There is no good reason for people to be working on anything else. We can’t predict anything with it now and don’t see any plausible way of predicting anything in the future, but the theory is a successful theory of quantum gravity, unlike our competition. We don’t actually know what string theory is, just that it’s a “framework” that encompasses QFT and much more. By the end of the day, after making my way through about 20 long interviews with string theorists, with few exceptions the story they were telling was one I’m all too familiar with. I made the mistake of starting off by reading some of the string theorist interviews, which was rather depressing. Roughly half the interviewees are string theorists, with the author making a concerted effort to also include non-string theory approaches to quantum gravity. I’ll likely go back again and look more carefully at parts of it. What I’m writing here is based on a day’s worth skimming of the book. The scale of this project is immense: there are 37 interviews, most of them rather long and detailed, making up a book of 716 pages. It consists of interviews about quantum gravity put together by Dutch string theorist Jay Armas, starting in 2011.
This morning I found out about Conversations on Quantum Gravity, a fascinating book published by Cambridge that appeared online today, hard copies for sale in November. When informed I taught math and did physics, one of them recommended Carlo Rovelli’s new book to me, and said he hoped I wasn’t doing string theory. Unfortunately for the public understanding of science, this is followed byīut at the moment the bookies’ favourite for unifying relativity and the Standard Model is something called “entropic gravity”… in the past five years, Brian Swingle of Harvard University and Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology have begun building models of what Dr Verlinde’s ideas might mean in practice, using ideas from quantum information theory.įor something much more anecdotal, on Saturday night I was having dinner outside in a hut during a rainstorm on the Upper East Side (having fled an aborted Central Park concert), and started talking to a couple seated nearby. Which, if true, clears the field for non-string theories of everything. Without Susy, string theory thus looks pretty-much dead as a theory of everything. Many physicists thus worry they have been on a wild-goose chase… Even two as-yet-unexplained results announced earlier this year (one from the LHC and one from a smaller machine) offer no evidence directly supporting Susy. And, 13 years after the LHC opened, no sparticles have shown up. Today the Economist has Physics seeks the future: Bye, bye, little Susy, where one finds out that:īut, no Susy, no string theory. Things for many years now have been going badly for string theory on the public relations front.
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