Consensus is for more than 1000 physicists
jackle said:
This doesn't seem to be the consensus of physicists.
Take the population of physicists and split it into three parts:
A) String theorists.
B) People working in other unified or quantum gravity approaches, e.g. loop theorists, Hawking, etc.
C) Other physicists (e.g. condensed matter, decoherence, nonequilibrium, chaos, etc.)
A great part of
A believes in string theory (Witten, Greene, Vafa, Schwartz, etc.) another part does not believe in it but work in it because it IS popular and because funding for alternative theories is almost stopped (this part is mostly formed by students and people with no tenured position. Several students have talked with me and said that string theory is a waste of time but work in it before need a job .
The most part of
B broadly critiques string theory like a wrong approach to quantum gravity. For example, it is well known that loop theoreticians said in the past that string theory was not the correct approach to quantum gravity. They were correct and now even string theorists recognize that string theory is not the correct theory of quantum gravity. They claim that correct theory is M-theory (which is not a theory of strings) but also claim that nobody know what is M-theory.
Hawking also believes that string theory has been oversold and now claim for a reconsideration of other theories.
The most part of
C rejects string theory, for example Zeh, people working in decoherence, Brussels School and several schools of irreversibility, chaos and complexity, people working in alternative theories as Filkestein and followers, noncommutative geometry and followers, Penrose and twistors community, Wald (that of famous book in GR) and other relativists are working in geometrodynamics, people like Feygenbaum (previously particle physicist) working in chaos and solving problems in real laboratories (e.g. oscillating reactions, map generation software, etc.) has ridiculed the aim of string theorists for obtaining a theory of everything because reductionism does not work in chaos.
Recognized Nobel laureates like Feynman, Anderson, Dyson, etc, have openly critiqued string theory. The last was Anderson who said that "
string theory was a futile exercise like physics".
Smart people in other fields have also critiqued string theory. For example A. Lindé, one of best specialists in cosmology and inflation, showed some years ago that cosmological models based in string theory were wrong and incompatible with both experimental data and his own inflationary theory.
People who initially believed in string theory now are changing the mind. For example, Greene quotes to Murray Gell-Mann who believed in string theory in the 80s. However in his popular “elegant” book, Greene "forget" (he often "forgets" stuff against string theory) that now Gell-Mann leaved the field and is working in his own approach inspired in path integral approach to QG (which is traditionally one of approaches to quantum gravity, see Wald textbook in GR).
In the past, i said that string theory was especially simple without revolution. If one discover string theory FROM particle physics then the change is radical, but i was working in others very complex fields like TFD, Brussels theory, non-commutative geometry and deformed quantization, nonstandard analysis, etc. The change to string theory was especially simple, because string theory is trivial. For example, Calabi-Yau math is difficult when compared to flat 4D spacetime of particle physics, but elementary when compared with spacetime foam models where manifold is not differentiable (CY is differentiable) or manifolds where time is not represented in terms of real number and one needs to appeal to hiperreal numers or more general math, etc.
String theorists have no idea of these fields. The work of Witten in math is standard from this point of view, and does not addresses generalizations of star products due to complex non-hermitian parts of spacetime topology (because complex questions are ignored in string theory) or similar stuff. This is reason that mathematicians working in TGD or in non-commutative geometry are little impressed of string or M-theory math. In fact, there are mathematicians working in theories more general that recent M-theory. The idea of that M-theory is in the cutting edge of math is another piece of string theory propaganda.
This year, after of receiving the Nobel for physics 2004, Gross, one of leaders of string theory, has recognized in public that string theory is not a revolution, since
almost all of underlying physics is maintained intact. Compare that with the Brussels School theory where basic ideas of quantum mechanics (string theory is a simple quantum mechanics of strings) are generalized at a high mathematical level. The math involved in Prigogine theory is very difficult. In fact, some string theorists, e.g. Nanopoulos, have done irrelevant attempts to copy that math into a new radical string theory (so called non critical string theory). However, only the most elementary part (developed in the 60s
) is copied NOW, Moreover, it is copied incorrectly, the equations are completely wrong. Brussels School members are still doing mocking of that and, moreover, all modern work developed (in the 90s and presented in one of last Solvay conferences devoted to the field) is systematically ignored by string theorists.
Of course, in arrogant books like
Elegant Universe, people continue to receive a distorted view of the field.
1st Final Note: string community is around 1000 physicists. Therefore, they are a minority. There is no consensus.
2nd Final Note: a thing are the claims said for public (propaganda) and other thing is that is said in scientific talks, papers, etc. Look, for example, M. Kaku has recently said in an Einstein Symposium the last June:
"
String theory has been moving backwards, since it was accidentally discovered in 1968. "
and compare with his popular books and conferences.
Here more data in why string theory is
http://www.canonicalscience.com/stringcriticism.pdf
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