falsifiable results is certainly a problem, but it could very easily be falsified by making nonsensical predictions about everyday phenomena, which it doesn’t do.

What’s wrong with complexity theory? I remember seeing a talk about it a long time ago and the concepts were super interesting, but I didn’t (I don’t) have the mathematical maturity to understand it in depth.

I don't think it ever congealed into a coherent field, say, with an established canon of techniques and a heirarchy of results that built on itself.

It hasn't become concrete enough to make sharp, striking, correct predictions. It turns out the real world is extremely messy. Complexity theory can produce specific predictions ("disease spread will follow a power law with a critical exponent of...") but they won't be quantitatively correct. Or it can produce correct predictions ("airplanes increase disease spread because they increase the global network's connectivity") but they're generally obvious, and certainly don't require the full formalism of complexity theory to get.

Thank you for mentioning the book, it sounds interesting!

> noodle theorists

Lovely name

oh, I wonder if this is fitting with my current obsession with truth and lies.

Not only are we increasing the number of lies in the world, using lies to get what we want has become more and more acceptable through social media, politics, capitalism, etc...

But we are increasing the number of things you can't prove are lies. You can't falsify me, therefore I am right.

OMG, this is very religious. This is all because of postmodernism! Prior to today, you couldn't prove that my religion was wrong. The more people I could get to believe my lie about the origins of the universe, the more powerful I was.

Tribalism requires agreed upon unfalsifiable lies. I am with you because I believe the same thing you do.

Postmodernism has done this to us. With religion and an omniscient being watching us, heaven for the good, hell for the bad, we had a -- conscience.

Now, it's the internet. The internet is omniscient. Facebook is watching us. Google is watching us. The CIA and FBI are watching us through the internet.

We've replaced god with ... the internet. The internet is the new god. And thus, we are evolving toward the biblical God that created us in his image. We are walking down the path to omniscience via the internet.

I wonder if you might try the subtler word myths instead of lies.

Reality is formless, and we reason about it through what Foucault called grids I think, where every structure that we impose on it to bring something new into view necessarily obscures something else.

This is a bit like what Alan Watts talks about when saying that stories are like music, in which it wouldn’t have any form unless there were notes left out.

I think of a fact as a compressed statement of experience in service to some story. This is like the surprising observation that bits of information seem to always have some color that cannot be captured[1].

And there is the type of myth I like to call Fruith, as opposed to Truth. Most myths comprising culture might be these—in that we pretend things are true in the belief that it brings something more important to fruition, and that is the truth which overrides the seminal “lie”.

I see your despair, but I think it’s bigger than what you may be suggesting.

[1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

When you say, "... it's bigger than what you may be suggesting."

What is ... "it"? My despair?

I understand your point about lies vs myths. If I substitute the two words in my mind according to your explanation of myths and their purpose, then everything actually does seem to make more sense and is more acceptable in my mind.

If someone tells a lie the connotation is that it's meant to harm others to their own benefit. If it's a myth, then they need that ... not accurate portrayal of the world in order to keep going... to survive, perhaps as an individual or group.

The problem is that strongly-held myths can still cause a lot of harm to others. While it may be understandable for people to cling to some myths, we should still work to stamp them out, but compassionately.

Not sure if you got it, but it’s myths all the way down. It’s only by the values of one myth that another should be “stamped out.”

The book Sapiens covers this well, that you cannot escape the prison of a myth without being contained by one larger.

That's a matter of philosophy and opinion, not established fact.

> That's a matter of philosophy and opinion, not established fact.

If one takes “myth” to mean something that is itself believed without being falsifiable, it is true by necessity of any belief system with any content beyond statements about the subjective experience of the believer

“It” being what I understand about your philosophy of truth and what you mean by “accurate”. It’s hard to describe directly, since I’ve thought about this from a bunch of different sources that I struggle to synthesize, but I recommend this short story by Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling[1], which I think does a great job of capturing that ineffable, paradoxical nature of truth.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...

> "If someone tells a lie the connotation is that it's meant to harm others to their own benefit."

Who's connotation? I think that's a very myopic take on lying. Insofar as people care for others, people frequently lie to benefit those they care about. Some people believe the truth is more important than sparing the feelings of somebody you care about, and that's totally fine. But that point of view is not universal to humans and many people believe lying for the benefit of others to be reasonable or even obligatory.

I won't bore you with examples of such lies; I think you can probably imagine a few. Some are trivial, and others far more substantial. Whether or not those lies are justifiable under your personal system of ethics (or my own) is beyond the point; the point is that to some people those lies are justifiable and for those people, lying is motivated by a desire to benefit others.