The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next

by Lee Smolin

the actual system in the U.S. really discourages people who are truly original thinkers,

Innovation in music proceeds at such a hectic, vibrant pace because young musicians can find ways to connect to audiences and other musicians quickly, in clubs and on the radio, without having to ask the permission of established artists with their own agendas.

Today, for graduate students and postdocs to survive, they have to do things that people near retirement can understand. Doing science this way is like driving with the emergency brake on.

More than at any time in the history of science, the cards are stacked against the revolutionary. Such people are simply not tolerated in the research universities.

The real question is not why we have expended so much energy on string theory but why we haven’t expended nearly enough on alternative approaches.

If our generation of theorists has failed to make a revolution, it is because we have organized the academy in such a way that we have few revolutionaries, and most of us don’t listen to the few we have.

This is not just a problem for theoretical physics. If a highly disciplined subject like physics is vulnerable to the symptoms of groupthink, what may be happening in other, less rigorous areas?

I fully expect some readers to come back at me with “If you’re so smart, why haven’t you done any better than the string theorists?” And they’d be right. Because in the end, this book is a form of procrastination.

John Kenneth Galbraith, the influential economist, called it “conventional wisdom.” He meant by this “opinions that, while not necessarily well founded, are so widely held among the rich and influential that only the rash and foolish will endanger their careers by dissenting from them.”

I was extraordinarily fortunate to encounter someone who asked me, “What would you really like to do? What is your most ambitious and crazy idea?” Then, unexpectedly and generously, Jeffrey Epstein gave me the chance to try to make good on my answers, and for this I will always be deeply grateful.