Is “string theory world” in some trouble?

Is Cool cosmology not getting results? Columbia mathematician Peter Woit, admittedly a critic, comments:

For quite a few years now, I’ve been mystified about what is going on in string theory, as the subject has become dominated by AdS/CFT inspired work which has nothing to do with either strings or any visible idea about a possible route to a unified fundamental theory. …

Peter Woit, “Deterioration of the World’s Thinking About the Deepest Stringy Ideas” at Not Even Wrong

The fun part is this quote:

This superficial approach – in which people reduced their understanding of string theory and its amazing properties to some mundane, constantly repetitive ideas about AdS/CFT, especially those that are just small superconstructions added on top of 4D quantum field theories – got even worse in the recent decade when the “quantum information” began to be treated as a part of “our field”. Quantum information is a legitimate set of ideas and laws but I think that in general, this field adds nothing to the fundamental physics so far which would go beyond the basic postulates of quantum mechanics…

Lubos Motl, “Evolution, deterioration of the world’s thinking about the deepest stringy ideas” at The Reference Frame (July 11, 2021)

And Woit adds,

According to Lubos, he’s not the only one who feels this way, with an “anonymous Princeton big shot” agreeing with him (hard to think of anyone else this could be other than Nima Arkani-Hamed)

Peter Woit, “Deterioration of the World’s Thinking About the Deepest Stringy Ideas” at Not Even Wrong

Nima Armani-Hamed has crossed our screen before.

Some of us think string theory only existed in order to give a bizarre twist to the fine-tuning of our universe and to create a basis for believing that there is an uncountable infinity of universes out there instead. Apart from that, it may be hard to see much point. We shall see.

Gossip is fun when it doesn’t hurt anyone.

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