> I work on small-scale experiments, a field that Sabine portrays as starved of funding because of string theory. But that's not at all how funding actually works. Generally, all of our boats rise or fall together.
Please could you quantify this a bit? The competition for grants seems to be fierce. It's hard to see how such a competitive game is not close to zero-sum.
The question is: As scientists and civilians,
1) how to we model/quantify the opportunity cost of 50 years of String Theory?
2) What was the expected value of String Theory (what promises were made?). What has been the ROI?
Hypotheses: What string theory did, among other things, might have been:
1) crowd out the market for ideas.
The perception was created by the media and within academia,that String Theory was/is the hottest idea available. Arguably humanity's most brilliant theoretical physicists and mathematicians seem to have been seduced/compelled into spending their lives working on it. Perhaps one might quantify how many graduate students ended up not exploring other ideas because of the primacy of string theory.
2) caused a perception that physics research is cheaper than it is, effectively reducing the cost expectation in the market.
If string theory is the best idea, and it is purely mathematical, then a university or institution could easily claim to have a cutting-edge physics department, not by funding infrastructure for expensive experiments, but by hiring a string theorist. This in turn might lead to graduate students who can only be trained in string theory. Other institutions might be induced to reduce their costs to the level of string theory institutions/departments. If String Theory is the best idea, how do I justify spending 100x more money than the String Theory department in order to run experiments or train graduate students to do experiments or even work on their crazy new ideas?
3) Lowered the standards to which Physics is held.
If the hottest field in Physics is not required to have any relation to reality, and requires no physical evidence by which ideas are tested for almost half a century, then one might convince themselves that physics can be done purely abstractly, rather than as physical science. For the entire field of Physics to be led in this way, is terrifying.