TLDR:
String theory solve no new problem.
There were hypes on what string theory can do. When they were proven wrong, they just come up another unverifiable shit and start the hype again.
String theory solve no new problem.
There were hypes on what string theory can do. When they were proven wrong, they just come up another unverifiable shit and start the hype again.
Presenting them as the only one truth, however, is a problem.
If on the other hand you say that abstract structure is a fundamental building block of the universe and, say, unifies the standard model with gravity etc but actually your theory isn't explaining anything observable I would say that isn't theoretical physics[2] but is just "making shit up".
So far string theory has failed to produce any sort of verifiable prediction[3], so I just don't see how it's physics (you could say "yet" perhaps).
I enjoyed the video "String Theory Lied to Us and Now Science Communication is Hard"[4] by Angela Collier, who is a computational astrophysicist[5], because it gives a sense for how these things impact other physicists and the popular perception of science.
[1] And Ed Witten for example is without doubt a very impressive mathematician - he won the Fields medal.
[2] Which is the science of matter, energy, space, time etc all the stuff which makes up the natural world.
[3] In particular, the one that has been tried is supersymmetry and the LHC, as I understand it as a non-physicist, brought about an experimental result that called supersymmetric extensions of the standard model into serious doubt https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3068
[4] https://youtu.be/kya_LXa_y1E?si=FTC0sbs2ubxGyydZ
[5] https://jila.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/group-files/20...
The problem is, for 40 years theoretical particle physics was working only on this one single weird unverifiable idea. Pretty much all other ideas were brushed aside.
People's egos, careers, reputations and funding are dependent on keeping up the façade, so you can't just reboot and start over. You have to keep paying lip service to the emperor with no clothes. Theoretical physics used to be the "king of sciences", but now it more and more appears as a dead end, intellectually and career-wise, for the next generation of physicists.
The core hypothesis of string theory is unfalsifiable, at least if we find another theory at the same scale that is then verified by experiments.
If it turns out that there is nothing significant "beneath" the Standard Model (ie that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics can be unified with only minor extensions), then string theory may remain unfalsifiable forever.