(July 25, 2011 at 2:56 pm)Moros Synackaon Wrote: When I interned at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics at UCSC, one professor, this elderly gentleman of eighty or so, hobbling around with such care that one might've suspected a slight breeze would've done him in, came with us to lunch at the local pizza place. As I sat down next to him, still interested from his talk on cosmology and traditional particle physics, I asked him "So what do you think, about this string theory thing."
Right then, he turned to me suddenly, and said: "Frankly, I think it is a load of shit." and resumed eating.
Being a rather unjaded high school intern (compared to the jaded motherfucker I am now), needless to say I was utterly caught off guard by his candor. And suppressing a slight laugh too.
Except Lee Smolin was a noted string theoretician. He thinks string theory is magnificient, it's beautiful, he's proud of his contribution to it. it's just not real science. He thinks string theory makes grand promises which has no significant testable predictive power, it has been pushed as the wave of an indefinite and probably very far-off future at the expense bread and butter science whose validity can be tested and whose contribution to physics can thus be made concrete. He thinks that those entiring the field of theoretical physics in the last 20 years have mostly been shunted off into strong theory as the only real future of theoretical physics has in effect created a talent gap of at least 20 years amongst people who treat physics as a real science.
